China Scientist Awards Blog

Warehouses across China are bulging with grain as a deepening economic crisis takes hold, leaving the world’s farmers to grapple with the prospect of a long-lasting slowdown gripping one of their largest customers. The strain across global markets is already showing. French barley exports to China have been tumbling, and the US has yet to sell a full corn cargo for the new season. Wheat farmers in Australia are likely to be nervous as they prepare to start harvesting their new crop over the coming weeks. None of this will change soon, and the combination of an ageing population and a cooling economy augurs poorly for the future. Traders and farmers will need to start adjusting to a very different demand outlook. Even if food security concerns keep imports robust for years to come, the meteoritic growth seen through the past two decades is likely over. “People are getting more pessimistic about the economy and demand,” said Ivy Li, a Shanghai-based commodity markets analyst at StoneX.

  People from both sides of the Taiwan Strait gathered in Fuzhou, capital of East China's Fujian province, on Sept 12, 2024 to celebrate the upcoming Mid-Autumn Festival.  Ahead of the Mid-Autumn Festival , a traditional holiday that symbolizes family reunion that will fall on Tuesday, more than 200 people from both sides of the Taiwan Strait gathered in Fuzhou, capital of East China's Fujian province, calling for peaceful development. Song Tao, head of both the Taiwan Work Office of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, stressed upholding the one-China principle and the 1992 Consensus, resolutely opposing "Taiwan independence" when meeting with Taiwan guests attending the event on Thursday. "It is a tradition for Chinese people to reunite with the whole family and celebrate the festival," he said, adding that the Chinese mainland will actively boost the cross-Strait flow of personnel as well a

                     A T-flight maglev train model on display in Taiyuan, Shanxi province.  A novel ultra high-speed maglev transportation system under development recently passed a trial run in Datong, Shanxi province. The successful demonstration test brings the train another step closer to market, where it could significantly reduce travel times and boost cross-regional economic exchanges. With a maximum designed speed of 1,000 kilometers per hour, the T-flight system is about three times faster than current high-speed trains and even faster than airplanes. If put into operation, travel time between Beijing and Shanghai will be shortened to about an hour, a fraction of the time of the current fastest train trip between the metropolises — 4 hours and 18 minutes — and about half as long as a flight, which takes roughly two hours. "As socioeconomic development continues, people's demand for faster, more comfortable transportation is increasing," said Zhao Ming, a techni

  Beijing-based company LandSpace set the stage for next year’s maiden flight of its reusable Zhuque-3 rocket with a 10km (6-mile) vertical take-off, vertical landing (VTVL) test in China’s Gobi Desert on Wednesday. The 200-second test flight was also the first time engine reignition – a critical deceleration phase in rocket recovery – was tested in China, in what state broadcaster CCTV called a “ breakthrough” for the country’s commercial space sector. Dai Zheng, commander of the Zhuque-3 project, said the test validated in-flight engine cut-off and restart, as well as other key technologies including joint guidance and control, as well as precise landing. The test marked a “crucial step” towards low-cost, high-frequency space launches, said Dai in the CCTV report. “We have verified these core technologies in advance, laying a solid foundation for the flight and recovery of the rocket. ”An engineer from the Zhuque-3 team, speaking anonymously to the South China Morning Post, said th

  You.com, which makes an artificial intelligence-powered search engine and productivity tools, has raised US$50 million in a new funding round that includes backing from  Nvidia  and Duck Duck Go. The fresh capital brings the company’s total haul to US$99 million . Investor Georgian led the round, with participation from SBVA (formerly Softbank Ventures Asia), Salesforce Ventures and Day One Ventures . The company declined to share its latest valuation. Founder and chief executive officer Richard Socher started You.com, officially called SuSea, as an AI-powered search engine after spending four years as Salesforce’s chief scientist. As the company has grown, so has competition in the AI-powered search market, with  Alphabet  and  Microsoft  infusing AI into their search products, even as start-ups like Perplexity grow in popularity. Beyond just search, Socher aims to position You.com as a productivity tool for people at work and add AI agents to its offerings. “We don’t just give yo

A new plant-based nanoparticle treatment for glioblastoma, the fastest growing and most aggressive form of brain cancer, has been developed by scientists in China and the US. Researchers from Renmin Hospita l of Wuhan University and Yale University found that bardoxolone methyl (BM) – a phytochemical capable of self-assembly into spindle-shaped nanoparticles – was able to effectively target tumour cells when injected into mice.“These nanoparticles are designed to overcome the dual challenges of effectively killing [glioblastoma] cells and efficiently penetrating the brain,” the team said in a paper published in the August issue of the peer-reviewed journal, Small Science. These spindle-shaped nanoparticles have a diameter of just 50 to 80 nanometres and a length of around 170 nanometres. A nanometre is one-millionth of a millimetre – an average sheet of paper has of thickness of around 100,000 nanometres. Nanomedicine is an area that is showing a lot of potential in the fight agains