China Scientist Awards Blog

  Chinese scientists make seawater uranium extraction 40 times more efficient China’s increasing nuclear power capacity drives a growing demand for uranium. The country imported 13,000 tonnes of natural uranium in 2024, while domestic production was only about 1,700 tonnes. With its uranium mines unable to keep up with demand, Chinese scientists have  turned their attention to the sea . The world’s oceans are estimated to contain 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium, 1,000 times the amount of uranium ore reserves in the ground. However, the concentration of the heavy metal is extremely low in seawater, at just 3.3 milligrams (less than 1,000th of an ounce) per tonne. The presence in seawater of vanadium, which shares chemical properties with uranium, also presents a challenge as the two must first be separated, complicating the extraction process. Researchers at Lanzhou University’s Frontiers Science Centre for Rare Isotopes have developed a technology that doubles the capacity for u...

  Ex-Google engineer joins Shanghai robotics start-up to take lead on advanced AI research A pre-eminent  Google  scientist, Luo Jianlan, has joined Chinese humanoid  robotics  company  AgiBot , known on the mainland as Zhiyuan, to lead the  Shanghai -based  start-up ’s new  artificial intelligence  (AI) research centre. Known as a leading scholar in AI and robotics, Luo will spearhead the establishment of the Zhiyuan Embodied Intelligence Research Centre as the newly appointed chief scientist of AgiBot, a start-up co-founded in 2023 by former  Huawei Technologies  “Genius Youth” recruit  Peng Zhihui . Luo has closely collaborated with renowned computer scientist Sergey Levine, a co-founder of San Francisco-based AI start-up Physical Intelligence. He previously worked at Google’s “moon shot factory” Google X and AI research lab Google DeepMind. Luo – who obtained his doctoral degree from the University of California, Berke...

  Scientists monitor surface solar radiation via satellite remote sensing BEIJING -- A geostationary satellite network observation (GSNO) system has been developed to precisely monitor changes in surface solar radiation by introducing satellite remote sensing technology, according to the Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Serving like a "sunlight scanner," the GSNO system can provide more precise data support for sectors such as clean energy application, agricultural yield estimation and climate change response, as well as public health, said the institute. The study was led by AIR researchers and conducted in collaboration with researchers from multiple institutions, both at home and abroad. The study results have been published in the journal The Innovation. Surface solar radiation is a general term for the solar radiation components received by the Earth's surface, including ultraviolet rays, visible light, infrared an...

  China advances in brain-computer interface technology, aiming for US$900 per procedure A Chinese brain-computer interface (BCI) company said it had seen positive results from three human implants, matching Elon Musk’s Neuralink in the number of human patients, as China prepares for wider commercialisation of the technology. Beinao No 1, a semi-invasive BCI system developed by the Chinese Institute for Brain Research (CIBR) in Beijing and its affiliated start-up NeuCyber NeuroTech, completed their first three human implants between February and March this year, the companies said last week. The Chinese government, meanwhile, is moving to support the market for BCI products, which are inching closer to commercialisation. The local government in China’s central Hubei province on Monday released the country’s first pricing guidelines for the operation, stipulating that invasive BCI implants should cost 6,552 yuan (US$902) per procedure, and that the price of removal should be 3,139 y...