China Science & Technology Forum

[rambro]

Should i hold back on getting a petrol car?

Geely have acquired proton, hope geely brings its range of electric vehicles here.

 

[Shahzaz ud din]

Scientists for the first time reconstruct genome of ancient Chinese
By Sun Wenyu (People's Daily Online) 16:17, October 13, 2017

The Tianyuan Cave site

A team of Chinese and German scientists has for the first time reconstructed the genome of an ancient Chinese person after extracting nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from the man’s leg bone, which was found in 2003 at the Tianyuan Cave site, located outside Beijing, Chinese media outlet thepaper.cn reported on Oct. 13.

The scientists used new techniques that can identify ancient genetic material from an archaeological find even when large quantities of DNA from soil bacteria are present.

Comparing that data with other genomic data, the scientists carried out thorough studies on this hard-won genetic profile.

Skeleton of Tianyuan Man

According to Fu Qiaomei, a researcher on the project, Tianyuan Man shares DNA with one ancient European—a 35,000-year-old modern human from Goyet Caves in Belgium. However, the results show that Tianyuan Man is more closely related with ancient people living in East Asia.

Tianyuan Man is not the immediate ancestor of the present-day people in East Asia, according to Fu. This branch of ancient East Asians has become extinct at some point of time in history.

The finding was published in the international academic journal Current Biology on Oct. 13. In addition, it has also offered a surprising insight into the evolution of ancient Native Americans.

The big surprise here is that Tianyuan Man also shares a close genetic relationship with Native Americans living in the Amazon region. It suggests that this group of people might be the offspring of an unknown branch of ancient humans who had a connection with Tianyuan Man.

(For the latest China news, Please follow People's Daily on Twitter and Facebook)(Web editor: Hongyu, Bianji)
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[lcloo]

When China stop making petrol powered cars, global oil demand will go down thus the petrol prices will become cheaper which is good news for current petrol powered car owners. And fresh air for all.

The bad news is five (or ten) to fifteen years from now, petrol car owners will probably face penalties like higher road tax, more expensive replacement parts due to economy of scales on production of replacement parts, and the re-sale value of their cars.

Solar, wind, hydro power and high-tech clean coal power generation coulped with eletric cars will make skies more blue .

 

[cirr]

Ocean research gets 'smart'

2017-10-23 09:22 Global Times Editor: Li Yan

China building intelligent vessels with fewer crew

China plans to build more "intelligent and competitive" scientific research vessels to meet the growing global ocean exploration demand, following the country's first intelligent polar research ship, the Xuelong 2, which is still being built and is expected to carry researchers to the North and South poles, Chinese experts said.

China is planning for an intelligent, eco-friendly oceanic research system that covers the globe and can withstand all climates and water conditions.

This was explained by Huang Wei, a chief engineer at the China State Shipbuilding Corporation's (CSSC) Research Institute No.708, who spoke at an oceanic scientific vessel conference in Shanghai on Friday, as reported by the Science and Technology Daily.

China's future focus in research ship building is on a minimal number of crew numbers. In the area of automation and intelligence, it wants to match U.S. counterparts' standards, and allow scientists to control the mission from an intelligent capsule, according to Wu Lixin, vice-principal of the Ocean University of China, as reported by the Shanghai Observer.

Wu also pointed out that ships of the future will have professional research teams on board to significantly save scientists from doing the physical labor by themselves as is the case currently.

Wu went on to say that Chinese research vessels really need to improve their safety since the West Pacific, a critical area for Chinese scientific research, has been experiencing stronger typhoons.

The Xuelong 2, China's first domestically-built polar research vessel, is an exemplar of China's future plans, experts have said, pointing to its length of 122.5 meters and beam of 22.3 meters, with a displacement of 13,990 tones and a navigational capability of 20,000 nautical miles. It will also be able to break polar ice with both its bow and stern, the Xinhua News Agency reported previously.

It comes with an intelligent capsule that can give the vessel a thorough examination. It is expected to take Chinese scientists to the north and south poles in 2019, and to be a leader in polar research, its chief designer Wu Gang, was quoted as saying in the Science and Technology Daily report.

There are now about 50 vessels qualified for oceanic survey and deep-sea scientific research in the world, according to Qu Tanzhou, head of the State Oceanic Administration's science and technology division.

Qu also noted that the number of Chinese research vessels and their quality still fail to meet the need to conduct marine surveys on a regular basis.

"From retrofitting to construction, Chinese research vessels are gradually improving and taking scientists to deeper seas and higher seas and the polar regions after 60 years of development," Huang was quoted as saying in the report.

China has the largest number of new oceanic research vessels in the world, with 10 in the design stage or under construction as of August, experts said at the conference.

http://www.ecns.cn/2017/10-23/277982.shtml

 

[cirr]

China's gravitational wave observatory to be operational by 2020

2017-10-23 16:15 Ecns.cn Editor: Mo Hong'e

A observatory is under construction at an altitude above 5,250 meters in Ngari Prefecture, Southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region. (Photo/Xinhua)

(ECNS) -- A world-class observatory under construction at an altitude above 5,250 meters in Ngari Prefecture, Southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, will begin efforts to detect primary gravitational waves in 2020.

Ngari is considered an ideal place for astronomers to gaze into the remote universe due to its thin air and clear skies. Chinese scientists will also undertake high-precision detection of cosmic rays in the program called the Ngari Plan.

Zhang Xinmin, researcher with the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, works as chief scientist on the Ngari Plan.

He said principal construction on the observatory complex will be completed by the end of this year, with the optical telescope ready in 2019. The site is scheduled to start observation a year later.

Zhang said detection of primary gravitational waves, dubbed "the first cry of the cosmos after the Big Bang", is of great significance to studying the origin and evolution of the universe.

The telescope will enable the first measurement of primary gravitational waves in the northern hemisphere.

According to Zhang, China's current research into gravitational waves include three approaches – the Ngari Plan, the 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in Guizhou Province and space exploration, each under the leadership of different institutes.

Space exploration includes two projects -- the Taiji project by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Tianqin project proposed by Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou City.

http://www.ecns.cn/cns-wire/2017/10-23/278071.shtml

 

[JSCh]

China paying attention to better, more sound earthquake technology
By Zhao Yusha Source:Global Times Published: 2017/10/22 22:33:39

China wants to develop its earthquake forecasting technology to become one of the most advanced countries in this field, Chinese scientists said on Sunday.

Zheng Guoguang, head of the China Earthquake Administration, has explained that the country will speed up development of its earthquake technology to make it competitive with that of developed countries by 2020, and to develop global top-notch detecting technology by 2030, the Science and Technology Daily reported on Sunday.

The report quoted Zheng as saying that the Chinese government saw great progress in earthquake preparation and disaster relief in the past five years, and the current technology is capable of detecting an earthquake above 2.5-magnitude, and reporting it within two minutes.

However, the report also pointed out that disaster relief work is more crucial because of growing population density and the construction of more reservoirs and nuclear power stations.

But, China does not lag behind some developed countries very much, since no one can really do an earthquake forecast with zero-error, Sun Shihong, a China Earthquake Networks Center (CENC) researcher told the Global Times on Sunday. And, seismic resistance materials, such as a shock-absorption devices is already wide used in China, according to the report.

China has given priority to earthquake-forecasting technology, a challenge that requires solid understanding of complicated subterranean activity, said Sun, adding that China also wants to focus on disaster prevention, for example, with earthquake resistant buildings.

China's earthquake administrators have said China plans to launch a satellite that can be used for real-time monitoring of earthquakes and possible seismic precursors in China and neighboring regions, through data on the Earth's electromagnetic field and high-energy particle study, said the Xinhua News Agency on January 17.

In 2016, China announced a new seismic parameter map to help build safer structures with national standards, said Xinhua, adding that it includes national standards for construction and anti-seismic design. All buildings and infrastructure must meet basic criteria and requirements as outlined by the country.

China's size has it straddling one of the most active seismic zones in the world. Since 1900, it has had a 7.5-magnitude earthquake or above every five years on average on the mainland, and every decade has seen one tremor measuring at least magnitude 8.0.

 

[JSCh]

Atoms and Josephson junctions simulate 1D quantum liquid
Oct 19, 2017

Disorder at work: the Josephson junction quantum simulator​

A theory that describes how quantum particles interact with each other in 1D has been put to the test by two independent teams of physicists. In one experiment, aspects of the Tomonaga–Luttinger theory were verified using laser-trapped ultracold atoms. The other study made use of superconducting devices. Confirmation of the theory could lead to the development of new technologies based on nanowires and other 1D systems. Applications include electronics, sensing, energy harvesting and quantum information.

Tomonaga–Luttinger theory describes a 1D ensemble of interacting quantum particles in terms of a Tomonaga–Luttinger liquid (TLL). It predicts properties of 1D quantum systems such as how electrons behave in a nanowire. Testing these predictions in a systematic way has not been possible, however, because it is very difficult to control how particles interact in 1D systems such as nanowires.

Quantum simulator
One way forward is to create an analogous quantum system such as an ensemble of trapped ultracold atoms, in which parameters such as particle interactions can be controlled. While there has been some progress in studying TLLs using quantum simulators, challenges remain. One problem is that a TLL has a homogenous distribution of particles whereas most quantum simulators have spatial order. Ultracold atoms, for example, are held in a 1D lattice with regular spacing.

Now, Bin Yang, Yang-Yang Chen and colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China have overcome this inhomogeneity problem in an ultracold-atom simulator. Their experiment begins with a regular 1D array of rubidium-87 atoms trapped in an optical lattice of laser light. A laser pulse is then used to eject atoms from the central region of the trap, which sets off a density wave that moves outwards from the centre of the trap. The atomic density in the central region of the trap becomes nearly uniform, thus providing a homogeneous analogue to a TLL.

TLL parameter
By measuring the density and speed of sound in the central region, the team could work out the "TLL parameter" – which measures the level of quantum fluctuations in the system. Yang, Chen and colleagues then measured the momentum distribution in the system and confirmed that it was as predicted by the TTL model.

Meanwhile at the University of New South Wales, Timothy Duty and colleagues took a very different approach. They made their quantum simulators using lines of superconducting material that are interrupted by Josephson junctions at intervals of about 1 μm. In this case, the quantum particles are the Cooper pairs of electrons that are responsible for superconductivity.

Disorder versus interactions
Josephson junctions are non-superconducting regions through which the Cooper pairs can tunnel. There is inherent disorder in the materials used to make simulators and this results in slight differences in the number of Cooper pairs at each junction. By studying simulators with different sized junctions – and therefore different levels of disorder – Duty and colleagues were able to look at how disorder and particle interactions compete against each other to determine the properties of the TLL. When interactions dominate, for example, the system behaved as a superfluid. But when disorder prevails, the system became glass-like with no flow.

Both studies are described in Physical Review Letters.

About the author
Hamish Johnston is editor of physicsworld.com


Atoms and Josephson junctions simulate 1D quantum liquid - physicsworld.com

 

[JSCh]

The world’s first trees grew by splitting their guts

By Dennis Normile
Oct. 23, 2017 , 3:00 PM

Scientists have discovered some of the best preserved specimens of the world’s first trees in a remote region of China. At up to 12 meters tall, these spindly species were topped by a clump of erect branches vaguely resembling modern palm trees and lived a whopping 393 million to 372 million years ago. But the biggest surprise is how they got so big in the first place.

Today’s trees grow through a relatively simple mechanism. The trunk is a single cylindrical shaft made up of hundreds of woody strands called xylem, which conduct water from the roots to the branches and leaves. New xylem grow in rings at the periphery of the trunk just behind the bark, adding girth so the tree can get taller.

This is not how ancient trees known as cladoxylopsids grew, however. Two specimens discovered in a desert in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province in 2012 were remarkably well preserved. That’s because they underwent a process in which silica—likely emitted by a nearby volcano—saturated the tree and took on the shape of the wood’s internal structure as it decayed, preserving its 3D cellular structure.

The fossils reveal that, unlike modern trees with a single shaft, cladoxylopsids had multiple xylem columns spaced around the perimeter of a hollow trunk. A network of crisscrossing strands connected the vertical xylem—much like a chain-link fence spreads from pole to pole—and soft tissue filled the spaces between all these strands. New growth formed in rings around each of the xylem columns while an increasing volume of soft tissue forced the strands to spread out.

All of this expanded the girth of the trunk, allowing for a taller tree. But it also split apart the tree’s xylem skeleton, which required the tree to continually repair itself, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The weight of the tree squeezed tissue at the base of the trunk outward.

An artist’s impression of a stand of cladoxylopsida trees, which formed Earth's first forests.
Peter Geisen

In the largest of the two fossil trunks, above the bulge, the xylem and soft tissue occupied a ring about 50 centimeters in diameter and 5 centimeters thick, with external roots making up the remainder of the 70-centimeter-diameter tree trunk. The scientists estimate cladoxylopsids could have been 8 to 12 meters tall.

This growth strategy has not been seen in any other tree in Earth’s history, says Xu Hong-He, a paleontologist at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology in China who discovered the fossilized tree trunks. “It's crazy that the oldest trees also had the most complex growth strategy,” adds Christopher Berry, a plant paleontologist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom who helped analyze the fossils.

The trees are particularly important, says Berry, because they dominated Earth during the Devonian period from 419 million to 358 million years ago. They formed the first forests and played a key role in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They also added oxygen to the atmosphere, affecting the climate and influencing conditions that fostered the emergence of other life forms, he says.

Despite their early critical role in the evolution of life on Earth, the cladoxylopsids do not have any modern descendants. They disappeared at the end of the Devonian period, perhaps because they were left in the shade of taller, more robust trees, or because changing environmental conditions may have favored Archaeopteris, the ancestors of modern trees that appeared about 385 million years ago.

The new study is an important step in solving several such mysteries about early Earth, says Brigitte Meyer-Berthaud, a paleobotanist at the University of Montpellier in France who was not involved in the research. To understand the role of cladoxylopsids on our planet’s past, she says, “it is essential to know how the trees are constructed.”

doi:10.1126/science.aar2986


The world’s first trees grew by splitting their guts | Science | AAAS

Hong-He Xua, Christopher M. Berry, William E. Steinc, Yi Wang, Peng Tang, and Qiang Fu. Unique growth strategy in the Earth’s first trees revealed in silicified fossil trunks from China. PNAS (2017). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1708241114​

 

[JSCh]

China uses unmanned boats for coastal geological survey
Source: Xinhua| 2017-10-23 17:55:55|Editor: Mengjie

Surveyors transport unmanned boat Jinghai No. 3 into water in Sanya, south China's Hainan Province, Oct. 23, 2017. China has sent two unmanned boats to join a geological survey along its 18,000 km coastline, especially in main coastal zones. Guangzhou Marine Geological Survey has introduced two unmanned boats, developed by Shanghai University, to collect data and take video, which used to be done by surveyors. (Xinhua/Zhang Jiansong)

SANYA, Hainan Province, Oct. 23 (Xinhua) -- China has sent two unmanned boats to join a geological survey along its 18,000 km coastline, especially in main coastal zones.

Guangzhou Marine Geological Survey has introduced two unmanned boats, developed by Shanghai University, to collect data and take video, which used to be done by surveyors.

The unmanned boats, named Jinghai N0. 3 and Jinghaihong respectively, are carried by China's new-generation offshore fishing ship YUEXIAYU 90215, which has a displacement of 887 tonnes and is equipped with a crane for lifting the boats.

The boats have just finished surveying the geological marine condition in Dongmaozhou Islands off Sanya city in Hainan Province, where surveyors failed to carry out a field survey last year after ships ran aground.

It was the first time that unmanned boats had been used in such a survey, said senior engineer Wen Mingming from the Guangzhou subsidiary of China Geological Survey.

"Many shallow coasts are complicated and likely to leave survey boats stranded. While, the unmanned boats can fit in and eliminate risks for surveyors," Wen said.

Jinghai No. 3 is 6.28 meters long and 2.86 meters wide, with a load capacity of 2.6 tonnes and a cruising power of 200 nautical miles. It can conduct automatic topographical mapping, sea floor exploration and environmental monitoring.

The 2.7-meter-long Jinghaihong is the newest model developed by the Shanghai University, with a speed of 6 nautical miles per hour. It can perform automatic route planning and navigation while collecting hydrological data.

Shanghai University unmanned vessel research institute is China's first institute for designing and developing such vessels with advanced communication and computing systems.

Guangzhou Marine Geological Survey is responsible for comprehensive geological survey of coastal zones in Guangdong, Fujian and Hainan provinces, as well as Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

Unmanned boat Jinghaihong works in Sanya, south China's Hainan Province, Oct. 23, 2017.

Unmanned boat Jinghai No. 3 works in Sanya, south China's Hainan Province, Oct. 23, 2017.

China's new-generation offshore fishing ship YUEXIAYU 90215 is seen in Sanya, south China's Hainan Province, Oct. 23, 2017.

 

[JSCh]

New property found in unusual crystalline materials
Materials with a special kind of boundary between crystal grains can deform in unexpected ways.

David L. Chandler | MIT News Office
October 25, 2017

Most metals and semiconductors, from the steel in a knife blade to the silicon in a solar panel, are made up of many tiny crystalline grains. The way these grains meet at their edges can have a major impact on the solid’s properties, including mechanical strength, electrical conductivity, thermal properties, flexibility, and so on.

When the boundaries between the grains are of a particular type, called a coherent twin boundary (CTB), this adds useful properties to certain materials, especially at the nanoscale. It increases their strength, making the material much stronger while preserving its ability to be deformed, unlike most other processes that add strength. Now, researchers have discovered a new deformation mechanism of these twin crystal boundaries, which could help engineers figure out how to more precisely use CTBs to tune the properties of some materials.

Contrary to expectations, it turns out that a material’s crystal grains can sometimes slide along these CTBs. The new finding is described in a paper published this week in the journal Nature Communications by Ming Dao, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Subra Suresh, the Vannevar Bush Professor Emeritus of Engineering and president-designate of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore; Ju Li, the Battelle Energy Alliance Professor in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering; and seven others at MIT and elsewhere.

While each crystal grain is made up of an orderly three-dimensional array of atoms in a lattice structure, CTBs are places where, on the two sides of a boundary, the lattice forms a mirror-image of the structure on the other side. Every atom on either side of the coherent twin boundary is exactly matched by an atom in a mirror-symmetrical location on the other side. Much research in recent years has shown that lattices that incorporate nanoscale CTBs can have much greater strength than the same material with random grain boundaries, without losing another useful property called ductility, which describes a material’s ability to be stretched.

Experimental observation of coherent twin boundary (CTB) sliding in a nanopillar subjected to compression. (Courtesy of the researchers)

Some previous research suggested that these twin crystal boundaries are incapable of sliding due to the limited number of defects. Indeed, no experimental observations of such sliding have been reported before at room temperature. Now, a combination of theoretical analysis and experimental work reported in the Nature Communications paper has shown that in fact, under certain kinds of loads these grains can slide along the boundary. Understanding this property will be important for developing ways to engineer material properties to optimize them for specific applications, Dao says.

“A lot of high-strength nanocrystalline materials [with grains sizes measured in less than 100 nanometers] have low ductility and fatigue properties, and failure grows quite quickly with little stretching,” he says. Conversely, in the metals that incorporate CTBs, that “enhances the strength and preserves the good ductility.” But understanding how these materials behave when subjected to various mechanical stresses is important in order to be able to harness them for structural uses. For one thing, it means that the way the material deforms is quite uneven: Distortions in the direction of the planes of the CTBs can happen much more readily than in other directions.

The experiment was carried out with copper, but the results should apply to some other metals with similar crystal structures, such as gold, silver, and platinum. These materials are widely used in electronic devices, Dao says. “If you design these materials” with structures in the size range explored in this work, which involves features smaller than a few hundred nanometers across, “you need to be aware of these kinds of deformation modes.”

Molecular dynamics simulation showing coherent twin boundary (CTB) sliding in a nanopillar under compression. (Courtesy of the researchers)

The sliding, once understood, can be used for significant advantages. For example, researchers could design extremely strong nanostructures based on the known orientation dependence; or by knowing the type and direction of force that’s required to initiate the sliding, it might be possible to design a device that could be activated, such as an alarm, in response to a specific level of stress.

“This study confirmed CTB sliding, which was previously considered impossible, and its particular driving conditions,” says Zhiwei Shan, a senior co-author and dean of the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Xi’an Jiao Tong University in China. “Many things could become possible when previously unknown activation or enabling conditions are discovered.”

“This work has identified through both systematic experiments and analysis the occurrence of an important mechanical characteristic which is found only in certain special types of interfaces and at the nanoscale. Given that this phenomenon can potentially be applicable to a broad range of crystalline materials, one can envision new materials design approaches involving nanostructures to optimize a variety of mechanical and functional characteristics,” Suresh says.

“This discovery could fundamentally change our understanding of plastic deformation in nanotwinned metals and should be of broad interest to the material research community,” says Huajian Gao, the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Engineering at Brown University, who was not involved in this work.

Gao adds that “CTBs are key to engineering novel nanotwinned materials with superior mechanical and physical properties such as strength, ductility, toughness, electrical conductivity, and thermal stability. This paper significantly advances our knowledge in this field by revealing large-scale sliding of CTBs.”

The team included researchers at Xi’an Jiaotong University in China, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China, and Nanyang Technical University in Singapore. The work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China, ExxonMobil Research and Engineering through the MIT Energy Initiative, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the Singapore-MIT Alliance.



New property found in unusual crystalline materials | MIT News

Zhang-Jie Wang, Qing-Jie Li, Yao Li, Long-Chao Huang, Lei Lu, Ming Dao, Ju Li, Evan Ma, Subra Suresh & Zhi-Wei Shan. Sliding of coherent twin boundaries, Nature Communications (2017). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-01234-8
​

 

[JSCh]

Super laser sets another record for peak power
By Ke Jiayun | 00:01 UTC+8 October 27, 2017 |

Print Edition

SHANGHAI’S super laser machine has given a demonstration of ultra intense, ultra fast lasers that can deliver peak power of 10.3 petawatts, the city government announced yesterday.

According to the government, this reading is the highest so far in the world.

The machine Shanghai Superintense-Ultrafast Lasers Facility (SULF) had already recorded a breakthrough in August last year when the peak power exceeded 5 petawatts, making it then the world’s most powerful pulse laser.

The latest result was released on Tuesday by a combined lab, supplied by Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM) and ShanghaiTech University. The SULF machine is scheduled to be fully completed in late 2018.

One petawatt equals 1 quadrillion watts. Experts said the new progress in laser technology can be projected to research covering fields such as astrophysics, nuclear medicine, nuclear physics and material science.

The super intense and ultra fast laser also makes it possible to create extreme environments — which only exist inside a star or at the edge of a black hole — within a laboratory.

 

[JSCh]

It’s Big and Long-Lived, and It Won’t Catch Fire: The Vanadium Redox-⁠Flow Battery
Move over, lithium ion: Vanadium flow batteries finally become competitive for grid-scale energy storage

Posted 26 Oct 2017 | 15:00 GMT
By Z. Gary Yang

Photo: Rongke Power
Go Big: This factory produces vanadium redox-flow batteries destined for the world’s largest battery site: a 200-megawatt, 800-megawatt-hour storage station in China’s Liaoning province.

The factory sprawls over an area larger than 20 soccer fields. Inside, it’s brightly lit and filled with humming machinery, a mammoth futuristic manufactory. Robot arms grab components from bins and place each part with precision, while conveyor belts move the assembled pieces smoothly down production lines. Finished products enter testing stations for quality checks before being packed for shipping.

It has been called a gigafactory, and it does indeed produce vast quantities of advanced batteries. But this gigafactory is in China, not Nevada. It doesn’t make batteries for cars, and it’s not part of the Elon Musk empire.

Opened in early 2017, in the northern Chinese port city of Dalian, this plant is owned by Rongke Power and is turning out battery systems for some of the world’s largest energy storage installations. It’s on target to produce 300 megawatts’ worth of batteries by the end of this year, eventually ramping up to 3 gigawatts per year.

The scale of this “other” gigafactory may be impressive, but the core technology it makes is even more compelling. The Dalian factory produces vanadium redox-flow batteries, a specialized type whose time has finally come. The VRFB was invented decades ago but has emerged only recently as one of the leading contenders for large-scale energy storage.

How large? VRFBs are being touted for grid-scale uses in which they would store up to hundreds of megawatt-hours of energy. In these applications, they may be charged by large baseload power plants, which generate electricity cheaply but are too sluggish to accommodate sharp increases in demand during peak hours. Or they may be charged by renewable sources like wind farms, whose generation doesn’t always align well with demand. Like most batteries, VRFBs can deliver power nearly instantaneously, so they can stand in for the traditional means of meeting peak demand: fossil-fueled “peaker” plants that, in comparison with batteries, are costly to maintain and operate and not as fast.

Lithium-ion batteries, too, have been proposed for grid-scale uses. But here they are no match for VRFBs, which have longer lifetimes, can be scaled up more easily, and can operate day in, day out, with no significant performance loss for 20 years or more.

Soon this technology will be the cornerstone of the largest battery installation in the world: a 200-MW, 800-megawatt-hour storage station being built in Dalian. The first 100 MW will be installed by the end of this year, with the remainder coming on line in 2018. The station will help balance supply and demand on the Liaoning province power grid, which serves about 40 million people, filling the same function as a peaker power plant but without using scarce water. Furthermore, if the batteries are charged by the wind-generated power that’s abundant in northern China, no fossil fuels will be burned. Should demand spike or the supply dip suddenly, the battery station will be able to dispatch all or just part of its 200 MW within milliseconds.

The result will be a stable grid that can integrate more renewable energy. At times, wind generation in Liaoning province tops 7 GW, or about 15 percent of total generation. But much of that power isn’t used because other sources already meet grid demand. Earlier this year, the amount of wind power in Liaoning that was curtailed, or wasted, reached 15 percent; in the neighboring province of Jilin, it was 30 percent. The Dalian site will store that wasted energy for later use, adding up to a few hundred gigawatt-hours per month.

The Dalian site is just one of several big VRFB installations being built in China, so its reign as the world’s biggest battery may be short. Meanwhile, other countries are adopting VRFBs. According to the U.S. Department of Energy’s global energy storage database, since 2014, more than 30 VRFB projects in 11 countries have been deployed or begun construction; these range in power from a few tens of kilowatts up to Dalian’s 200 MW. While these projects reflect the surging interest in all forms of energy storage, what’s driving the renewed push toward VRFBs are important technological distinctions.


Continue --> It’s Big and Long-Lived, and It Won’t Catch Fire: The Vanadium Redox-⁠Flow Battery - IEEE Spectrum

 

[JSCh]

Young researchers invent cancer detector: screening for 12 types of cancer with a single drop of blood
Sang Yarong, China Plus
Published: 2017-10-26 17:09:39

MxHealth, a research team from Southeast University, has invented an automatic detector that can screen for 12 types of cancer by testing one drop of blood, Chinanews.com reported.

The researchers applied the world-leading technology which uses a photonic crystal microsphere to build an accurate system to detect early-stage cancers.

The team leader, Chang Ning, a 22-year-old Ph.D. candidate from Southeast University, explained that the traditional means of detection usually screens for only one cancer biomarker, which is unstable and inaccurate. Instead, the automatic detector developed by MxHealth examines multiple tumor markers, greatly improving the accuracy of the detection process.

Chang Ning demonstrates how to apply the cancer detector to examine a drop of blood at Southeast University in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, on October 25, 2017. [Photo: Chinanews.com]

“We only need to collect 50 microlitres of blood to examine biomarkers of 12 common cancers, including liver, lung, pancreatic and prostatic cancers,” said Chang. “The whole testing process takes only five to ten minutes and costs less than 100 yuan (around 15 U.S. dollars).”

Test results are displayed on the screen of the printer-like cancer detector at Southeast University in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, on October 25, 2017. [Photo: Chinanews.com]

The invention won the silver award at this year’s China College Students “Internet Plus” Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition.

It will take two to three years or possibly longer to officially launch the cancer detector on the market, according to Chang.

 

[JSCh]

Tsinghua Named World’s Best Engineering, Computer Science School

Beijing university overtakes MIT in two US News & World Report subject rankings.

David Paulk Oct 25, 2017

One of China’s elite educational institutions, Tsinghua University in Beijing, is the world’s top school for both engineering and computer science, authoritative ranking survey U.S. News & World Report announced Tuesday.

While Tsinghua has previously held U.S. News’ top spot for engineering, this marks the first time the school has overtaken the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to be named the world’s best in computer science. Tsinghua was also ranked sixth in materials science and 10th in chemistry.

Other Chinese universities to be ranked highly for engineering include the Harbin Institute of Technology at No. 6 and Zhejiang University at No. 7. Zhejiang University also made the global top 10 in computer science, behind ninth-ranked Hangzhou University of Science and Technology.

U.S. News & World Report evaluated 1,250 universities in 74 countries for its 2018 rankings. The top four overall spots went to U.S. institutions Harvard University, MIT, Stanford University, and the University of California–Berkeley, in that order, with the U.K.’s Oxford University rounding out the top five.

Tsinghua, meanwhile, ranked fourth in Asia behind two Singaporean universities and the University of Tokyo, and 64th overall, just ahead of Beijing rival Peking University.

“The schools that rank the highest in the Best Global Universities rankings are those that emphasize academic research, including by partnering with international scholars to produce highly cited articles,” said Robert Morse, chief data strategist for U.S. News, in the company’s press release.

For its 2018 global rankings, U.S. News said it placed greater emphasis on international collaboration, rewarding schools that partnered with their foreign peers to write and publish papers. Other variables considered for the company’s rankings methodology include research reputation, number of publications, and citation frequency.

Tsinghua University did not immediately respond to Sixth Tone’s interview request on Wednesday.

Additional reporting: Lin Qiqing; editor: Kevin Schoenmakers.



Tsinghua Named World’s Best Engineering, Computer Science School |
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Ranking for Computer Science(left) and Engineering (right)