China Science & Technology Forum

[applesauce]

Noted.

Also, as I say, the automobile sector will automate. But what about other sectors?

Over here, jobs will shift to SE Asia. It is already gradually happening in things like assembling, textile apparel etc.

depending on the sector, but many things could be automated actually, to varying degrees, but obviously some such as mining for instance cannot be(yet), currently there must always be people involved. but as far as assembling and texiles is concerned, it also depends on the market. for instance, assembling iphones in china makes sense because china itself is a huge market and the components are all located in close proximity. textiles is inherently a light manufacturing work, it's natural for it to move to cheaper countries since there isnt much in terms of components, skill or infrastructure to worry about. but things are different for electronics

 

[Bussard Ramjet]

World first G4 RORO containership delivered in Shanghai - People's Daily Online

The "Atlantic Star", the world’s first G4 (Generation 4) roll on roll off (RORO) containership, made by Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding Group, was delivered on Changxing island in Shanghai Tuesday.

The "Atlantic Star" is the first of five ships made by Hudong-Zhonghua for the Atlantic Container Line (ACL). It can transport nearly 45,000 tons of goods on its routes between Mediterranean, Atlantic and American markets. At 296 meters long and 37.6 meters wide, the giant has been designed to have 7 layers of RORO deck with a car loading area of 28,900 square meters, and the capacity for 3,800 containers. It is the largest, newest and most advanced RORO containership in the world.

According to He Jianghua, Deputy general manager at Hudong-Zhonghua, the upper four layers of deck can be freighted with the small private cars, the lower three layers can both carry all types of engineering vehicles and containers. The ship can serve short-haul routes in the Mediterranean Sea or the Atlantic Ocean. As it can both transport containers and vehicles, it offers greater flexibility to the owner.

 

[JSCh]

Main AP1000 pumps pass qualification tests
29 October 2015

Final performance testing and post-test inspections have been successfully completed for the reactor coolant pump for the first Westinghouse AP1000 reactor, under construction in China. The first two of four such pumps for Sanmen 1 will now be shipped from the USA to China by the end of the year.

An AP1000 reactor coolant pump (Image: Curtiss-Wright)​

In a joint statement, Westinghouse, Curtiss-Wright Corporation and China's State Nuclear Power Technology Corporation (SNPTC) said, "Throughout the testing, the reactor coolant pump performance met the design requirements which are necessary to support safe and reliable AP1000 plant operation."

The final performance testing verified reactor coolant pump operation during a full range of AP1000 plant operating conditions for more than a total of 1600 hours, including more than 600 start-and-stop cycles. Extensive reviews by the Chinese regulator and detailed post-test inspections have almost been completed. Pump manufacturer Curtiss-Wright conducted the testing and inspection at its electro-mechanical division facility in Cheswick, Pennsylvania.

The successful completion of the tests and inspections means the first and second pumps for unit 1 of the Sanmen plant in China's Zhejiang province can be delivered to the site by the end of December. Fabrication and subsequent delivery of the third and fourth pumps for the unit can also proceed, as well as for the pumps for the seven further AP1000 units currently under construction in China and the USA.

Westinghouse senior vice president for new plants and major projects Jeff Benjamin said, "Conclusion of the reactor coolant pump testing program is a major milestone in the delivery of the world's first AP1000 plant." He added, "With the completion of this phase, we are now positioned for the next steps in providing our customers with a new generation of safe, clean, reliable energy."

"Designing and manufacturing the technically sophisticated and demanding AP1000 reactor coolant pump has been a close, collaborative effort," said SNPTC president Zhongtang Wang. "After seven years of hard work among Chinese and US companies and a rigorous regulatory review and strong support of the National Nuclear Safety Administration and the National Energy Administration of China, development of the reactor coolant pump has succeeded."

Each AP1000 employs four main reactor coolant pumps - each almost seven metres tall and 1.5 metres wide and weighing some 91 tonnes - which circulate reactor coolant through the core, loop piping and steam generators. The first two pumps for Sanmen 1 were manufactured by Curtiss-Wright and initially passed qualification testing in June 2012. However, final testing of a similar pump in January 2013 revealed potential quality problems. As a result of the problems, SNPTC decided to ship three of the four main pumps it had already received back to the USA for replacement of components including the impeller and guide vanes and factory re-testing.

Westinghouse is currently constructing four AP1000 units in China, two each at Sanmen in Zhejiang province and Haiyang in Shandong. Curtiss-Wright was awarded a contract by Westinghouse to produce 16 reactor coolant pumps for the units in 2007. Sanmen unit 1 is currently expected to begin generating electricity in September 2016.

Researched and written
by World Nuclear News

 

[JSCh]

China plans world's most powerful particle collider
China Daily, October 29, 2015

Chinese scientists have completed an initial conceptual design of a super giant particle collider which will be bigger and more powerful than any particle accelerator on Earth.

"We have completed the initial conceptual design and organized international peer review recently, and the final conceptual design will be completed by the end of 2016," Wang Yifang, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, told China Daily in an exclusive interview.

The institute has been operating major high-energy physics projects in China, such as the Beijing Electron Positron Collider and the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino experiment.

Now scientists are proposing a more ambitious new accelerator with seven times the energy level of the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

In July 2012, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN, announced that it had discovered the long sought-after Higgs boson－the "God particle", regarded as the crucial link that could explain why other elementary particles have mass－on LHC.

The discovery was believed to be one of the most important in physics for decades. Scientists are hopeful that it will further explain nature and the universe we live in.

While LHC is composed of 27-kilometer-long accelerator chains and detectors buried 100 meters underground at the border of Switzerland and France, scientists only managed to spot hundreds of Higgs boson particles, not enough to learn the structure and other features of the particle.

With a circumference of 50 to 100 km, however, the proposed Chinese accelerator Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) will generate millions of Higgs boson particles, allowing a more precise understanding.

"The technical route we chose is different from LHC. While LHC smashes together protons, it generates Higgs particles together with many other particles," Wang said.

"The proposed CEPC, however, collides electrons and positrons to create an extremely clean environment that only produces Higgs particles," he said.

The Higgs boson factory is only the first step of the ambitious plan. A second-phase project named SPPC (Super Proton-Proton Collider) is also included in the design－a fully upgraded version of LHC.

LHC shut down for upgrading in early 2013 and restarted in June with an almost doubled energy level of 13 TeV, a measurement of electron volts.

"LHC is hitting its limits of energy level, it seems not possible to escalate the energy dramatically at the existing facility," Wang said. The proposed SPPC will be a 100 TeV proton-proton collider.

If everything moves forward as proposed, the construction of the first phase project CEPC will start between 2020 and 2025, followed by the second phase in 2040.

"China brings to this entire discussion a certain level of newness. They are going to need help, but they have financial muscle and they have ambition," said Nima Arkani Hamed from the Institute for Advanced Study in the United States, who joined the force to promote CEPC in the world.

David J. Gross, a US particle physicist and 2004 Nobel Prize winner, wrote in a commentary co-signed by US theoretical physicist Edward Witten that although the cost of the project would be great, the benefits would also be great.

"China would leap to a leadership position in an important frontier area of basic science," he wrote.

Gerard't Hooft, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1999, said in an earlier interview to Doha-based broadcaster Al Jazeera that the proposed collider, if built, "will bring hundreds, probably thousands, of top class scientists with different specializations, from pure theory to experimental physics and engineering, from abroad to China".

 

[TaiShang]

China to set up civil satellite systems by 2020
October 29, 2015
China aims to finish building satellite systems for remote sensing, communications and navigation before 2020, a national plan showed Thursday.

The three satellite systems should be able to provide continuous and stable service, according to the plan for long-term development of civil space infrastructure posted on the website of the National Development and Reform Commission, the top economic planner.

In the next decade, China will build civil space infrastructure featuring cutting-edge technology, independent development and control, and reasonable distribution and global coverage, the plan said.

The three systems should meet demands for different industries and regions to support China's modernization drive, ensure national security and improve people's lives, it said.

Through the combined use of satellites from different systems or constellations, the country should be able to provide diversified, high-quality and reliable services to different industries.

For remote-sensing satellite systems, the priority should be on development of land, ocean and atmospheric observation satellites with seven different satellite constellations, the plan showed.

The system will meet the demands of various fields, including monitoring land and ocean resources, environmental protection, disaster relief, traffic, agriculture and weather forecasts.

The communications satellite system will be used for broadband Internet, mobile telecommunications and live television broadcasts.

China will improve the service capabilities of its Beidou Navigation Satellite System, a domestic alternative to U.S.-operated GPS, the plan added.

By 2020, China will set up a complete Beidou system consisting of 35 satellites, which will provide global coverage with positioning accuracy of less than 10 meters and timing accuracy of 20 nanoseconds.

The country will also improve research to catch up with world-class technology and promote the use of domestic satellite systems.

 

[JSCh]

Submersible touches depths of 4,000m
October 30, 2015, Friday

​

A deep-sea submersible, developed by the Shanghai Ocean University, has reached depths of 4,000 meters during a trial operation from September 26 to October 25 in the South China Sea. The “Rainbow Fish” submersible is expected to reach depths of 11,000 meters by 2016. It can go down deeper than the nation’s first deep-sea submersible “Jiaolong,” which touched depths of 7,000 meters. The submersible will probe under the 26 oceanic trenches beneath 6,500 meters. It has three seabed landers, both unmanned and manned. It will try to reach the depths of 11,000 meters under the Mariana Trench in 2019 with a researcher onboard. The project also includes a mother ship named “Zhang Jian” named after an entrepreneur and educationist in modern China. — Ti Gong


Deep-sea submersible 'Rainbow Fish' fulfills first trial voyage
Reporter: Hu Nan 丨 CCTV.com
10-30-2015 13:22 BJT

Shanghai Maritime University has welcomed its deep-sea submersible "Rainbow Fish," the first non-government-funded submersible, back from its one-month dive mission in the South China Sea.

During the past month, "Rainbow Fish" has dived more than a dozen times in the South China Sea, reaching a depth of 4,328 meters. It is set to take sea trials near the Mariana islands next year, before eventually trying to scale the depths of the Mariana Trench in 2019.

The retrieving system, surface control system and optical fiber of "Rainbow Fish" were all manufactured domestically, and these features will help combat the hydraulic pressure of being 11,000 meters below the sea surface.

An ambulatory deep-sea science lab will also be founded, relying on bathyscaphes and their mothership.

"It's an open, ambulatory science lab. The samples and data collected by the submersibles will pave the way for fields of science research, such as biology, ecology, chemistry, marine technology, and marine surveying and mapping, etc," said Chen Xinjun, dean of Marine Science College, Shanghai Maritime University.

This open platform will facilitate continuous, systematical research of the deep-sea. Aberdeen University, Hawaii Pacific University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have already signed agreements of cooperation with the "Rainbow Fish" project, co-developed by Shanghai Maritime University and the Rainbow Fish Ocean Technology Company.

"The study of the Hadal Trench, 6,000 meters beneath the sea, remains limited. If we have sufficient funds to survey and investigate each trench, we will accomplish a meaningful task for the understanding of marine science and ecological structuring," said Cui Weicheng with Shanghai Maritime University.

 

[cirr]

Huawei’s new smartwatch looks like a Swiss watch… made in China

October 30th, 2015 | by Alfred Siew

I don’t mean to be funny with that headline.

If you look at the sophisticated watch faces and finishes in terms of straps and cases, you’d be hard pressed to say the new Huawei Watch doesn’t remind you of an expensive Swiss masterpiece.

The only things missing are the brand and the iconic “Swiss made” on the front. If you flip the watch around, the strap says it’s from Huawei and made in China.

Though there have been Chinese-made mechanical watches, they are nowhere valued as highly as those from established Swiss watch houses. In the Huawei Watch, strangely, you feel that the playing field has been levelled.

By far, the new watch is the closest you’d come to emulating the “complications” – or features on mechanical watches – on a smart watch.

If no one told you this was a smart watch at first glance, you might think it takes after the well-proven mechanical designs of old. Look at the moon phase complication, for starters.

Or the brown leather and gold plated case, which form a classic pairing. The same for the designs with the silver steel mesh strap and more modern all-black steel finish.

The common 42mm diameter is also another cue from Huawei that it has taken after more expensive Swiss designs. And yes, these watches come with sapphire crystal as well to protect against scratches.

Why go through all the hassle? Huawei probably has sensed a demand for classic-looking watches that sport some of the smarts of the latest wearable technologies.

In the digital department, the new watches seem to keep pace with the best as well. Powered by Google’s Android Wear software, they sport a bright AMOLED display.

You, of course, get to monitor your heart rate throughout the day, while also getting alerts for calls and messages. Really standard stuff for smartwatches by now.

Question is, will people would buy these as keepsakes, as mechanical watches are often seen as (read our opinion piece on this), likely because of their high prices?

Huawei certainly isn’t selling its new watches for cheap. A top-end “limited edition” model with 64GB storage that’s gold-plated costs S$999.

Regular versions start from S$549 for a leather and stainless steel option and S$649 if you pick pick a stainless steel bracelet.

The black options cost S$649 and S$749, depending on your choice of leather or steel strap. And finally, if you go for the steel case that’s gold plated, get ready to pay S$899 or S$999, again depending on the strap.

Huawei’s new smartwatch looks like a Swiss watch… made in China Techgoondu

 

[cirr]

Huawei Mate 8 specs: Kirin 950 chipset more powerful than Nexus 6P; Tipped for launch on Nov. 5

Sanjit Dutt Oct 30, 2015 8:50 AM


The Huawei Mate 8 running on Kirin 950 is tipped for launch on Nov. 5 (Reuters)

Huawei will reportedly be introducing its next proprietary Kirin chipset for smartphones in the first week of November alongside the Huawei Mate 8 flagship phablet. The Chinese smartphone maker has posted an invitation on social networking website Weibo, announcing the launch of the new chipset, possibly the powerful Kirin 950 SoC, on Nov. 5, when it will also launch the Huawei Mate 8.

Huawei's invitation comes in the company's usual cryptic style, showing the image of a chip bearing the name "Kirin", which, according to PhoneArena, could be with the new Kirin 950 SoC. According to previous reports, the Kirin 950 features an eight core design, with four Cortex A72 cores clocked at 2.4GHz for performing demanding tasks and four Cortex A53 cores clocked at 2.1 GHz for energy-savings.

Earlier benchmark tests on Geekbench have already shown the Kirin 950 processor to be more powerful than the Samsung Exynos 7420 chipset, which powers the current Galaxy S6, Galaxy S6 Edge, Galaxy S6 Edge Plus and Galaxy Note 5 range of devices.

The Huawei Mate 8 will also be the first smartphone to be powered by the Kirin 950, with both likely to be announced on Friday. The Huawei Mate 8 is a successor to the Mate 7 and will feature a 6-inch QHD display with a resolution of 2,560 x 1,440 pixels.

The phablet will be available in two variants, one with 32GB of on-board storage and 3 GB of RAM, while the other variant will come with 64 GB of internal storage and 4 GB of RAM, both models paired with a Mali-T880 graphics unit. The Huawei Mate 8 will sport a 21 megapixel rear camera along with either a 5 megapixel or 8 megapixel front facing camera for selfies and video chats.

The Huawei Mate 8 and the Kirin 950 chipset powering the handset will both be unveiled on Nov. 5 at an event in China. Stay tuned.

Huawei Mate 8 specs: Kirin 950 chipset more powerful than Nexus 6P; Tipped for launch on Nov. 5

 

[TianyaTaiwan]

Mate 8

 

[nForce]

how often do one has to charge them ? I'm thinking of getting one.

 

[cirr]

China to start work on supercollider by 2020, staking claim as science leader

The facility is planned to generate millions of Higgs bosons, far more than the current capacity of the Large Hadron Collider at Cern on the Swiss-French border

The Compact Muon Solenoid, a particle physics detectors built on the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Switzerland and France. China plans to build a supercollider at least twice as big. Photograph: Rex Features
AFP in Beijing

Thursday 29 October 2015 19.46 GMT

Last modified on Thursday 29 October 201519.48 GMT

China will begin work on the world’s largest supercollider in 2020, a mega-machine aimed at increasing understanding of the elusive Higgs boson, state-run media has reported.

The facility, designed to smash subatomic particles together at enormous speed, will reportedly be at least twice the size of Europe’s physics lab, the Swiss-based Cern, where the Higgs boson was discovered.

Scientists believe the Higgs – sometimes dubbed the “God particle” – endows mass, making it a fundamental building block of the universe.

How the Higgs boson is born and how it dies: the most precise picture so far

The final concept design for the project is on track for completion by the end of 2016, Wang Yifang, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics at the China Academy of Sciences, told the China Daily.

The facility is expected to generate millions of Higgs bosons, far more than the current capacity of Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where the particle’s existence was demonstrated in 2012.

As planned, the Chinese project will generate seven times the energy of the LHC, smashing subatomic particles together to generate “Higgses” on an unprecedented scale.

“[The] LHC is hitting its limits of energy level,” Wang told the China Daily, which is published by the government. “It seems not possible to escalate the energy dramatically at the existing facility.”

Cern was quick to point to its own plans for a major upgrade to the LHC. It said it aimed for a tenfold increase by 2025 in the “luminosity” of the LHC, meaning the rate of particle collisions that the machine can generate.

“The LHC already delivers proton collisions at the highest energy ever,” Cern chief Rolf Heuer said in a statement.

“The High-Luminosity LHC will produce collisions 10 times more rapidly, increasing our discovery potential and transforming the LHC into a machine for precision studies: the natural next step for the high-energy frontier,” he insisted.

More than 230 scientists and engineers from around the world met at Cern this week to discuss the project, which would be operational from 2025, the organisation said on its website.

Cern said its upgrade would allow its giant lab – a 27-kilometre (17-mile) ring-shaped tunnel straddling the French-Swiss border – to produce 15m Higgs bosonparticles per year, compared with the 1.2m it generated in total between 2011 and 2012.

China plans to land lunar probe on far side of moon

At a time when austerity measures have led many developed nations to reduce research funding for projects without clear applications, China has been pouring huge sums money into theoretical as well as practical science, hoping to become a world leader in fields from biology to cosmology.

Planning for the Chinese project began in 2013, shortly after the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, according to slides from a presentation by Wang in Geneva that appeared on his institute’s website.

He suggested Qinhuangdao, a northern port city that is the starting point of the Great Wall, as an ideal location for the underground facility, noting its favourable geological conditions and local wineries as important selling points.

China’s rapid economic growth and large population put it in a unique position to invest in basic scientific research, he wrote.

“This is a machine for the world and by the world: not a Chinese one,” he added, saying physicists from around the globe had travelled to China to help with the project.

China to start work on supercollider by 2020, staking claim as science leader | Science | The Guardian

 

[Albatross]

The Jinping Underground Labatory in southwestern China's Sichuan province is making Western countries nervous, according to German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung.

First put into service in late 2010, the Jinping Underground Labatory is China's first deep underground lab which provides an experimental platform for cutting-edge underground scientific research.

Inping is the deepest underground lab in the world with vertical rock coverage of 2,400 meters. Cosmic rays are said to be 200 times weaker in the lab compared to the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy.

Jinping underground lab may give China the lead in research: report｜WCT

PandaX

PandaX is designed to build and operate a ton-scale liquid xenon experiment to detect the so far elusive dark matter in the Universe. The PandaX experiment will use a two-phase (liquid and gas) xenon position-sensitive time projection chamber detector. The program will evolve in two stages, initially probing the low-mass regime (<10 GeV) with a nuclear- recoil energy threshold of about 5 keV and ultimately employing a ton-scale detector to probe the higher-mass regime (10–1,000 GeV), reaching a sensitivity down to 10^-47 cm^2 for spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross section.


Design of the PandaX stage-1a TPC integrated with the inner vessel

CJPL

The PandaX experiment is designed as a next generation liquid xenon experiment using the two-phase technique. It is located at the China Jin-Ping underground Laboratory (CJPL), which is in the middle of a 18-km tunnel under 2400 meters of rock overburden, in the Sichuan province of south-west China. As one of the deepest underground labs in the world, the CJPL has an extremely low flux of muon rate of less than 20/m^2/100-day, which is about two orders of magnitude lower than the flux at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory (LNGS) in Italy. The low muon rate and the resulting background makes the lab ideal for a sensitive dark matter detection.


Located in the Sichuan province of China, CJPL is one of the deepest underground labs in the world



Scientists across China and the United States collaborating on the PandaX search for dark matter from an underground lab in southwestern China report results from the first stage of the experiment in a new study published in the Beijing-based journal SCIENCE CHINA Physics, Mechanics and Astronomy.

PandaX is the first dark matter experiment in China that deploys more than one hundred kilograms of xenon as a detector; the project is designed to monitor potential collisions between xenon nucleons and weakly interactive massive particles, hypothesized candidates for dark matter.

In the new study, scientists explain, "Dark matter is a leading candidate to explain gravitational effects observed in galactic rotational curves, galaxy clusters, and large scale structure formation."

"Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), a particular class of dark matter candidates, are interesting in particle physics and can be studied in colliders [and in] indirect and direct detection experiments."

If confirmed, dark matter particles would extend understanding of the fundamental building blocks of nature beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, and would provide support for theories on supersymmetry and extra dimensions of space-time.

"Direct positive detection of WIMPs using ultra-low background detectors in deep underground laboratories would provide convincing evidence of dark matter in our solar system and allow the probing of fundamental properties of WIMPs," they add in the new study.

Direct detection experiments using different technologies have produced many interesting results, but not universally confirmed evidence of weakly interacting massive particles. These results have produced much excitement across the global scientific community and call for further examination of WIMP signals through other experiments.

"In recent years, new techniques using noble liquids (xenon, argon) have shown exceptional potential due to the capability of background suppression and discrimination, and scalability to large target masses," state the PandaX collaborators.

"The XENON10/100 and LUX experiments using the dual-phase technique have improved WIMP detection sensitivity by more than two orders of magnitude in a wide mass range."

China's PandaX experiment, operated at the China Jinping Underground Laboratory, uses the dual-phase xenon technique to search for both low and high mass WIMP dark matter.

The initial success of the PandaX project demonstrates China has joined the global competition at the scientific frontier marking dark matter searches.

Today more than twenty dark matter search experiments are being conducted worldwide. Many dark matter search experiments, such as the DAMA/LIBRA experiment in Italy, the CoGeNT and CDMS experiments in the US, and the German-led CRESST experiment have reported findings that could be interpreted as positive signals of dark matter in recent years.

The PandaX collaboration joins this effort with results from a dark matter search that started in May of 2014.

No dark matter signal was observed in the first PandaX-I run, which places strong constraints on all previously reported dark matter-like signals from other similar types of experiments.

The PandaX experiment to date has collected about 4 million raw events; only about ten thousand events fell into the energy region of interest for dark matter. In the quiet central part of the xenon target only 46 events were observed.

However, the data from these 46 events was consistent with signals marking background radiation, not dark matter.

PandaX stands for Particle and Astrophysical Xenon Detector. The experiment is being conducted by an international team of about 40 scientists, and led by researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

The goal of the first stage of PandaX experiment is to examine previously reported dark matter-like signals. The scale of the PandaX-I experiment is second only to that of LUX, which is currently the planet's largest dark matter experiment and is located in a South Dakota mine in the US.

To shield the Chinese experiment from cosmic rays, the PandaX detector is located at the China Jinping Underground Laboratory (CJPL), the deepest underground laboratory in the world. CJPL was developed by Tsinghua University and the Yalong River Hydropower Development Company in 2010.

First dark matter results from underground China lab hosting PandaX-I

Congrats to Chinese bros and Tsinghua Uni for creating such a state of the art facility.

 

[JSCh]

Chinese students develop highly-efficient battery
Xinhua, November 1, 2015

A spoon of sugar can generate 80 hours of electricity for a battery, thanks to a novel microbial fuel cell (MFC) developed by students from north China's Tianjin Municipality.

A group of 19 college and high school students led by instructors from Tianjin University worked out a three-species co-cultured system of electricity generation, which won them a gold medal and the award for the best energy project at the 2015 International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Competition.

The poor performance and limited practical application of traditional single-strain MFC inspired the team to extend their engineering capabilities to multicellular microbial consortia, according to Liu Yue, a team member and a postgraduate majoring in biological engineering.

According to Yuan Yingjin, the team instructor, this is the first time for three different species, namely E. coli, Shewanella and B. subtilis to be introduced into an MFC system.

"Every microbe has its own unique functions and responsibilities in the 'team', which reduces the metabolic burden for all the microbes, improves the transmission efficiency of electrons and provides more electricity," Liu said.

Through the electricity generation platform they designed, the final output reached over 520 mV and lasted over 80 hours. The microbes feed on organic substances such as sugar or grass.

"After technical optimization, our MFC is able to generate the same electricity output as a lithium battery, with longer battery life, lower cost and zero pollution," Yuan said.

 

[JSCh]

Walking Chinese robot breaks Guinness world record
English.news.cn 2015-11-01 18:24:42

CHONGQING, Nov. 1 (Xinhua) -- A quadruped robot in the southwestern municipality of Chongqing walked its way on to the pages of the Guinness World Records book on Sunday.

"Xingzhe No. 1" was developed by Li Qingdu, a professor with the college of automation under the Chongqing University of Post and Telecommunications. Starting on Oct. 24, it took 340,000 continuous steps over 54 hours covering a distance of 134.03 km and used 0.8 kwh of power.

The previous record was set by Ranger, a quadruped robot developed by Cornell University in America, which walked 65 km in 30 hours consuming 0.5 kwh.

Li and his team began developing the robot in November 2014. The first prototype was produced in January

"We can apply the technology and processes involved to a wide range of robotic devices, to make them more efficient, durable and reliable. In the future we could begin to use these robots for dangerous or remote tasks," Li said.

 

[Martian2]

China unveils jetliner in bid to compete with Boeing, Airbus - US News