News on China's scientific and technological development.

Chinese scientists successfully completed a unisexual reproduction of mice.

• Bi-paternal mice reaching adulthood generated via targeted imprinting modifications
• ESCs with imprinting modifications showed twice the developmental ability of control
• Functional bi-paternal placenta created by modifying the Sfmbt2 microRNA cluster
• Mice with 20 loci modifications exhibited higher cloning efficiency

两个鼠爸也能生出一只鼠宝？这并非天方夜谭。

1月29日，正值新春佳节之际，一项发表在《细胞-干细胞》的研究宣布了这一科学成果。中国科学院动物研究所研究员周琪、李伟，副研究员李治琨以及中山大学教授骆观正等合作，利用胚胎干细胞工程技术，成功培育出只有两个鼠爸的小鼠，而且小鼠创纪录地活到了成年。

这项突破性进展一经发布，就引发国际学术界的广泛关注，被认为克服了哺乳动物单性生殖中前所未有的挑战。

Lethe said:

I notice that ASPI's Critical Technology Tracker was updated in August 2024. The ASPI tracker looks at high-impact published research (top 10% of papers by number of citations) across a variety of technologies, as a leading indicator of potential medium- and long-term developments.

Over the period 2019-2023, China is assessed as the leading source of high-impact research in 57 of the 64 categories assessed, with the United States leading in the remaining 7 categories: Quantum computing, vaccines and medical countermeasures, atomic clocks, genetic engineering, small satellites, nuclear medicine and radiotherapy, and natural language processing. Notably, all but quantum computing is at <2:1 US:China ratio of published papers, and NLP is basically a tie. Conversely, China not only leads in many more fields, but has significantly stronger leads in many of those fields, with 24 of the 57 categories that China leads having a >3:1 ratio of published research and 8 or more of the top 10 institutions in that field.

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Obviously there are many limitations to this data and nuances in interpreting it. The full report is worth reading in that regard.

Click to expand...

It says China has a 63%-7% lead in "advanced aircraft engines", which I think is misleading given that China's first civilian jet engine is not even in service whereas the likes of GE have been leading the field for decades.

It also says China has a lead in "space launch systems" despite the U.S. having a reusable launch system in the Falcon 9 and now Starship being close, whereas China is still launching mostly hypergolic rockets.

It also claims China leads in "advanced integrated circuit design and fabrication" despite the fact that the U.S. controls EUV lithography and Nvidia GPUs power data centers worldwide. And it claims India is ahead of Taiwan, the Netherlands, South Korea or Japan in this field. Which boggles the mind, at least as of 2025.

Overall, this report may or may not indicate something about the future but I feel is is very little reflective of current reality. Then again, I don't trust anything that comes out of ASPI, especially about China.

gadgetcool5 said:

It says China has a 63%-7% lead in "advanced aircraft engines", which I think is misleading given that China's first civilian jet engine is not even in service whereas the likes of GE have been leading the field for decades.

It also says China has a lead in "space launch systems" despite the U.S. having a reusable launch system in the Falcon 9 and now Starship being close, whereas China is still launching mostly hypergolic rockets.

It also claims China leads in "advanced integrated circuit design and fabrication" despite the fact that the U.S. controls EUV lithography and Nvidia GPUs power data centers worldwide. And it claims India is ahead of Taiwan, the Netherlands, South Korea or Japan in this field. Which boggles the mind, at least as of 2025.

Overall, this report may or may not indicate something about the future but I feel is is very little reflective of current reality. Then again, I don't trust anything that comes out of ASPI, especially about China.

Click to expand...

As noted in the report, it's specifically a measurement of (high-impact) research output. That is to say, "China has a lead in X" actually means "Chinese scientists are publishing more papers about X." Which is in fact exactly what you would expect for areas of strategic significance where Chinese technology lags other countries—lots of R&D, and therefore papers being published, as a direct result of Chinese efforts to close the gap.

There are plenty of problems with ASPI, but this isn't one of them. It's correctly measuring velocity, whereas you are mistakenly assuming it's measuring displacement.

gadgetcool5 said:

It says China has a 63%-7% lead in "advanced aircraft engines", which I think is misleading given that China's first civilian jet engine is not even in service whereas the likes of GE have been leading the field for decades.

It also says China has a lead in "space launch systems" despite the U.S. having a reusable launch system in the Falcon 9 and now Starship being close, whereas China is still launching mostly hypergolic rockets.

It also claims China leads in "advanced integrated circuit design and fabrication" despite the fact that the U.S. controls EUV lithography and Nvidia GPUs power data centers worldwide. And it claims India is ahead of Taiwan, the Netherlands, South Korea or Japan in this field. Which boggles the mind, at least as of 2025.

Overall, this report may or may not indicate something about the future but I feel is is very little reflective of current reality. Then again, I don't trust anything that comes out of ASPI, especially about China.

Click to expand...

Your interpretation is totally wrong. These are 'leading' indicators. You are using a 'trailing' indicator example. It takes on an average 15 years for research results to be commercialized. Was China very behind in research output in 2010? You bet. That led to the China's engine situation today. These numbers suggest China will dominate commercial aerospace by 2040. If China manages that, would you be surprised? No one would. You are thinking strictly applied engineering, not longer-term basic scientific research.

gadgetcool5 said:

Overall, this report may or may not indicate something about the future but I feel is is very little reflective of current reality. Then again, I don't trust anything that comes out of ASPI, especially about China.

Click to expand...

The report does not pretend to have anything to say about the present state of technology deployment. The road from research papers to operational capabilities (commercial or otherwise) is necessarily a lengthy, convoluted and contingent one. The full text of the report acknowledges many of these limitations and nuances, which is why I linked it and suggested folks read it.

That China's high-impact published research into advanced aircraft engines over the 2019-2023 period outweighs that of the United States by 9:1, with all of the top ten publishing institutions in this field being Chinese, does not suggest that China's current engine technology matches that of the United States. It does not even suggest that its engine technology will match or exceed that of the United States in the forseeable future. What it does suggest, even allowing for the likelihood that a greater proportion of relevant US research goes unpublished, is that there is a very high-level of research activity in this field within China, and that we can reasonably expect China's operationalised capabilities to at least close the gap over time relative to those of the United States. There is no straight line from the number of high-impact research papers to world-leading capabilities, but it is also wildly implausible to imagine that there is no real-world correlation or future implications to be drawn from the transition over the past two decades from an almost entirely US-led spectrum of research (US led in 60 of 64 categories over the period 2003-2007) to today's largely China-led spectrum of research.

As ASPI , the CTT implies that, far from seeing DeepSeek as some ahistorical Black Swan phenomenon that could not reasonably have been anticipated, the trends noted here suggest that we should expect China to increasingly approach, and in some cases exceed, the global state of the art across various technology domains -- to deliver more DeepSeek and J-36 moments going forward. ASPI mostly functions as a mouthpiece for the American empire, but that doesn't mean they don't occasionally produce useful material.