News on China's scientific and technological development.

t2contra said:

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Sorry, but I don't see any car here.

It sure sounds far-fetched but a story in the Beijing Times claims China is considering building a high-speed train that would connect China’s northeast with the United States. The project would cross Siberia and the Bering Strait to Alaska to then go across Canada into the United States, according to the English-language report published in the state-run China Daily. To cross the Bering Strait into Alaska the railway would need a 125-mile underwater tunnel, which implies it would be around four times the length of the tunnel that cross the English Channel, notes a very skeptical Washington Post article on the report.

China Daily claims that the technology to construct such a long underwater tunnel already exists and will be used to build a tunnel to connect China’s Fujian province with Taiwan. "Right now we're already in discussions. Russia has already been thinking about this for many years," said a railway expert cited by the Beijing Times, according to the Independent’s report on the story. The train would reportedly travel at around 220mph, meaning the entire trip between the United States and China would take around two days.

What is being called the China-Russia-Canada-America line is one of four large-scale international high-speed rail projects the country wants to build, the Guardian writes, citing the Beijing Times:

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Chinese doctors in Xi'an, capital of Shaanxi province, successfully treated a highly sensitized uremic patient by a kidney transplant in combination with an auxiliary liver transplant, China Daily learned on Monday.

It was the first such operation in China and considered a breakthrough in solving the medical problem for such highly sensitized patients in need of kidney transplants, said Yuan Jianlin, director of Urology at Xijing Hospital under the Fourth Military Medical University in the city and team leader for the operation.

The patient Gao Hui (not his real name) received an allogenic kidney transplant nine years ago but the transplanted kidney lost its function one year later, and he had to rely on hemodialysis to sustain his life.

"Such highly sensitized recipients are not uncommon and kidney transplantation for this kind of patient would often fail because of hyperacute rejection, and there were no effective and workable treatments for such patients although various methods were explored at home and abroad in the past years," Yuan said.

In order to save Gao's life, doctors at Xijing hospital tried a new surgical approach — a kidney transplant combined with an auxiliary liver transplant.

The operation was performed on March 6 and lasted 8 hours and 25 minutes. The patient is in now in a stable condition with stable renal function, and is expected to soon be discharged.

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BEIJING -- The Chinese government is making efforts to solve possible security risks for government agencies after Microsoft stopped providing security updates for Windows XP, an official said on Tuesday.

"Security problems could arise because of a lack of technical support after Microsoft stopped providing services, making computers with XP vulnerable to hackers," Yan Xiaohong, National Copyright Administration deputy director, told a press conference.

Microsoft ended support for the 13-year-old Windows XP, which remains a major operating system for Chinese computer users, after April 8, and advised users to upgrade to Windows 8.1 and get a new PC if necessary.

"Windows 8 is fairly expensive and will increase government procurement costs," he said, adding that relevant authorities are negotiating with Microsoft over the issue.

Windows 8 is sold for 888 yuan ($142) in China.

To protect the 13-year-old operating system and help users continue using it, Chinese security providers have released specialized XP-protection products.

"The government is conducting appraisal of related security products and will promote use of such products to safeguard users' information security," Yan said.

The Chinese government has invested hundreds of millions of US dollars in buying copyrighted software since 2010, when China launched an anti-piracy drive among government agencies, according to Yan.

By the end of 2013, all government agencies above the county level had been examined, and their practices of buying pirated software had been corrected, he said.

The government has also been moving to extend the campaign to big state-owned enterprises in recent years, according to Yan.

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BEIJING - China's State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) on Tuesday said the country accepted a larger proportion of invention patent applications in 2013.

Shen Changyu, head of the SIPO, said China accepted 2,377,000 patent applications and authorized 1,313,000 cases last year. The number of invention patent applications was 825,000, up 26.3 percent year on year.

It is the first time in five years invention patent applications took up more than one third of the three types of applications, said Shen at a press conference. The other two types are utility model and design.

"The patent application structure was further improved in the first quarter of 2014, as nearly 40 percent of applications were invention patent," said Shen.

According to Shen, invention patent applications amounted to 396,000 in the first quarter 2014, up 10.6 percent year on year.

Also in the first quarter, China's international patent applications to the Patent Cooperation Treaty increased by 8.5 percent year on year, indicating that Chinese enterprises have speeded up to enter the international market, he added.

China ranked third in international patent applications to the Patent Cooperation Treaty, with more than 20,000 submissions in 2013.

China also received 1,881,500 applications of trademark registration last year, up 14.15 percent, according to Shen.

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BEIJING - An unmanned submersible has passed its final field test, marking another step in China's drive to explore deep sea resources.

Named "Haima," or sea horse, the vehicle can dive a depth of 4,500 meters via remote control and has the highest proportion of China-made parts compared with the country's other submersibles, according to a statement released on Tuesday by the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Chinese scientists spent six years developing core technologies and making the machine, which went through multiple improvements following problems and malfunctions during tests in laboratory tanks and the ocean.

During tests, the vehicle achieved a maximum depth of 4,502 meters, and reached the central basin in the South China Sea for tasks such as deploying cables, collecting sedimentary rock samples and photographing.

The ministry said the vehicle enables the country to strengthen its hi-tech exploration of deep sea resources, and the ministry will cooperate with the Ministry of Land and Resources in devising work plans for Haima.

Meanwhile, Qianlong-1, another unmanned submersible still in the trial stage, is designed to travel to a depth of 6,000 meters and will be tasked with exploring the seabed and collecting hydrological data.

In 2012, Jiaolong, the country's most advanced manned submersible, achieved a record dive depth of more than 7,000 meters in the Pacific's Mariana Trench.

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HANGZHOU - A human blood protein has been found to be associated with the H7N9 fatality rate, according to a study by Chinese medical scientists.

The study, published in Nature Communications on Tuesday, showed that blood plasma levels of angiotensin II are higher in H7N9 patients and could be used to predict their physical deterioration.

Angiotensin II is a human protein contained in plasma, the vascular wall, heart and kidney to regulate blood pressure. It is closely linked to acute lung injury.

H7N9 patients with higher levels of angiotensin II carry more viral load, said Li Lanjuan, researcher at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a specialist in H7N9 prevention.

"It is particularly obvious in the second week of human infection. The angiotensin II level of patients in critical condition keeps going up, while that of mild cases tends to drop," Li said.

Li added the new finding could help in clinical practice. Medical personnel could adopt more effective and reliable treatment measures for patients suffering different conditions.

"This study will provide a new perspective to H7N9 pathology and potential treatment for future cases," said Ed Gerstner, executive editor of Nature Communications.

The study was led by researchers of the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

They collected plasma from 47 H7N9 patients in cities of Hangzhou, Shanghai and Nanjing and analyzed the correlation between angiotensin II and viral load.

H7N9 was first reported in China in March 2013. The virus causes severe disease in humans, including acute and often lethal respiratory failure.The country has reported more than 200 human H7N9 cases.

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Chinese scientists have built the world's first prototype testing platform for an ultra-high-speed vacuum maglev train, which theoretically could hit speeds up to 2,900 km per hour, or almost three times the speed of a passenger jet, researchers confirmed on Wednesday.

Running the maglev train in a near-vacuum environment is the best way to ensure the comfort and energy economy of an ultra-high speed train, said Deng Zigang, head of the project team based in Southwest Jiaotong University in Sichuan's capital Chengdu.

When a train's speed reaches 400 km per hour or above, Deng said, more than 83 percent of the traction is wasted to offset air resistance and the aerodynamic noise is over 90 db, higher than the 75 db set by design standards.

Southwest Jiaotong University developed the initial high temperature superconducting magnetic levitation test loop in March 2013, and the latest model had the vacuum pipe that became the world's first evacuated tube transport system.

When the train runs in the tube, the pressure inside is 10 times lower than outside and the train can use more power for driving at high speed, Deng said.

From the point of design, the vacuum ultra-high-speed maglev train uses two different technologies to increase the speed of the train, said Zhao Lin, an associate research fellow of the National Lab for Superconductivity, Institute of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The first is magnetic levitation, which uses superconductors to produce powerful magnets to elevate the train above the track, thus remove the friction with the track and enhance the speed.

"The reason that an aircraft moves faster than any vehicle on the ground is similar - the friction from the air is much smaller than the ground," Zhao explained.

The concept of maglev transportation was first presented in the mid-20th century and the first commercial maglev train line was put into operation at Birmingham Airport in Britain in 1984, which had a speed of only 42 km per hour because of the technology at that time.

Currently, China and Japan are actively developing such technology, and the maglev train connecting the Bund and Pudong Airport in Shanghai is the world's fastest commercial line with speeds up to 431 km per hour.

The second technology used to speed up the train is to put it into a vacuum tube to reduce air resistance, which is the only source of friction for a magnetic levitation train.

"Compared with conventional superconductors, the high-temperature superconductors require less stringent environmental demands, and thus reduce the cost of the train," Zhao said.

For example, the conventional superconductors used on Japan's levitation trains need to stay at about -270 C to keep their superconducting state, which needs liquid helium cooling.

In contrast, high-temperature superconductors of the maglev train running in Pudong Airport can keep the superconducting state at -180 C to -200 C, which can be refrigerated with liquid nitrogen, a cooling agent one hundred times cheaper than liquid helium.

However, there are major technological problems to resolve before the train could be put into use.

"For example, the train would need a vacuum tube that extend hundreds of kilometers. And it is challenging to maintain such a large vacuum system," Zhao said.

"Also, there could be external impacts like earthquakes that could pose a threat to the system. And the braking system of the train at such high speed also needs non-traditional designs."

Peng Chao in Chengdu contributed to this story.

Contact the writer at [email protected]

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