News on China's scientific and technological development.

BEIJING, Feb. 14 (Xinhua) -- Two Chinese scientists, physicist Xie Jialin and architect Wu Liangyong, were both given China's top science and technology award Tuesday morning at a high-profile annual ceremony held to honor excellent scientists and research achievements.

Attended by President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao and senior leaders Li Changchun and Li Keqiang, the event, staged in the Great Hall of the People, saw the two each conferred the State Top Scientific and Technological Award and awarded 5 million yuan (794,900 U.S.dollars).

President Hu Jintao delivered certificates to the two top scientists, shook their hands and congratulated them on their achievements.

In his address at the ceremony, Premier Wen said that China should fundamentally count on its reform and opening-up drive, systematic innovation and scientific progress as the way to overcome the influence of external economic crises, solve systematic and structural problems and achieve development in leaps and bounds.

China aims to build itself into an innovative country by 2020, when scientific progress will contribute to nearly 60 percent of the nation's economic growth, according to a national outline for scientific and technological development (2006-2020), launched in March 2010.

"We should be sharp-eyed on new opportunities that the economic crisis has brought for new revolutions in science and technology," Wen said, urging efforts to accumulate new advantages for the Chinese economy by deepening science and technology-related systematic reforms.

Eyeing further innovation-powered development, China has been offering annual awards to elite scientists for 12 consecutive years since 2000, and 20 top scientists, including Xie and Wu, have won the award so far.

Xie Jialin, 92, studied at Yanching University in China and California Institute of Technology in the United States, and then obtained a Ph.D from Stanford University. He returned to China in 1955.

Xie is best known for helping China build its first electron linac (linear particle accelerator) in 1964 and contributed to the research and design of the Beijing Electron Positron Collider (BEPC), the country's first large-scale scientific facility for basic research, in the 1980s.

In his decades-long research career, Xie has made outstanding achievements regarding accelerator physics, accelerator technology and the free electron laser. His research efforts have helped bring China's relevant research to an international vanguard group.

"My lifelong aspiration has simply been to become a man useful to the country and the people. It never occurred to me that I should make fame or profit from my work," said Xie, who was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980.

Wu Liangyong, 89, gained a bachelor's degree in architecture from National Central University in Chongqing, China in 1944 and then a master's degree in architecture and urban design from Cranbrook Academy of Art in the United States five years later.

When he returned to China in 1950, Wu committed himself to city planning, architectural design and landscape planning, as well as teaching and scientific research.

Wu earned his reputation for developing the science of human settlements in China and combining it with China's urbanization.

Of the award-winning research projects featured at the event, original broadband mobile telecommunications transmission technology and organic light-emitting technology earned first place in the State Technology Invention Award.

A team from Tsinghua University also clinched first prize in the State Technology Invention Award for their technological breakthrough in the field of Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED).

Bringing lower power consumption and longer service life to OLED products, their technology had been put into use for spacesuits with which spacemen aboard Shenzhou VII conducted extravehicular activities.

Thirty-six projects received second place prizes of State Natural Sciences Award, but the first place prize was not awarded for the 8th time in the last 12 years.

Three scientists from Japan and five from Germany, France, Britain, the United States and Australia won the International Cooperation Award in Science and Technology.

While presiding over the ceremony, Vice Premier Li Keqiang said science and technology is, in a sense, the most active and revolutionary element in social and economic development, and it is also a driving force of social progress.

Li called on the country's researchers and workers in the scientific and technological fields to learn from the award winners.

Li also urged them to better combine their career ambitions as well as their professional knowledge and skills with the country's development, social progress and improvement of people's livelihood, and to support the country's causes of transforming the economic development pattern and building an innovative country.

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An employee displays a solar panel at a workshop in a factory in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province

Armed with tens of billions in loans from the Chinese government, Chinese solar companies have scaled at a rate unthinkable only a few years ago.

At the end of this year, there will likely be 50,000 megawatts (MW) of manufacturing capacity in place around the world, with much of that new capacity being developed in China and other Asian countries.

In four years, the solar manufacturing sector shifted from being led by a geographically dispersed number of companies to one dominated by Chinese companies.

In 2006, there were two companies from China in the list of top ten cell producers. In 2010, there were six, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

There are currently only two non-Asian manufacturers in the top ten, and those companies -- First Solar and Q-Cells -- have shifted a lot of their production to Asia.

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Chinese scientists collected the world's deepest undersea samples on Tuesday, proving the country's ability to reach nearly all the seabed on Earth.

China's submersible Jiaolong descended to a new depth of 6,965 meters in an 11-hour dive in the Mariana Trench, the State Oceanic Administration said.

"We collected samples of deep sea water, deposits and creatures, and recorded video and took photographs," Tang Jialing, one of the three pilots in the vehicle, told China Central Television on Tuesday, adding that the deep sea environment is unimaginably beautiful.

"I feel confident of reaching a depth of 7,000 meters because Jiaolong worked very well in the (Tuesday) dive," Tang said, smiling. It was the second dive for the vehicle, with another four scheduled to achieve the country's first 7,000-meter dive.

Xu Qinan, the submersible's chief designer, told China Daily that it was still undecided whether the craft would try for 7,000 meters in the third dive.

Though the dive was 35 meters short of the target, China National Radio quoted on-site scientists as saying Tuesday's accomplishment means China is capable of exploring 99 percent of the ocean floor.

Compared with the first, 6,671-meter dive on Friday, Tuesday's dive took much longer, to test problems detected in the first dive, Peng Lisheng, an official of the China Ocean Mineral Resources Research and Development Association, told China Daily.

Cui Weicheng, deputy commander-general of the diving team, said the second dive was much more important than the first because it had to solve all the problems detected in the previous dive and test the craft's safety.

According to Xinhua News Agency, four machine problems were detected in the first dive and a leaky oil pipe postponed the scheduled second dive on Monday.

"Besides testing the safety, our diving team finished all scheduled tasks, such as collecting samples and measuring the seabed," Peng said.

Cui said Jiaolong is not only a submersible, but also a platform for scientists.

"If Jiaolong succeeds in the 7,000-meter dive, the vessel will play an important role in future scientific research and mineral exploration in the deep sea," said Tao Chunhui, professor of the Second Institute of Oceanography and chief scientist on the Chinese scientific research ship Dayang Yihao, or Ocean No 1.

Jiaolong, which is 8.2 meters long and 3.4 meters high, weighs nearly 22 tons. It will be used in the exploration and development of marine resources, according to the State Oceanic Administration.

In 2011, China became the first country approved by the International Seabed Authority to look for polymetallic sulphide deposits, a recently discovered mineral source, in the Southwest Indian Ridge, a tectonic plate boundary on the floor of the Indian Ocean.

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Semiconductor nanocrystals, also known as quantum dots (QDs), have been the subject of intense research in the past 20 years due to their size- and composition-tunable optoelectronic properties. The use of QDs in biomedical applications hinges on the ability to manipulate the surface chemistry. For many biomedical applications, nanoparticles need to be small, stable, biocompatible, monodisperse, and available functional groups for conjugation. As a bioorthogonal, efficient and selective reactions that can be used to join molecules together rapidly and in high yield, click chemistry has also been used for selectively labeling biomolecules within biological systems. Recently, the use of click chemistry for this purpose has been a major focus.

In an effort to achieve small and conjugation-ready quantum dots nanoprobes, researchers of CAS Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT) have developed click-functionalized quantum dots coated with a new class of mutifunctional multidentate polymer ligands, thus providing a biological interface necessary for living-organism (eg. virus, etc) labeling and imaging. The research represented an attractive tool for investigating viral infection routes and characterizing the dynamic interactions between viruses and target cells.

The research results have been recently published online on May 8 in Journal of the American Chemical Society (

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). The presented research was financially supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program), the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the ‘‘Hundred Talents Program’’ of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Science and Technology Foundation of Guangdong Province of China, Guangdong Innovation Reasearch Team of Low-cost Healthcare and Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Cancer Nanotechnology.

The research group, led by Prof. CAI Lintao, carries out world leading research on a range of biomedical nanotechnology including studying multifunctional and nanostructured composite materials, providing highly sensitive and selective detection method through molecular probes for medical imaging and molecular diagnosis in nanoscale and single molecular level, exploring new device concepts and self-assembly techniques for the development of biomedical nanodevices and sensors for biosensing, environmental monitoring, information processing, energy utility and other applications.

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Recently, a long-life barycenter location energy detecting optical system developed by our institute won the invention patent license with patent No. ZL201010583699.0. The system is mainly applied to kinds of space orbital long-life satellite, reactor, hot cell and circumstances with strong radioactivity.

In the present aerospace field, especially in the aspect of high orbit satellite attitude control, in order to correct the flight path deviation of the detector, measure the detector attitude and perform pointing control to the solar panels and pay load, the star sensor is required to secure the orbit stability during the flight and a certain flight attitude. In terms of the middle and high orbit satellites, the star sensor which can serve at the high and middle orbit for 10 years or more, or even 25 years is specially needed. Due to the harsh working environment and high demand of precision, quality and service-life, the techniques involved are especially difficult and no such optical system is invented in the our country yet. Also, due to the harsh space environment in high orbit, once the general optical system is irradiated chronically by the space particles, the transmittance of the whole system would decay fast or even become light-proof. In this case, the satellite control system would not able to detect effective fixed star, which would invalidate the whole star control system, and it could not provide long-tem and stable flight attitude control for the satellite system. The existing Barycenter Location Energy Detecting Optical Systems either have complicated structure with at least 7 optics or more or with 3 kinds of optical glass or more or could not serve for 10 years or more.

In view of this problem, Wang Hu and Liu Jie of our institute have developed a Long-Life Barycenter Location Energy Detecting Optical System, which solves the difficulties that the traditional optical systems hardly work stably, precisely in the rugged electromagnetic environment for long time. The optical system includes 1st positive lens, 2nd positive lens, 2nd positive lens, 1st negative lens, diaphragm, 3rd positive lens, 4th positive lens and 2nd negative lens which are setting up on the same light path in sequence along the direction of the incident light. All these six lenses are radiation-resistant and their focal distance, radius of curvature and refractive index are designed. This optical system is especially for the application of the long-life satellite in different space orbits. It could serve for 10 years or more, or even 25 years, which could correct the system aberrations better, form smaller defocused spots and colourbias, adapt the environmental temperature better and produce high transmittance.

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Chinese scientists on Thursday launched a DNA test program on 22 ancient human skeletons that date back more than 2,000 years.

Scientists will conduct DNA tests on the bones and carry out micro-element analysis to collect demography and ethnology data, said Wang Wei, researcher with the Chinese Frontier Research Center of Jilin University and head of the program.

With the data, the scientists can analyze the diets and lifestyle habits and age structure of the people living in the Warring States Period (476 BC to 221 BC) as well as the agriculture and business development at that time, Wang said.

A total of 34 tombs of the Warring States Period were discovered in Zhangjiakou city of north China's Hebei province last September. Twenty-eight human skeletons were found in the tomb, of which 22 were complete.

Jilin University, which is based in northeast China's Jilin province, set up China's first archaeological DNA laboratory in 1998. Computer technology was used to reconstruct 3-D faces of a princess from the Laoshan Han Tomb (202BC- 9AD), which was discovered in Beijing in 1999.

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Microbes are widely used in the chemical, food, pharmaceutical, and health care industries as well as new industries such as environmental remediation, green chemistry, sustainable manufacturing, biomass energy and resources, and low-carbon biodiesel. Improvement in the microbial production strains offers great opportunity for elevated profits and sustainability of relevant industries without significant capital outlay. Shake flasks and tubes account for 90% or more of all microbe culture experiments. However, current flask culture techniques require large numbers of flasks, bulky shaking beds, large fluid volume, intensive human labor and expensive equipment, and thus cause poor screening efficiency.

Recently, Dr. GAN Mingzhe from the i-LAB of Suzhou Institute of Nano-Tech and Nano-Bionics (SINANO), CAS, invented a novel scalable multi-channel microfluidic chip for bacterial suspension culture (Figure 1A). In this device, culture media in 32 parallel and identical culture chamber loops are driven by a series of micropumps formed with a single set of control channels. The culture media indifferent culture loops are demonstrated to cycle at the same speed, which ensures identical growth environments in all culture loops. Suspended cultivations of microbial strains such as E.coli (Figure 1B), Bacillus subtilis, Pseudomonas stutzeri and Zymomonas mobilis are carried out to demonstrate general applicability of the chip for microbial culture. The simple chip design and low-cost fabrication allow for an efficient microbial suspension culture. This work has been published on Lab on a chip [link to the publisher article].

On the basis of this work, Dr. GAN and colleagues developed a second-generation microbial culture chip. A high degree of integration of 120 culture chambers (50 nL each) in a 7.5 cm× 5 cm chip is achieved. A faster circulating flow rate enables the suspension culture of various microbial strains including bacteria as well as yeast. Simpler fabrication process allows for future low-cost industrial chip production. This work has been recently published on small [link to the article on publisher website].

Both works are the parts of project “microbial screening and analysis system”. The objective of the project is to develop an integrated microfluidic system for microbial screening and optimization, which could greatly speed up strain selection processes in microbial industry. Current the research is focusing on the development of rapid micro-analysis technology for microbial metabolites.

This work is supported by the Hundred Talents Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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An international research team for the first time carried out high resolution imaging observations of the Sun at He I 1083 nm using the 1083 nm Lyot filter made by the Nanjing Institute for Astronomical and Optical Technology. For the first time, scientists obtained the highest resolution images of the Sun at 1083 nm and discovered structures of ultrafine magnetic loops with a surprisingly narrow diameter of only about 100 km. The result is published in APJ Letter. [

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Dr. JI Haisheng, researcher of Purple Mountain Observatory, CAS carried out the research cooperating with Prof. Philip Goode and CAO Wendao of Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO),with the 1.6 m aperture New Solar Telescope (NST) at BBSO

These ultrafine magnetic loops are ubiquitous on the Sun and rooted in convection intergranular lanes. By combining simultaneous observations from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) for the high temperature coronal plasma, they are identified as ultrafine channels of the outside flowing of high temperature material and energy. This finding is expected to resolve the long standing puzzle of "solar coronal heating".

What causes the anomalous heating of solar corona is an unresolved question, which along with dark matter and dark energy puzzles et al. is chosen as one of the eight most compelling mysteries of astronomy by journal Science. Resolving the puzzle of coronal heating is taken to be one of the main scientific objectives by almost all the most important international solar instruments, such as Hinode satellite launched in 2006 by Japan. It is also one of the important scientific objectives of SDO satellite launched in 2010 by NASA.

The finding fundamentally answers where on the photosphere the energy comes from to heat the corona. Possible physical process is as follows: the continuous convection motions of the photosphere granules concentrate magnetic fields to the place of intergranules, forming small scaled strong magnetic fields in intergranules. Then the dynamics of the strong intergranular magnetic fields produce the out flowing of high temperature material and energy.

NASA news release for this result:

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A Nb3Sn CICC superconducting test magnet was developed at High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CHMFL). This is the first Nb3Sn superconducting magnet self-developed in China. The testing experiments were carried out inside a background magnet producing 7.5 T central magnetic field. When test magnet is charged up to 16 KA current, its central field reached 12.1 T. Performances under several operation conditions were also tested, and the results accord with the prediction analyzed in advance. The good DC performance declared the design, material selection and manufacturing processes of the test magnet are successful.

Nb3Sn superconductors have several advantages, such as high critical temperature, high critical field and a current carrying capability of higher than 2000A/mm2 under the conditions of 12T&4.5K. It is a generally preferred superconducting wire in the world for manufacturing high field superconducting magnets.

This is the first high field superconducting magnet made from Nb3Sn CICC in China. The R&D of this test magnet is a critical step in manufacturing the outsert superconducting magnet for the 40 T hybrid magnet at CHMFL. The goal is to find and solve possible technical problems in manufacturing superconducting outsert, and verify the coil design. Finally, it will provide the key fabrication techniques and experiences needed for superconducting outsert manufacture.

This test magnet, which is China’s first Nb3Sn CICC typed magnet, was developed by the superconducting magnet group at CHMFL. During the R&D process, the group members have solved many technique problems, such as coil winding technique, insulating, heat treatment technique, etc. They have made many important technological innovations and breakthroughs. This work laid an important technique foundation for the R&D of high field hybrid magnets in China.

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Chemical sensor and device based on fluorescent materials have received more considerable attention in material science. Chemical fluorescent sensors have been developedin molecular and ionic recognition because of their fast response, high sensitivity and potential for real-time detection.

Under the supports of the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, researchers in the Key Laboratory of Photochemistry of Chinese Academy of Sciences have studied on the synthesis of fluorescent materials and the design of new functional devices over the years. They have achieved efficient detection of positive metal ions and fluoride anion with high sensitivity and selectivity by using a series of fluorescent molecules with special structures with the principles of fluorescent chemical sensing.

Usually, it was difficult to fabricate fluorescent chemical sensor over a wide range of temperature by using temperature-dependent fluorescent materials, because of the significant decrease in fluorescence efficiency with increasing temperature.

In this work, a triarylboron compound was designed and synthesized to be used as a fluorescent component for thermometer detection. This compound showed unique property in solution that the molecules maintained high luminescence quantum efficiency at higher temperature with apparent molecular conformation changing. Meanwhile, it exhibited different fluorescence color from green at low temperature to blue at high temperature. By sealing the fluorescent solution in a thin porous film, a large area of ​​temperature-sensitive material was fabricated to achieve high spatial resolution of tens of micrometers.

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