China Science & Technology Forum

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DNA analysis reveals distinct lineage of ancient panda in south China
Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 00:33:38|Editor: Chengcheng


WASHINGTON, June 18 (Xinhua) -- Chinese scientists have found an ancient panda, belonging to a distinct group not found today, separated from present-day pandas 144,000 to 227,000 years ago.

In a study published on Monday in the journal Current Biology, they analyzed ancient mitochondrial (mt) DNA isolated from a 22,000-year-old panda found in Cizhutuo Cave in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in south China, a place where no pandas live today and revealed a new lineage of giant panda.

The newly sequenced mitochondrial genome represents the oldest DNA evidence from pandas, according to the study.

"Using a single complete mtDNA sequence, we find a distinct mitochondrial lineage, suggesting that the Cizhutuo panda, while genetically more closely related to present-day pandas than other bears, has a deep, separate history from the common ancestor of present-day pandas," said Fu Qiaomei from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Little has been known about pandas' past, especially in regions outside of their current range in Shaanxi, Gansu and Sichuan provinces in China. Evidence suggested that pandas in the past were much more widespread, but it's been unclear how those pandas were related to pandas of today.

In the new study, the researchers used sophisticated methods to fish mitochondrial DNA from the ancient cave specimen. That's a particular challenge because the specimen comes from a subtropical environment, which makes preservation and recovery of DNA difficult.

The researchers successfully sequenced nearly 150,000 DNA fragments and aligned them to the giant panda mitochondrial genome reference sequence to recover the Cizhutuo panda's complete mitochondrial genome.

They then used the new genome along with mitochondrial genomes from 138 present-day bears and 32 ancient bears to construct a family tree.

Their analysis showed that the split between the Cizhutuo panda and the ancestor of present-day pandas went back about 183,000 years.

The Cizhutuo panda also possesses 18 mutations that would alter the structure of proteins across six mitochondrial genes.

The researchers said those amino acid changes may be related to the ancient panda's distinct habitat in Guangxi or perhaps climate differences during the Last Glacial Maximum.

The findings suggested that the ancient panda's maternal lineage had a long and unique history that differed from the maternal lineages leading to present-day panda populations.

According to the researchers, their success in capturing the mitochondrial genome also suggested that they might successfully isolate and analyze DNA from the ancient specimen's much more expansive nuclear genome.

"Comparing the Cizhutuo panda's nuclear DNA to present-day genome-wide data would allow a more thorough analysis of the evolutionary history of the Cizhutuo specimen, as well as its shared history with present-day pandas," Fu said.

 

[JSCh]

Viewpoint: Lost Photons Won’t Derail Quantum Sampling

Austin P. Lund, Centre for Quantum Computation and Communications Technology, School of Mathematics and Physics, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia
June 6, 2018• Physics 11, 57
​

A photon-based method for demonstrating the advantage of quantum over classical machines can handle photon loss, facilitating experiments.

A race is on to build a quantum computer that solves difficult problems much faster than a classical computer—a milestone dubbed quantum supremacy [1]. Runners in this race, however, are faced with a hazy finish line, which can move closer as quantum machines and algorithms improve or further away as their classical counterparts catch up. An experiment led by Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology in China [2] nudges the racers forward for now. Inspired by a theoretical proposal, the researchers confirmed that a promising method for demonstrating quantum supremacy, known as boson sampling with photons (Fig. 1), produces useful output even as photons leak from the system. This means that researchers don’t have to “toss away” the output of a sampling experiment when photons are lost, as was previously assumed [3], allowing for faster computations and bringing a demonstration of quantum supremacy closer to reality.

When will we have a useful quantum computer? To make the answer concrete, consider the most famous quantum-computing algorithm—factoring large prime numbers [4]. This task will likely require millions, and possibly billions, of quantum bits (qubits) and an even larger number of the devices, or “gates,” that manipulate the qubits. Since today’s most advanced quantum computers have around 50 qubits, a quantum computer that could quickly factor large numbers is probably a long way off.


--> Physics - Viewpoint: Lost Photons Won’t Derail Quantum Sampling

Toward Scalable Boson Sampling with Photon Loss
Hui Wang, Wei Li, Xiao Jiang, Y.-M. He, Y.-H. Li, X. Ding, M.-C. Chen, J. Qin, C.-Z. Peng, C. Schneider, M. Kamp, W.-J. Zhang, H. Li, L.-X. You, Z. Wang, J. P. Dowling, S. Höfling, Chao-Yang Lu, and Jian-Wei Pan
Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 230502 (2018)
Published June 6, 2018​

USTC Conducts the First Experiment on Boson Sampling with Photon Loss
[2018-06-21]

Professor PAN Jianwei and Professor LU Chaoyang of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) carry out an experiment on boson sampling with photon loss in collaboration with Researcher YOU Lixing’s group of Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology (SIMIT) of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The results show that boson sampling with a few photons lost can increase the sampling rate, which brings a demonstration of quantum supremacy closer to reality. This research is published in Physical Review Letters on June 6th as one of Editor’s Suggestions. The American Physical Society website Physics comments on the paper with a Viewpoint article entitled “Lost Photons Won’t Derail Quantum Sampling”.

A boson-sampling device with photons / Image from Physics​

Boson sampling with photons is considered as a strong candidate to demonstrate quantum computational supremacy. However, the unavoidable photon loss in the photonic experiments is a major obstacle to scaling up. PAN and colleagues’ work is the first to confirm experimentally that even as photons leak from the system, boson sampling with photons still produces useful output. This means that researchers don’t have to “toss away” the output of a sampling experiment when photons are lost, allowing for exponentially faster sampling rate. The experiment is based on a world-class single-photon source from a quantum-dot micropillar developed by the research team and high-performance superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPD) developed by SIMIT. This research suggests that our country is leading the charge internationally in the field of quantum computation and takes yet another step forward for the demonstration of quantum supremacy.

Experimental setup for lossy boson sampling / Image from Physical Review Letters​

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Chinese Academy of Science, the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality, the National Fundamental Research Program, the State of Bavaria, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.


References:
Toward scalable boson sampling with photon loss. Physical Review Letters120.23 (2018): 230502.
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.230502

Viewpoint: Lost Photons Won’t Derail Quantum Sampling
https://physics.aps.org/articles/v11/57

(Written by YANG Ziyi, Edited by WU Qiran, USTC News Center)


http://en.ustc.edu.cn/news/201806/t20180621_317753.html

 

[JSCh]

This ancient Chinese tomb held a royal, her extinct ape — and a warning
By Ben Guarino
June 21 at 2:00 PM

(Sam Turvey/ZSL)​

A long-forgotten species of ape has been found buried in a 2,300-year-old tomb. It's a type of gibbon, which scientists named Junzi imperialis. Gibbons are the smallest apes, chatty and as lanky-limbed as Kermit the Frog. They're also more closely related to humans than they are to any monkey.

And humans, the scientists say, are the likely agents of these gibbons' extinction.

Archaeologists excavated the burial site, in the ancient Chinese capital city of Chang’an, now part of modern Xi'an, in 2004. “I'm afraid we don't know much about the tomb,” said Helen Chatterjee, a biology professor at University College London and a co-author of the study, published in Science, that describes the gibbon. The tomb is about 2,300 or 2,200 years old, and is possibly the final resting place of Lady Xia, grandmother of the Qin dynasty's first emperor.

The tomb contained several dead exotic animals in 12 pits, including a leopard and a bear, befitting a member of the ancient Chinese elite. Among these remains, excavators found a small jawbone and skull with prominent canine teeth. The gibbon bones wound up in a museum drawer until Samuel Turvey, at the Zoological Society of London, plucked them out of obscurity.

“It's just luck that Sam found this specimen and immediately suspected it was a gibbon,” Chatterjee said.

Turvey scanned the gibbon bones and sent the images to Chatterjee. With their students, the scientists began to pick apart the gibbon's features. Their analysis “revealed it to be significantly different from living gibbons,” Chatterjee said.

Junzi imperialis had a steeper forehead than other gibbons, narrower cheekbones and more slender brow ridges, said Alejandra Ortiz, an anthropologist at Arizona State University and a co-author of the report. Its molars were unusually sized, too.

All of these features combined, the authors say, make a strong case that the gibbon is not just a new species but a new genus. (A genus, you'll recall, ranks above a species — it's the Homo in Homo sapiens.) Living gibbons are split into 20 species over four genera.

“There’s good reason to believe this represents a new species of gibbon,” said anthropologist Paul Garber, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois who has studied gibbons in China and was not involved with this report. Whether it's a new genus is tough to say, he said, based on one specimen.

What's more critical, in Garber's mind, is the gibbon's extinction.

In China, wild gibbons stick to the dense forest canopies of the southwest. One species, the Hainan gibbon, lives at the nation's southernmost point; there are only 30 of these apes left, making them one of the rarest mammals alive. The Chang’an tomb, in the central province of Shaanxi, is 750 miles from the nearest known gibbon habitat. Shaanxi is mountainous, Garber said, and though macaques and snub-nosed monkeys live there, no gibbons do.

It's possible, Ortiz said, that “Lady Xia’s gibbon was transported to Chang’an as a trade item or tribute.” (Ortiz pointed to old Chinese texts referring to the animals as “elegant” and symbols of “gentlemen.”) But the study's authors say Junzi imperialis could have been a local. Except for the gibbon, the other mammals found in the tomb still occur in Shaanxi.

“Gibbons had much wider ranges in the past,” Chatterjee said. “It is unlikely specimens such as Junzi would have traveled this far just by humans.” Chatterjee and her colleagues suspect there are more Junzi bones in the area, waiting to be found. “We are keen to find them.”

The scientists cannot say with certainty that humans wiped the gibbons off the planet. They just think it's the most likely hypothesis. (The current study of this species, after all, depended on its cultural value to long-dead humans.) And although we might think of ecological loss as a modern problem, ancient Chang’an had a dense human population. "We have been a threat for quite a while," Ortiz said.

“Probably more than any country in the world, China has transformed its landscape,” Garber said. Two thousand years ago, the Han dynasty had an estimated population of 60 million people, a quarter of the world's total.

Primate habitats shrank dramatically in China over the past two millennia. In September, Garber published a paper based on historical records of snub-nosed monkeys, taken from texts as old as 1 A.D. As the population of China boomed from the 1700s onward, references to snub-nosed monkeys in eastern and central China vanished completely.

Gibbons, who consume mostly fruits, are especially ill-equipped for shrinking forests. Because they rarely descend from the canopy, when forests splinter, the apes remain boxed in. Their ability to cross open gaps to between habitats, Ortiz said, is "extremely limited."

“The Junzi find is a sobering lesson in the devastating effects that humans can have on the natural world,” Chatterjee said. “Nature cannot keep up.”

The primate vanishing act has not stopped with Junzi. “Unless things dramatically change over the next 25 to 75 years, there will be a major primate extinction crisis,” Garber said. “Worldwide, 60 percent of primates are threatened, endangered or critically endangered.”

China still has the opportunity to enact better policies that protect living primates, he said. But that window won't stay open forever.


This ancient Chinese tomb held a royal, her extinct ape — and a warning - The Washington Post

 

[JSCh]

China sets new record in deep-well drilling
By Zhou Huiying in Anda, Heilongjiang | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2018-05-26 19:53

China completed the drilling of deepest well in Asia and the first one in the world that goes through continental stratum of the cretaceous period on March 26, 2018. [Photo by Gu Landing/for chinadaily.com.cn]

China on Saturday completed the drilling of deepest well in Asia and the first one in the world that goes through continental stratum of the cretaceous period.

The project, called Songke 2, was launched in April 13, 2014, in Anda, Heilongjiang province, by the China Geological Survey and undertaken by about 20 organizations, including the Institute of Exploration Technology, SinoProbe Center, China University of Geosciences, Jilin University and Petrol China Daqing Oilfield Company Ltd.

After four years, the team finished drilling the 7,018-meter-deep well.

"On behalf of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP), I would like to congratulate you on the project achieved at the unprecedented depth and with great success," said Ulrich Harms, head of Operational Support Group of ICDP. "These technical achievements are outstanding and will have a long-term impact on the role partnership between industry and science played in scientific drilling in China and in the world. And it will have an impact on the scientists involved."

Researchers planning drill rig capable of boring 15 km hole
By Zhou Huiying in Harbin and Han Junhong in Changchun | China Daily | Updated: 2018-06-21 09:54

Technicians closely observe operations of the record-breaking Crust 1, one of China's most-advanced onshore drilling rigs. Provided To China Daily

Researchers plan to develop a drilling rig capable of boring a hole 15,000 meters deep, following up on the success of a domestically developed rig that reached 7,018 meters last month.

The development of the new rig will be based on knowledge gained from the Crust-1 10K ultradeep scientific rig, currently the best China has developed, said Sun Youhong, vice-president of Jilin University and the research and development director of the deep continental scientific drilling equipment program.

Crust-1, which was designed to bore 10,000 meters into the earth, showed its capability in Anda, Heilongjiang province, on May 26, when it penetrated the Cretaceous continental strata and drilled the deepest borehole for scientific purposes completed by an Asian country.

Sun said some daunting problems await researchers - high temperatures, high pressures and high stress in the earth's crust - that will become more serious as drilling depth increases.

For example, temperatures will reach 400 C at a depth of 13,000 meters, while they are about 175 C at 7,000 meters, he said. Higher stress in the crust means some of the rocks are more likely to crack and result in drilling mishaps.

Such problems are cutting-edge, and there is no mature technology and experience that can be used for reference, he said.

A deep borehole drilled by the future rig could be used as "a permanent underground observation station", he said.

Equipment at such a station could enable scientists to make "dynamic observations" of the earth, instead of the current static ones, and "greatly improve our ability to warn of major natural disasters early", he said.

Zhao Yan, a researcher on the Jilin University team, said that an initial design has been completed and awaits approval.

Zhao said they are also considering possible sites to drill a 13,000-meter borehole. Nine candidate sites include volcanic areas of Changbai Mountain and Tarim Basin in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, which has huge potential as a source of oil and natural gas.

Last month's successful Songke 2 project, which drilled to a depth of 7,018 meters, made China the third country to develop a rig capable of hitting 10,000-meters, after Germany and Russia.

Research into Crust-1, which started in April 2009, is being led by Jilin University in cooperation with several other institutes, including two under the China Geological Survey and China University of Geosciences.

The researchers at Jilin University also overcame some of the challenges of working in extreme cold weather and taking rock samples from a complex environment.

"All these achievements have fully shown the capability of China in independent research and the development of deep-drilling rigs," Sun said.

The Songke 2 project is located in the Songliao Basin, one of the largest continental sedimentary basins in the world, which holds China's most important reserves of oil and natural gas.

"The success of the project will provide key technologies and equipment for exploration and experimental research deep within the earth," said Cheng Qiuming, secretary-general of the International Union of Geological Sciences. "It will also open a new space for clean-energy prospecting in the basin."

 

[JSCh]

PUBLIC RELEASE: 22-JUN-2018
Self-assembled energetic coordination polymers based on multidentate pentazole cyclo-N5-
SCIENCE CHINA PRESS

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The scheme of assembling CP 1 and CP 2. ©Science China Press​

Pentazole anion cyclo-N5- is an attractive five-membered ring comprised of only nitrogen atoms. After being recently first synthesized, it is found that the cyclo-N5- anion shows good adaptability to take part in ionic, coordination, and hydrogen bonding interactions and therefor is a possibility to form different types of derivatives.

Ming Lu and co-workers, from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, developed two new energetic coordination polymers based on multidentate pentazole cyclo-N5-, recently published in Science China Materials, 2018, doi: 10.1007/s40843-018-9268-0.

Lu's group was devoted to the development for high energy density materials including polynitrogen and nitrogen-rich compounds for a long time. He said "The cyclo-N5-, as a polynitrogen structure, is high-energy specie that, if properly assembled with other ions, is likely to develop into a new generation of energetic materials, breaking through the energy limits of current energetic materials. "

At present, their group has realized the synthesis of metal-N5? complexes, but the introduction of organic cations or molecules and the formation of organic salts with the assembly of N5- ions have not yet been achieved.

"Although metal-N5- compounds contain energy and can explode in certain condition, the overall energy level of them is always very low. It is necessary to introduce energetic organic ions to increase the energetic performance", he says, "At the same time, the design ability and different physicochemical properties of organic cations provides a possibility to develop other new substances such as coordination polymers."

Coordination to form polymer is emerging as a new technology for modifying or enhancing the properties of the existed energetic substances in energetic materials area. "However, compared with metal ions, organic ions often have weaker coordination ability." he says, "It is still challenging to introduce organic ions to coordinate with N5- by ion exchange."

To achieve the purpose of organic ions instead of metal ions, the strategy for using metal ions with weak coordination effect is a good choose. Lu emphasized "It is essential to the crystal growth and ion/ligand exchange processes of coordination polymer."

Prof. Lu, as the leader of the research group, tells us "Previous experience motivates us to employ sodium salt as precursor because we have prepared more than 5 kinds of metal salts from it." By self-assembling, anhydrous coordination polymers

(NaN5)5[(CH6N3)N5](N5)3- (CP 1) and (NaN5)2(C2H4N4) (CP 2) have been synthesized.

Lu says, "Experimentally, we used methanol solution containing sodium pentazole salt and guanidine or amino-triazole. Colorless crystals can be obtained by maintaining the solutions in air at room temperature naturally for several days, with more than 80% yield."

He adds "The evaporation rate of the solvent is more critical because the coordination capacity is relatively weak. If solvent evaporates too quickly, it is very likely that the coordination polymer will not be formed. Only mixed salts can be obtained."

The DSC curves for both CPs show that their decomposing temperatures are at 118.4 and 126.5°C, respectively. He highlights "These values are 7.4 and 15.5°C higher than precursor sodium pentazole salt."

"This observation indicates that coordination and hydrogen bonding interactions are beneficial for stabilizing the N5 ring." Zhang adds.

Detonation heat, detonation velocity and detonation pressure are key parameters of energetic materials. The calculated nitrogen content (>66%) and heat of formation (>800 kJ mol-1) of the two CPs are significantly higher than those of traditional energetic materials (TNT, RDX and HMX).

The detonation heat of CP 2 (1.65 kcal g-1) is higher than that of TNT, RDX, HMX and CL-20 (about 1.5 kcal g-1). Detonation and detonation pressures (7,863 m s-1, 26.44 GPa) are higher than TNT.

"If we can improve the density of organic salts, it is very promising to reach level of HMX and CL-20." Lu said. "The detonation performance of CP 1 is poor, which is attributed to the low density caused by its porous structure" he added, "From another point of view; this porous structure can load other small molecules to enhance the energy performance."

"Two breakthroughs, removing coordinated water and combining with organic ligands, are achieved here. It makes pentazole derivative a step closer to energetic materials." Lu concluded.

###​

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (11702141, 21771108 and U1530101).

See the article: Peng-Cheng Wang, Yuan-Gang Xu, Qian Wang, Yan-Li Shao, Qiu-Han Lin and Ming Lu. "Self-assembled energetic coordination polymers based on multidentate pentazole cyclo-N5-" Sci. China Mater. 2018, doi: 10.1007/s40843-018-9268-0.

http://engine.scichina.com/publisher/scp/journal/SCMs/doi/10.1007/s40843-018-9268-0?slug=full text

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40843-018-9268-0​

Self-assembled energetic coordination polymers based on multidentate pentazole cyclo-N5- | EurekAlert! Science News

 

[JSCh]

Water droplets cannot soak into a bed of cotton topped by a coating composed partially of eggshells. Credit: J. He et al./Adv. Eng. Mater.

20 JUNE 2018
An eggshell mixture that sheds water and shrugs off punishment
A layer of this eco-friendly substance could prevent corrosion and ice build-up.

Researchers have used eggshells to create a waterproof material that can withstand radiation, corrosive liquids and other abuse.

Eggshells are inexpensive, readily available and eco-friendly, unlike the ingredients of many previously developed water-repellent materials. Jinmei He, Mengnan Qu and their colleagues at Xi’an University of Science and Technology in China obtained eggs from local supermarkets, ground up the shells and mixed them with stearic acid. By combining the mixture with zinc oxide particles, the researchers created a solid substance that sheds water even after exposure to harsh treatment, such as ultraviolet irradiation and prolonged scraping by sandpaper.

The group’s invention can be used as a coating to keep surfaces clean and prevent corrosion and ice build-up. Although water does not penetrate the material, oil does. That could make the material useful in filters for treating oily wastewater.

Adv. Eng. Mater. (2018)​

An eggshell mixture that sheds water and shrugs off punishment : Research Highlights | Nature

 

[JSCh]

Novel Method Using Deep Neural Network to Locate Source in Shallow Water
Jun 21, 2018

Source localization in a shallow water environment has captured considerable attention from researchers in the past several decades. Numerous approaches to range-depth estimation have been reported for the low-frequency broadband signal. However, there are few methods for source localization based on deep neural network (DNN).

Aiming to reduce dependence on environmental information, researchers from the Institute of Acoustics(IOA) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences applied DNNs and proposed a novel method to source localization in shallow water. Their findings were published online in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Researchers proposed two DNN-based methods forming this brand-new broadband source localization method.

The first one adopts the two-stage scheme, including feature extraction and DNN analysis. The eigenvectors corresponding to the modal signal space are taken as the input feature of neural network. Then, the time delay neural network (TDNN) is trained to estimate the range and depth of sound source.

The second method adopts a convolutional neural network-feed-forward neural network (CNN-FNN) architecture to learn the mapping relationship directly from waveforms.

The CNNs are operated as the time domain convolution filters to extract the spatial information of sound source from the raw multi-channel signals, because the signals radiated from different directions may result in different intensity differences and phase differences among the sensors. The location representation extracted by CNNs is collected by the following FNN layers.

Researchers evaluated the method under both the simulated and real environments. Experimental results showed that the proposed method achieved a better accuracy than conventional matched field processing (MFP), and boosted DNN to be available for practical applications where the experimental data collection is usually costly.

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Innovation Foundation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Source ranging using the experimental data: (a) result of the feature-based method and; (b) result of MFP. (Image by IOA)



Novel Method Using Deep Neural Network to Locate Source in Shallow Water---Chinese Academy of Sciences

 

[JSCh]

New carbon could signal step-change for the world’s most popular batteries
23 June 2018 09:23

Batteries in electric vehicles are one possible application for OSPC-1

Scientists have created a new type of carbon that could make the batteries in our phones, tablet computers and laptops safer, more powerful, quicker to charge and longer lasting.

An international team of researchers, led by Lancaster University and Jilin University in China, have announced the first organically synthesised porous carbon, called OSPC-1, in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

This new carbon shows exceptional potential as a material for anodes within lithium-ion batteries – the type of batteries that power millions of devices such as mobile phones, laptops, power tools, as well as being used in larger complex situations, such as space satellites, commercial airplanes and electric cars.

The industry standard material used for anodes within lithium-ion batteries is a form of carbon called graphite. The scientists compared the performance of OSPC-1 against graphite and discovered that OSPC-1 is able to store more than twice as many lithium ions, and therefore power, as graphite at the same mid-range speed of charging.

In addition, OSPC-1 is able to store lithium ions at more than double the rate as graphite – meaning charging speeds can be twice as fast. Discharge speeds can also be vastly improved with OSPC-1, which means it can also be used to power more energy-hungry applications.

Uniquely, OSPC-1 has been created at the molecular level using a complex technique called ‘Eglinton homocoupling’. This involves removing silicon from carbon-silicon groups to produce carbon to carbon links. The resulting structure is amorphous, very stable, and, crucially, highly conductive.

Another major advantage of OSPC-1 is its safety. It does not form dendrites. These are lithium metal fibres that can form when lithium gets stuck on the surface of graphite. If the dendrites build up and reach across to the cathode they can short circuit lithium-ion batteries and cause them to explode into flames.

OSPC-1 also appears to be much more longer-lasting than graphite. The team of scientists tested it over 100 charging and discharging cycles and there were no signs of deterioration. Graphite expands and contracts each time it is charged and discharged, which makes it susceptible to cracking. The open-framework structure of OSPC-1 means it is less brittle and not as prone to these weaknesses.

However, graphite is the industry standard because it is very cheap to produce and easily obtainable. The researchers acknowledge that OSPC-1 would be more costly to produce, at least initially. Therefore, the researchers believe the most likely early applications would be for situations where safety is the paramount consideration – such as within space satellites and aircraft.

Dr Abbie Trewin, from Lancaster University's Department of Chemistry and Materials Science Institute, and co-lead author of the study, said: “Our team has used an entirely new method to produce the only porous carbon designed at the molecular level.

“This new material, OSPC-1, is a highly promising anode material for lithium-ion batteries with a high lithium capacity, an impressive charge and discharge rate capability, potential for a long lifespan, and for significantly improved safety performance.

“We believe OSPC-1 has great potential in those situations where failure could lead to loss of life, or the loss of very expensive equipment in the case of satellites.”

The method used by the team of researchers has potential to be extended to other 3D carbon materials, and could see the creation of a new family of porous carbon materials, which could see benefits for energy storage, electronic devices, catalysis, gas storage, and gas separation technologies.

The findings are reported in the paper 'A 3-D Organically Synthesized Porous Carbon'.

The research benefitted from funding from the Royal Society, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in the UK, the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

The researchers are Abbie Trewin, Colin Lambert, Pierre Fayon, Patrick Heasman, Michael Jay and Steven Bailey from Lancaster University; Teng Ben, Ziqiang Zhao, Saikat Das, Guolong Xing and Shlun Qiu of Jilin University; Hiroki Yamada and Toru Wakihara from the University of Tokyo; and Valentin Valtchev of the Universite de Caen-ENSICAEN-CNRS.


New carbon could signal step-change for the world’s most popular batteries | Lancaster University

 

[JSCh]

Inventing the future in Chinese labs: How does China do science today?
June 28, 2018 8.38pm AEST

Author

Richard P. Suttmeier
Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Oregon​

Genetic engineering, the search for dark matter, quantum computing and communications, artificial intelligence, brain science – the list of potentially disruptive research goes on. Each has significant implications for future industries, defense technologies and ethical understandings of what it means to be human.

And, increasingly, the notable achievements in these fields are coming not from the great centers of science in the West, but Beijing, Shanghai, Hefei, Shenzhen and a number of other Chinese cities that make up China’s extensive research system. Inevitably, the question arises: How much of the future is being invented in Chinese labs?

The current trade negotiations between China and United States have brought China’s rapidly developing technological capabilities into clearer focus. As China aims to achieve leadership in emerging key technologies, the U.S. is quick to attribute much of Chinese progress to the theft of American intellectual property and forced technology transfers. But, as someone who has followed China’s scientific development for years, I’ve seen dramatic improvements in China’s own innovative capacity, along with the science base needed for success in the knowledge-intensive industries it seeks to master.

In its quest for scientific achievement, China’s research and development spending has grown rapidly over the past two decades. It’s now second only to the United States. China has become a leading contributor to the world’s science and engineering literatures, with Chinese papers in selected fields attracting an increasing number of citations.

Generous government science budgets have allowed China to build world-class facilities in a number of fields. And China is home to one of the world’s largest research communities, now enriched by high-quality domestic university programs as well as scientists returning from abroad with advanced degrees from the world’s leading universities.

But how is the enterprise of science in China organized? Who sets the priorities? And are its mechanisms of governance suitable for sustained progress?

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The world’s largest radio telescope – named FAST – was built in Guizhou province under the auspices of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Reuters/China Daily CDIC

Chinese science, by sector
In contrast to the U.S., where basic research is concentrated in universities, where there are strong traditions of corporate R&D and where research in government labs supports the missions of government agencies, the institutional arrangements for science in China reflect a different design.

Though each has been extensively reformed, Chinese science today is still largely conducted in five institutional sectors. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), a legacy institution from the 1950s, oversees some 120 institutes – including China’s “big science” facilities – and three institutions of higher education. Following a series of reforms over the past two decades, scientists in many of its labs now engage in world-class research across a range of disciplines, including quantum physics, mathematics and neuroscience.

Universities comprise the second institutional system, with the top schools competing with CAS for talent and prestige. University-based research was not emphasized in the pre-reform era. But over the past two decades, China’s top universities have emerged as important centers of basic and applied research, while also promoting a culture supportive of high-tech entrepreneurship.

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2017 visitors to the annual China Beijing International High-Tech Expo, a showcase for Chinese domestic technology companies and innovation. AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein

China’s industrial enterprises constitute the third institutional sector. Two of the most significant changes over the past two decades have been the growth of company-based R&D, especially in information and communications technology fields, and the emergence of non-state-owned, market-oriented high tech firms. R&D expenditures in the enterprise sector now amounts to roughly 80 percent of the nation’s total.

Government research institutes under civilian ministries – such as those for agriculture, public health, environmental protection, natural resources and so on – constitute a fourth system.

Finally, research and development in support of the military constitutes a fifth sector, one which remains largely opaque. In cooperation with civilian sectors, and guided by civil-military integration policies, it’s producing increasingly sophisticated national defense systems.

In the last few years, the Chinese government has introduced policies to encourage collaborative research across these sectors. In particular, China has established national laboratories and other major new national research centers, inspired by the national lab experience in the U.S. and other countries. These new institutions – cross-disciplinary and problem-focused by design – are engaged in world-class research of international interest. For example, the University of Science and Technology in Hefei is home to a leading facility for quantum physics and quantum information.

The government has also sponsored the establishment of major government-owned national research centers within leading Chinese companies. For instance, iFlytek, a leader in voice recognition technologies, hosts one on human-machine interactions. China National Offshore Oil Corporation hosts another on natural gas hydrates.

Encouraging policy from the top

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Chinese President Xi Jinping, left, and Premier Li Keqiang have thrown the government’s support behind the country’s research efforts. AP Photo/Ng Han Guan

In contrast to the current U.S. administration, which has yet to define a clear policy for science and technology, China’s quest for global scientific leadership is driven by its top political leaderswho see China’s future wealth and power being derived from its research and innovation capabilities.

Chinese science policy, as a result, is characterized by a strong emphasis on national needs as defined by a top-down design process. At the national government level, funding for research has become more centralized. It’s now channeled through national programs, or “platforms,” administered by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST). These do permit “bottom-up” investigator-initiated proposals, and efforts are being made to strengthen professional reviews and assessments of research projects. Nevertheless, the funding system is still characterized by strong state direction.

The themes of national science policy are also found in the initiatives of local governments, many of which have become major funders of R&D and partners in building the country’s new research facilities.

The emphasis on national needs had, until recently, biased the nation’s research away from basic science. Chinese policymakers, however, have come to realize that leadership in science-based industries requires basic research conducted at international frontier levels. As a result, financial support for basic research is increasing.

But, a controversial administrative reorganization in March of this year changed the status of China’s key agency for supporting basic science, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). No longer an independent agency under China’s State Council, NSFC is now an entity under the broad administrative direction of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

The NSFC had been seen as a pioneer in promoting a culture of basic science through the support of original investigator-driven, peer-reviewed research. Members of the scientific community now fear that NSFC operations will succumb to the more applications-oriented, bureaucratic procedures of its new home ministry.

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Chinese researchers announced they’d cloned primates in early 2018, a step other countries had held off on taking. AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein

Socialist science
China’s aspirations for scientific distinction, and its aggressive science policy in support of those aspirations, is occurring in a political environment that’s quite different from that of other countries with strong traditions of science.

The differences have come into sharper focus under the leadership of President and Party Chairman Xi Jinping. While Xi has redoubled political support for science, he has also altered the political climate by insisting on more demanding ideological commitments from the academic community to his own worldview, by strengthening the role of the Communist Party in research institutions and universities and by harnessing China’s technological progress to the development of a surveillance state, leaving little room for privacy and dissent.

Combined with China’s long tradition of bureaucratic rule, these initiatives set the models of science-state relations, and Chinese scientific development more generally, apart. Other leading nations in science have political systems based on law and the protection of human rights, on free and open communications and on civil society traditions, which permit the autonomous operation of professional societies.

The Chinese model, arguably, has been quite successful in producing rapid development over the past 30 years of scientific and technological “catch-up.” China has certainly caught up in selected fields and, in some, is advancing the frontier. But, whether this model of science-state relations is suitable, over time, for the kinds of original innovation and creative scientific breakthroughs envisioned by the leadership – and for managing the complex ethical issues arising from new technologies – are among the more intriguing questions about China’s future.



Inventing the future in Chinese labs: How does China do science today? | theconversation.com

 

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PUBLIC RELEASE: 29-JUN-2018
Surrey makes breakthrough in perovskite solar cell technology
UNIVERSITY OF SURREY

The University of Surrey has helped to create a technique that has produced the highest performing inverted perovskite solar cell ever recorded.

Perovskite based cells are widely viewed as the next generation of solar cells, offering similar power conversion efficiency (PCE) performance, but at a much lower cost than the market dominant crystalline silicon based solar cells.

In a study published by Science, a team of researchers from Peking University and the Universities of Surrey, Oxford and Cambridge detail a new way to reduce an unwanted process called non-radiative recombination, where energy and efficiency is lost in perovskite solar cells.

The team created a technique called Solution-Process Secondary growth (SSG) which increased the voltage of inverted perovskite solar cells by 100 millivolts, reaching a high of 1.21 volts without compromising the quality of the solar cell or the electrical current flowing through a device. They tested the technique on a device which recorded a PCE of 20.9 per cent, the highest certified PCE for inverted perovskite solar cells ever recorded.

?Dr Wei Zhang from the University of Surrey's Advanced Technology Institute, said: "The need for clean and sustainable energy that helps us to stop damaging our planet is what drives us at the Advanced Technology Institute. Our new technique confirms that there is a lot of promise with perovskite solar cells and we aim to explore this new and exciting area more in the future."

Professor Ravi Silva, Director of the Advanced Technology Institute at the University of Surrey, said: "It is pleasing to see the Advanced Technology Institute join in this global project that could provide a solution to the need for a truly sustainable, cheap and clean energy resource. This was a monumental effort from leading laboratories, researchers and institutions from across the world, all working together for the common good."



Surrey makes breakthrough in perovskite solar cell technology | EurekAlert! Science News

Deying Luo, Wenqiang Yang, Zhiping Wang, Aditya Sadhanala, Qin Hu, Rui Su, Ravichandran Shivanna, Gustavo F. Trindade, John F. Watts, Zhaojian Xu, Tanghao Liu, Ke Chen, Fengjun Ye, Pan Wu, Lichen Zhao, Jiang Wu, Yongguang Tu, Yifei Zhang, Xiaoyu Yang, Wei Zhang, Richard H. Friend, Qihuang Gong, Henry J. Snaith, Rui Zhu. Enhanced photovoltage for inverted planar heterojunction perovskite solar cells. Science, 2018; 360 (6396): 1442 DOI: 10.1126/science.aap9282​

 

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Origin Quantum Company and LQCC have successfully simulated a 64-qubit circuit

SCIENCE CHINA PRESS

IMAGE: PLOTS OF THE LOG-TRANSFORMED MEASUREMENT OUTCOME PROBABILITIES OF 42-, 56- AND 64-QUBIT SIMULATION. view more

CREDIT: ©SCIENCE CHINA PRESS

The quantum computer is a device that bases on the principles of quantum mechanics. Compared with classical bits, qubits can be at the superposition between "0" and "1", so the quantum computer which is composed of qubits can calculate and store more data. Adding additional qubits can exponentially increase the computational capabilities of quantum computers, and the computational capabilities of quantum computers may soon surpass state-of-the-art supercomputers for certain tasks.

The last few years have seen a series of significant advances in quantum computing, in particular regarding superconducting quantum chips with reports of devices of 20 and 50 qubits with good fidelity. In the meantime, great progress has also been made with semiconductor quantum chips. "Quantum supremacy" claims that the limit of classical computers would be transcended if a device of 50 qubits were made. Direct simulations of 50 qubits take about 16-PB of RAM to store the full vectors. Google and IBM teams have proposed some efficient methods for simulating the low-depth circuit which raised this limit to 56 qubits (e.g., deferral of entanglement gates and Feynman path method).

Origin Quantum Company cooperating with the team of Prof. Guang-Can Guo presented a scheme of simulation based on transforming two-qubit gates, achieving a 64-qubit simulation of a universal random circuit of depth 22 using a 128-node cluster, and 56- and 42-qubit circuits on a single PC. In particular, by transforming several control-Z (CZ) gates to measurement and single-qubit gates, the circuit is mapped onto an additional 2n sub-circuits. These sub-circuits are formed by two blocks without any qubit entanglement between them, thereby converting an N qubit simulation problem into a group of N/2 The results of all the sub-circuits are then added together to reconstruct the final state. They also estimated that a 72-qubit circuit of depth 23 can be simulated in about 16 hours on a supercomputer identical to that used by the IBM team.

Their work enables simulating more qubits with less hardware burden and provides a new perspective for classical simulations. It only needs a single PC with GTX-1080Ti to calculate 42- and 56-qubit circuits. A 64-qubit circuit was simulated with a 128-node computer cluster, but the hardware resources they used have been greatly reduced compared with other methods.

Due to the complexity growing exponentially with qubit number and depth, the simulation of more than 50 qubits will always have an upper bound in depth. Nevertheless, the simulation of more qubits system with small depth still plays an important role for the study of quantum algorithms such as QFT and unsupervised machine learning. Moreover, the partitioning scheme could be combined with other simulation methods (e.g., Feynman path integral), to further reduce the complexity. These improvements may help to realize the simulation of many other quantum algorithms.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-06/scp-oqc062218.php

https://phys.org/news/2018-06-successfully-simulate-qubit-circuit.html

 

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Chinese Firm Secures World’s First Graphene Product Certificate
DOU SHICONG
DATE: MON, 07/02/2018 - 11:46 / SOURCE:YICAI

Chinese Firm Secures World’s First Graphene Product Certificate​

(Yicai Global) July 2 -- Chinese firm LeaderNano Tech has been granted the world’s first product certificate for cutting-edge graphene technology at an event at the Graphene 2018 show in Dresden, Germany.

The International Graphene Products Certification Center, which was jointly set up by a Chinese graphene industry body and European institution Phantoms Foundation in early 2018, granted the certificate to the Shandong-based firm, state-backed Xinhua News Agency reported.

Graphene, made from carbon just one-atom thick, is the strongest material in the world. It is completely flexible, while also more conductive than copper, and could herald a new era in the development of new materials.

Phantoms Foundation invited over 700 top graphene experts, scholars and enterprises from 49 countries and regions worldwide to the event. Liu Zhongfan, an academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences received the certificate on behalf of LeaderNano Tech.

IGCC aims for the certificates to provide buyers with reliable approaches to choosing quality graphene products, while also regulating the overall industry.

Founded in 2011, LeaderNano Tech mainly deals in the industrialized development, production and application of graphene and relevant carbon nanomaterials. The firm is able to produce 100 tons of graphene powder, 200 tons of energy materials, 30,000 tons of polymer composites, and 48,000 tons of functional coating each year.

 

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New platforms to turn science into goods: report
Xinhua | Updated: 2018-06-29 13:39

The stand of Zhongguancun Science Park at the Fifth China Beijing International Fair for Trade in Services, or CIFTIS, on May 31. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

BEIJING - The administrative committee of Zhongguancun science park plans to offer money and workspace for enterprises to operate 10 platforms with an aim to commercialize scientific research findings, Friday's China Daily reported.

A string of measures have been published by the committee and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) to help add technology to products, as part of an effort to make Beijing a center of innovation.

Zhao Huijun, deputy director of the committee, said that Zhongguancun will build these commercialization platforms by providing subsidies for talent, hardware facilities and workspace this year.

"The platforms will hire professionals to assess the scientific findings, apply for patents and conduct market research," Zhao was cited as saying by the report.

The Beijing government and Zhongguancun, known as Beijing's Silicon Valley, have been supporting startups and high-tech research organizations through preferential policies.

"I feel very grateful to everyone involved," said Chen Tianshi from the CAS Institute of Computing Technology. "Thanks to their help, our technology and findings didn't stay on paper but were put into products."

Chen is also CEO of Cambricon Technologies Corp, a startup on artificial intelligence and AI chips.

He said that his company started research and development on AI chips two years ago. Now their products are inserted into millions of mobile phones.

"I'm glad we used the technology to serve the public," he added.

By the end of this year, the CAS and Zhongguancun will set up a database for scientific research results, which will be used for further selection and commercialization.

 

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NEWS | 02 JULY 2018
Gigantic study of Chinese babies yields slew of health data
Early results from birth-cohort have public-health implications, as other groups use the data to investigate the microbiome and mental health.

About 33,000 Chinese babies have been recruited for a major birth-cohort study.Credit: Liu Junxi/Xinhua/ZUMA Wire

An ambitious Chinese study tracking tens of thousands of babies and their mothers has begun to bear fruit — just six years after the study’s leaders recruited their first sets of mothers and babies.

Researchers have already published results based on the cohort study, which collects biological, environmental and social data, some with important public-health implications. And many more investigations are under way. One, in particular, will examine infants’ microbiomes, the collections of bacteria and other microorganisms that inhabit their bodies — a hot topic in health research and a key goal of the cohort study.

The Born in Guangzhou Cohort Study has recruited about 33,000 babies and their mothers since 20121. The study’s leaders are hoping to reach 50,000 baby–mother sets by 2020. And this year, investigators started recruiting 5,000 maternal grandmothers to the project, enabling studies across multiple generations.

“The data is vast, and there is space for many different groups globally to mine this information,” says Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, a microbiologist at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in New Brunswick, who is not involved in the study. “I really admire this effort from the Chinese team. Very few countries can achieve this scale.”

Ezra Susser, an epidemiologist from Columbia University in New York City, says the cohort is also important because it is tracking mothers and babies during a period of rapid economic development and social change in China, where previous studies of this type have been limited in scale.

The Guangzhou project aims to set itself apart from previous large birth cohort studies in Norway and Denmark by enabling detailed investigations of the links between the microbiome and disease. Two other large birth-cohort studies, in the United States and United Kingdom, had planned to include microbiome data, but both were cancelled because of trouble recruiting participants. The US study also struggled with excessive costs and management issues.

The Chinese team has so far avoided similar problems. Its rich collection of 1.6 million biological samples includes specimens of stools, blood, placental tissue and umbilical cords. Extensive surveys also record participants’ eating habits, mental health, and other lifestyle factors, such as the amount of mould in their house.

The cohort’s leaders recruit babies born at the Guangzhou Women and Children’s Medical Center. Only families planning to live in the southern Chinese city for a long time have been recruited, says Xia Huimin, a surgeon at the centre and one of the project’s co-founders. That’s because it is hoped that children will remain in the study from the time they are babies until they are 18 years old.

First results

Researchers are already publishing results. Incense burning is common in southern China, and one study found that exposure to the resulting fumes increases the risk of hypertension in expectant mothers2.

Another study found that progesterone, a drug used around the world to reduce the risk of a preterm birth, was prescribed too early in pregnancy in more than 40% of women studied3. The researchers found that giving women the drug before 14 weeks of gestation did not reduce their chances of a preterm birth, but put them at higher risk of needing a caesarean section and developing post-partum depression. The authors consider the findings “an urgent public-health concern”.

Current investigations

Other studies are in progress. A team from the University of Birmingham in the UK and BGI, one of China's largest genome-sequencing institutes, in Shenzhen, is trying to characterize how the microbiomes of babies born via the vagina — who are exposed to their mothers’ microbes on their journey down the birth canal — differ from those of infants born by caesarean section. Although similar smaller studies have been done before, Dominguez-Bello says the Guangzhou cohort will offer statistical power to separate out other variables that could influence an infant’s microbiome. These include pre- and postnatal medications, including antibiotics, and environmental pollutants.

Xiu Qiu, an epidemiologist at Guangzhou Women and Children's Medical Center and the director of the Guangzhou project, is using the cohort data to test her surprising, but tentative, finding that older mothers having a second child have a lower risk of depression during pregnancy than do women pregnant with their first child3. She had expected the opposite to be true because women who already have a baby when they are pregnant would be under more stress and face a higher financial burden, and so would be more depressed. The end of China’s one-child policy in 2016 means the birth-cohort study offers a fresh opportunity to study the mental health of an increasing number of women, many of them older, who are having a second child, she says.

Sing Sing Way, a paediatrician at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in Ohio, meanwhile, will be looking at the data provided by the addition of grandmothers to the study to understand why cells from mothers can live on indefinitely in their offspring. Studies in mice suggest that these cells play a protective role when the offspring are pregnant, says Way, who will use the grandmother data to test this hypothesis in people4.

Xia says the Guangzhou cohort has the power to answer many more questions like this. He hopes scientists around the world will use it. “We would like scientists from everywhere to work with us.”


doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-05522-1


Gigantic study of Chinese babies yields slew of health data | Nature

 

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Chinese Paper Demonstrates World’s First 18-Qubit Entanglement With Photon

A team of Chinese quantum physicists has demonstrated the world's first 18-qubit entanglement. This is the largest entangled state ever in all physical systems, and represents a big step towards large-scale highly efficient quantum computing.

BY SYNCED

2018-07-02

A team of Chinese quantum physicists has demonstrated the world’s first 18-qubit entanglement. This is the largest entangled state ever in all physical systems, and represents a big step towards large-scale highly efficient quantum computing. Lead researcher Pan Jianwei and colleagues at University of Science and Technology of China and CAS-Alibaba Quantum Computing Laboratory published the paper last week in Physics Review Letter.

Qubit entanglement is a distinctive feature of qubits that distinguishes quantum computers from classical computers. A set of entangled qubits can express high-level correlation regardless of their locations, allowing quantum computers to perform specific tasks not possible in classical computers. Generating an increasing number of entangled particles is an important benchmark for quantum information processing.

18-Qubit Entanglement with Six Photons’ Three Degrees of Freedom demonstrates an experimental result of an 18-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) entanglement by simultaneous exploiting three different Degree of Freedoms (DoFs) of six photons, including their paths, polarization, and orbital angular momentum (OAM). Previously, multi-qubit entanglements have been reported up to 14 trapped ions, 10 photons, and 10 superconducting qubits.

The paper presents a method of developing quantum logic operations on photons’ DoFs, which successfully enables concurrent readout of 262,144 outcome combinations of the 18-qubit state. A state fidelity of 0.708 ± 0.016 is measured, confirming the genuine entanglement of all 18 qubits.

Lead researcher Pan is widely recognized for his achievements in quantum entanglement with photons and superconducting circuits.

https://syncedreview.com/2018/07/02...rlds-first-18-qubit-entanglement-with-photon/