China Science & Technology Forum

[JSCh]

Public Release: 9-Sep-2016
Scientists expect to calculate amount of fuel inside Earth by 2025
With three new detectors coming online in the next several years, scientists are confident they will collect enough geoneutrino data to measure Earth's fuel level

University of Maryland

By 2022, scientists expect to be able to detect at least 536 antineutrino events per year at these five underground detectors: KamLAND in Japan, Borexino in Italy, SNO+ in Canada, and Jinping and JUNO in China. Credit: Ondrej Sramek

Earth requires fuel to drive plate tectonics, volcanoes and its magnetic field. Like a hybrid car, Earth taps two sources of energy to run its engine: primordial energy from assembling the planet and nuclear energy from the heat produced during natural radioactive decay. Scientists have developed numerous models to predict how much fuel remains inside Earth to drive its engines -- and estimates vary widely -- but the true amount remains unknown.

In a new paper, a team of geologists and neutrino physicists boldly claims it will be able to determine by 2025 how much nuclear fuel and radioactive power remain in the Earth's tank. The study, authored by scientists from the University of Maryland, Charles University in Prague and the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, was published on September 9, 2016, in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

"I am one of those scientists who has created a compositional model of the Earth and predicted the amount of fuel inside Earth today," said one of the study's authors William McDonough, a professor of geology at the University of Maryland. "We're in a field of guesses. At this point in my career, I don't care if I'm right or wrong, I just want to know the answer."

To calculate the amount of fuel inside Earth by 2025, the researchers will rely on detecting some of the tiniest subatomic particles known to science -- geoneutrinos. These antineutrino particles are byproducts of nuclear reactions within stars (including our sun), supernovae, black holes and human-made nuclear reactors. They also result from radioactive decay processes deep within the Earth.

Detecting antineutrinos requires a huge detector the size of a small office building, housed about a mile underground to shield it from cosmic rays that could yield false positive results. Inside the detector, scientists detect antineutrinos when they crash into a hydrogen atom. The collision produces two characteristic light flashes that unequivocally announce the event. The number of events scientists detect relates directly to the number of atoms of uranium and thorium inside the Earth. And the decay of these elements, along with potassium, fuels the vast majority of the heat in the Earth's interior.

To date, detecting antineutrinos has been painfully slow, with scientists recording only about 16 events per year from the underground detectors KamLAND in Japan and Borexino in Italy. However, researchers predict that three new detectors expected to come online by 2022--the SNO+ detector in Canada and the Jinping and JUNO detectors in China--will add 520 more events per year to the data stream.

"Once we collect three years of antineutrino data from all five detectors, we are confident that we will have developed an accurate fuel gauge for the Earth and be able to calculate the amount of remaining fuel inside Earth," said McDonough.

The new Jinping detector, which will be buried under the slopes of the Himalayas, will be four times bigger than existing detectors. The underground JUNO detector near the coast of southern China will be 20 times bigger than existing detectors.

"Knowing exactly how much radioactive power there is in the Earth will tell us about Earth's consumption rate in the past and its future fuel budget," said McDonough. "By showing how fast the planet has cooled down since its birth, we can estimate how long this fuel will last."



Scientists expect to calculate amount of fuel inside Earth by 2025 | EurekAlert! Science News

Paper Reference:

Ondřej Šrámek, Bedřich Roskovec, Scott A. Wipperfurth, Yufei Xi, William F. McDonough. Revealing the Earth’s mantle from the tallest mountains using the Jinping Neutrino Experiment. Scientific Reports, 2016; 6: 33034 DOI: 10.1038/srep33034​

 

[JSCh]

Public Release: 9-Sep-2016
Chinese Academy of Sciences eyes multiple S&T breakthroughs in next 5 years
Chinese Academy of Sciences Headquarters

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) announced its 13th Five-year Plan (2016-2020) this Wednesday in Beijing, outlining breakthrough programs in areas ranging from particle physics and galactic structure, to brain science and artificial intelligence, as well as oceanology, ecology and the environment, among others.

The plan, released by CAS President BAI Chunli, sets the Academy's goals and strategy for the five-year period ending in 2020.

"We will strive to achieve international prominence in strategically key fields and blaze the trail in cutting-edge and cross-disciplinary scientific areas, achieving a series of major original achievements, technologies and products," said BAI.

As China's driving force for exploring and harnessing high technology and the natural sciences, the plan calls for CAS to lead the country's key S&T projects in such fields as aviation, space and deep-sea exploration, quantum communication and computation, brain science and artificial intelligence, cyberspace security, the seed industry, clean energy, big data, intelligent manufacturing and robotics, new-generation materials development and applications, comprehensive environmental treatment, and public health research.

As part of this effort, CAS will heavily focus on fostering innovation. The five-year plan sets forth 60 major science and technology breakthroughs the Academy aims to achieve as well as 80 key projects it will undertake.

Ongoing projects will also be a major focus of the Academy over the five-year period, including: manned space exploration and lunar probe, high-resolution earth observation, nanotechnology, precision control of protein machinery and life processes, restoration and protection of fragile ecological areas, strategic advanced electronic materials, quantum control and information, and deep sea research.

By the end of the five-year period, CAS plans to spend 40 per cent of its research budget on basic research, 50 per cent on applied research, and 10 per cent on R&D, with the goal of making the Academy a top-ranked, globally influential and competitive research institution. CAS hopes to attain world-class levels in physics, chemistry, material science, mathematics, environment and ecology, and geoscience by 2020.

During the five-year plan period, the Academy will bring together resources from across the country to build 3-5 large-scale international cooperative science projects and more national laboratories in support of China's development.

Furthermore, CAS aims to further develop independent intellectual property rights (IPR) and industrial technology standards, as well as practical applications for its S&T output in order to enhance social development.

During this period, CAS plans to establish about 10 overseas research institutions. In addition, it aims to set up 5-10 CAS-TWAS Centers of Excellence, as part of China's Belt and Road Initiative.



Chinese Academy of Sciences eyes multiple S&T breakthroughs in next 5 years | EurekAlert! Science News

 

[JSCh]

Scientists find substitute for rare herb
Source: Xinhua | September 12, 2016, Monday

CHINESE scientists have developed a substitute for wild caterpillar fungus, a rare Tibetan herb known for its cancer-resisting properties.

According to the science department of northwest China’s Qinghai Province, after 11 years research, scientists can extract and cultivate the hypha from caterpillar fungus by producing an artificial substitute.

“The research was sponsored by the provincial government, as it wanted to stop depletion of the wild herb,” said Zhang Chaoyuan, deputy director of the science department.

A tiny stalk of fungus, known in China as “winter worm, summer grass”, sells for about the same price as gold. The wild herb has been a key source of income for ethnic Tibetans living in the region. But excessive digging of the fungus, which has a long growing cycle, has led to serious damage to the fragile ecological environment in the region.

Zhang said scientists collected the wild fungus from the Tibetan prefecture of Yushu, which is 4,800 meters above sea level, and used it to produce the artificial substitute, which also possesses the herb’s medical properties.

Found only on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the caterpillar fungus reportedly has cancer fighting properties and boosts the immune system.

The artificial product has a 97-percent DNA similarity with the wild herb, according to researchers.

 

[JSCh]

Manipulating liquid flow with light
By Zhou Wenting in Shanghai (chinadaily.com.cn) Updated: 2016-09-08 21:10

Chinese researchers have invented a new material to create light-activated micro-channels to transport liquid, which is likely to bring about breakthroughs in medical lab tests, as well as chemical engineering, aviation and aerospace industries.

Scientists believed that microfluidic chips can be applicable in various sectors, including medical lab tests, but the bottleneck for experts in the circle was that it needed an add-on pump, which is often large, to drive the liquid to flow. Therefore even though the chip is tiny enough, it is hard for the whole device to become small and portable.

Researchers from Shanghai-based Fudan University invented a special material to produce the channel to contain the liquid. Some certain changes in the shape of the channel will happen when light shines on the channel, and therefore the liquid will flow in a certain direction in the channel. "Thus we realized the manipulation of the liquid flow with light," said Yu Yanlei, a leading researcher on the team, whose research results were published on the website of the scientific journal Nature today.

Lyu Jiu'an, another researcher on the team, cited the example of its promising application in lab tests, and blood tests in particular.

"During the process of a test, a sample of blood needs to go to different stops in the channel for different steps, such as being purified and separated for the tests for various indicators. An add-on pump was used to drive the blood to run in the channel, but now we can cast the pump aside," Lyu said.

Researchers said small-sized and portable instruments for biochemical inspections, such as blood tests, will probably be developed with such technology, and people will be able to do blood tests by themselves at home.

Moreover, the tiny amount of material needed for a test sample will make collecting several tubes of blood from a patient history.

"In our tests, we only need a liquid sample of 0.2 microliter," Lyu said.

#####​

Paper Reference:

Jiu-an Lv, Yuyun Liu, Jia Wei, Erqiang Chen, Lang Qin & Yanlei Yu. Photocontrol of fluid slugs in liquid crystal polymer microactuators, Nature (2016). DOI:10.1038/nature19344

Abstract

The manipulation of small amounts of liquids has applications ranging from biomedical devices to liquid transfer. Direct light-driven manipulation of liquids, especially when triggered by light-induced capillary forces, is of particular interest because light can provide contactless spatial and temporal control. However, existing light-driven technologies suffer from an inherent limitation in that liquid motion is strongly resisted by the effect of contact-line pinning. Here we report a strategy to manipulate fluid slugs by photo-induced asymmetric deformation of tubular microactuators, which induces capillary forces for liquid propulsion. Microactuators with various shapes (straight, ‘Y’-shaped, serpentine and helical) are fabricated from a mechanically robust linear liquid crystal polymer. These microactuators are able to exert photocontrol of a wide diversity of liquids over a long distance with controllable velocity and direction, and hence to mix multiphase liquids, to combine liquids and even to make liquids run uphill. We anticipate that this photodeformable microactuator will find use in micro-reactors, in laboratory-on-a-chip settings and in micro-optomechanical systems.​

 

[JSCh]

Tianhe Project proposes 'air corridor' to advance cross-regional water diversion
(People's Daily Online) 15:09, September 12, 2016

Wang Guangqian, academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and president of Qinghai University, delivers a speech on Sept. 9, 2016. (Chinanews.com/Zhang Tianfu)

"Once the Tianhe Project is completed, it will be possible to transfer water in the air via an ‘air corridor.' [The corridor] will be formed as part of the South-to-North Water Diversion project," said Wang Guangqian, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and president of Qinghai University. Wang introduced his proposal at a meeting on Sept. 9, which aimed to jumpstart the novel project.

According to the project's description, the atmospheric boundary layer and the troposphere form a passage through which water vapor can be transported in a stable and orderly way. The passage can be regarded as "tianhe" (literally, a river in the sky). The proposed undertaking has therefore been named "Tianhe Project."

"We monitor the content and migration routes of water vapor, and then we conduct interference in certain regions to solve water shortages in northern China," Wang explained.

According to the UN World Water Development Report, northern China will face a severe water shortage by 2025. The established eastern and middle routes of the South-to-North Water Diversion project, which began in 2002, have relieved that "thirst" to some degree. However, the western route is still a work in progress due to high altitude, complex terrain and fragile ecosystems. The air corridor proposition may offer an innovative solution to those challenges.

The South-to-North water diversion project is the biggest project of its kind ever undertaken in China

The South-to-North Water Diversion project is the world's largest water diversion project, according to a Xinhua report. It was designed to transport water from the Yangtze River to dry regions in the north of the country. At its outset, the project was estimated to cost 500 billion yuan ($81.4 billion).

Bao Weimin, a CAS academician and director of the Science and Technology Committee of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, believes the proposed Tianhe Project and future air corridor are natural next steps toward supporting the ecology of the Tibetan Plateau. Bao also hopes the project will promote national economic and social development, especially in northern China.

File photo taken on May 18, 2015 shows one part of the South-to-North Water Diversion Middle Route Project in Zhengding County, north China's Hebei Province. (Photo/Xinhua)

Tianhe Project will attempt to increase annual precipitation in Sanjiangyuan (the birthplace of the Yangtze, Yellow and Lancang Rivers), the Qilian Mountains and the Qaidam region by 2.5 billion, 200 million and 120 million cubic meters respectively. Its long-term goal is to transfer 5 billion cubic meters of water per year.

 

[JSCh]

Walk Around in the Sun to Power Wearables With This Cloth
Posted 12 Sep 2016 | 15:29 GMT

Photo: Xing Fan/Chongqing University​

A new wearable fabric that generates electricity from both sunlight and motion could let you power your cell phone or smart watch by walking around outside. Researchers made the textile by weaving together plastic fiber solar cells and fiber-based generators that produce electricity when rubbed against each other.

The 0.32-millimeter-thick fabric is lightweight, flexible, breathable, and uses low-cost materials, its creators say. It could be integrated into clothes, tents, and curtains, turning them into power sources when they flap or are exposed to the sun. By harvesting solar and mechanical energy, the power-generating cloth could work day and night, its inventors say.

“The hybrid power textile could be extensively applied not only to self-powered electronics but also possibly to power generation on a larger scale,” Zhong Lin Wang at Georgia Tech, Xing Fan at Chongqing University in Chongqing, China, and their colleagues write in a research published today in the journal Nature Energy.



Continue -> http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise...eeeSpectrumFullText+(IEEE+Spectrum+Full+Text)

Walk Around in the Sun to Power Wearables With This Cloth - IEEE Spectrum​

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise...eeeSpectrumFullText+(IEEE+Spectrum+Full+Text)
Paper Reference:
Micro-cable structured textile for simultaneously harvesting solar and mechanical energy, Nature Energy (2016). DOI: 10.1038/nenergy.2016.138

Abstract

Developing lightweight, flexible, foldable and sustainable power sources with simple transport and storage remains a challenge and an urgent need for the advancement of next-generation wearable electronics. Here, we report a micro-cable power textile for simultaneously harvesting energy from ambient sunshine and mechanical movement. Solar cells fabricated from lightweight polymer fibres into micro cables are then woven via a shuttle-flying process with fibre-based triboelectric nanogenerators to create a smart fabric. A single layer of such fabric is 320 μm thick and can be integrated into various cloths, curtains, tents and so on. This hybrid power textile, fabricated with a size of 4 cm by 5 cm, was demonstrated to charge a 2 mF commercial capacitor up to 2 V in 1 min under ambient sunlight in the presence of mechanical excitation, such as human motion and wind blowing. The textile could continuously power an electronic watch, directly charge a cell phone and drive water splitting reactions.​

 

[Three_Kingdoms]

Working at Florida State University. Professor Tang Hengli along with Johns Hopkins Professors Ming Guo-Li and Song Hongjun and National Institutes of Health scientist Zheng Wei lead a team of researchers to discover a possible solution to cure the disease

FSU research team makes Zika drug breakthrough
BY: KATHLEEN HAUGHNEY | PUBLISHED: AUGUST 29, 2016 | 11:00 AM | SHARE:

A team of researchers from Florida State University, Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health has found existing drug compounds that can both stop Zika from replicating in the body and from damaging the crucial fetal brain cells that lead to birth defects in newborns.

One of the drugs is already on the market as a treatment for tapeworm.

“We focused on compounds that have the shortest path to clinical use,” said FSU Professor of Biological Science Hengli Tang. “This is a first step toward a therapeutic that can stop transmission of this disease.”

Tang, along with Johns Hopkins Professors Guo-Li Ming and Hongjun Song and National Institutes of Health scientist Wei Zheng identified two different groups of compounds that could potentially be used to treat Zika — one that stops the virus from replicating and the other that stops the virus from killing fetal brain cells, also called neuroprogenitor cells.

One of the identified compounds is the basis for a drug called Nicolsamide, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved drug that showed no danger to pregnant women in animal studies. It is commonly used to treat tapeworm.

This could theoretically be prescribed by a doctor today, though tests are still needed to determine a specific treatment regimen for the infection.

Their work is outlined in an article published Monday by Nature Medicine.

Doctoral students Emily Lee, Yichen Cheng and Sarah Ogden played a key role in conducting Zika research in Professor Hengli Tang’s laboratory.


Though the Zika virus was discovered in 1947, there was little known about how it worked and its potential health implications — especially among pregnant women — until an outbreak occurred in South America last year. In the United States, there have been 584 cases of pregnant women contracting Zika, though most of those are travel related. As of Friday, there have been 42 locally transmitted cases in Florida.

The virus, among other diseases, can cause microcephaly in fetuses leading them to be born with severe birth defects.

“It’s so dramatic and irreversible,” Tang said. “The probability of Zika-induced microcephaly occurring doesn’t appear to be that high, but when it does, the damage is horrible.”

Researchers around the world have been feverishly working to better understand the disease — which can be transmitted both by mosquito bite and through a sexual partner — and also to develop medical treatments.

Tang, Ming and Song first met in graduate school 20 years ago and got in contact in January because Tang, a virologist, had access to the virus and Ming and Song, neurologists, had cortical stem cells that scientists needed for testing.

The group worked at a breakneck pace with researchers from Ming and Song’s lab, traveling back and forth between Baltimore and Tang’s lab in Tallahassee where they had infected the cells with the virus.

In early March, the group was the first team to show that Zika indeed caused cellular phenotypes consistent with microcephaly, a severe birth defect where babies are born with a much smaller head and brain than normal.

They immediately delved into follow-up work and teamed with NIH’s Zheng, an expert on drug compounds, to find potential treatments for the disease.

Researchers screened 6,000 compounds that were either already approved by the FDA or were in the process of a clinical trial because they could be made more quickly available to people infected by Zika.

“It takes years if not decades to develop a new drug,” Song said. “In this sort of global health emergency, we don’t have time. So instead of using new drugs, we chose to screen existing drugs. In this way, we hope to create a therapy much more quickly.”

All of the researchers are continuing the work on the compounds and hope to begin testing the drugs on animals infected with Zika in the near future.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, Florida State University, Emory University and the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund.

Other institutions contributing to the research are the Zhejiang University School of Medicine in China, Emory University and the Icahn School of Medicine. Emily Lee, a Florida State University graduate student working with Tang, shared the first authorship position with Assistant Professor of Biology at Emory Zhexing Wen and NIH scientist Miao Xu.

https://news.fsu.edu/news/science-t...u-research-team-makes-zika-drug-breakthrough/

Professor Tang is a graduate of Anhui University and the University of Science and Technology, China

And in earlier news this year:

Breakthrough in Zika epidemic after Chinese scientists decode genome
23 February 2016, Beijing, Agencies

Chinese scientists today said they have successfully sequenced the genome of the country's first imported Zika virus, helping with prevention and diagnosis of the mosquito-borne disease that has triggered a global health emergency.

The success was achieved by scientists with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the provincial center in east China's Jiangxi Province. China confirmed the first imported Zika case on February 9. The patient, a 34-year-old man from Jiangxi, developed a fever, headache and dizziness on January 28 in Venezuela, before returning home on February 5. He has been discharged from hospital after a full recovery.

Monday's success has laid foundation for understanding the virus' variations as well as developing bacteria and reagents to diagnose the disease, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The World Health Organisation has declared a global health emergency over the Zika virus and its suspected links to birth defects.

The virus has been reported in at least 34 countries, many of them in Central and Latin America. WHO and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have advised pregnant women to consider delaying travel to Zika-infected countries.

Zika virus is spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which also carries dengue fever and yellow fever.

http://millenniumpost.in/NewsContent.aspx?NID=238514

 

[JSCh]

Developing composites that self-heal at very low temperatures
September 13, 2016
University of Birmingham

Scientists have developed a method of allowing materials, commonly used in aircraft and satellites, to self-heal cracks at temperatures well below freezing. The article is among the first to show that self-healing materials can be manipulated to operate at very low temperatures.



Developing composites that self-heal at very low temperatures -- ScienceDaily

Journal Reference:

1. Yongjing Wang, Duc Truong Pham, Zhichun Zhang, Jinjun Li, Chunqian Ji, Yanju Liu, Jinsong Leng. Sustainable self-healing at ultra-low temperatures in structural composites incorporating hollow vessels and heating elements. Royal Society Open Science, 2016; 3 (9): 160488 DOI: 10.1098/rsos.160488

 

[ahojunk]

Beijing builds serious diseases database
2016-09-15 09:30 | Xinhua Editor: Yao Lan

Beijing has established a serious diseases database, which contains 164,000 cases and 1.63 million samples of diseases, according to the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission Wednesday.

Fourteen medical institutions participated in establishing the database.

The samples will provide substantial resources for medical research.

Beijing is aiming to improve scientific and technological development in medical science. By 2020, the city is expected to have more than 20 innovative achievements in the treatment of serious diseases, and will introduce 100 codes and standards in medical technology, according to the commission.

 

[JSCh]

China launches second space lab
Tiangong 2 will develop expertise for a future space station and conduct science experiments.

Davide Castelvecchi, 15 September 2016

China has launched Tiangong 2, its second orbiting space lab — marking another stepping stone towards the country’s goal of building a space station by the early 2020s. The module, which launched aboard a Long March rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi desert at 22:04 local time on 15 September, will initially fly uncrewed in low-Earth orbit, but a planned second launch will carry two astronauts to it in November.

Tiangong 2 (meaning ‘heavenly palace’) carries a number of scientific experiments, including an astrophysics detector that is the first space-science experiment built jointly by China with European countries.

“By itself, Tiangong 2 is not a monumental achievement, but it is an important step in a larger effort to eventually build a Chinese space station in the early 2020s,” says Brian Weeden, a space-policy expert at the Secure World Foundation in Washington DC.

The 8-tonne module replaces the now-defunct Tiangong 1, a mission that marked several milestones in China’s manned space programme, including the country’s first in-orbit rendezvous with another spacecraft. Mission control lost contact with that station earlier this year, and its orbit is slowly decaying. An uncontrolled re-entry is expected some time in 2017.

In November, a Shenzhou spacecraft will carry two astronauts to Tiangong-2 for a 30-day stay. Then in April 2017, a cargo craft will dock to refuel and bring more supplies. The module also carries a robotic arm, a prototype for a similar tool that would fly on a space station.

Science projects
Tiangong 2 reportedly carries 14 experiments. These include POLAR, an international mission dedicated to establishing whether the photons from γ-ray bursts (GRBs) — thought to be a particularly energetic type of stellar explosion — are polarized. Answering this long-debated issue could shed light on how GRBs produce such high-energy photons in the first place.

“We aim to measure ten γ-ray bursts per year,” says POLAR project manager Nicolas Produit, an astrophysicist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, who spoke to Nature from a hotel near the Jiuquan launch centre.

The €3-million (US$3.4 million) detector was built largely with Swiss funding, and with the collaboration of Swiss, Chinese and Polish scientists, and support from the European Space Agency (ESA). POLAR is the first space experiment developed as a full international collaboration between China and other countries, Produit says.

US law bars NASA from doing joint projects with China’s space agencies, but the Chinese Academy of Sciences is discussing a number of other space collaborations with ESA. The country has also been aggressively ramping up its space science: just in the last year, it put into orbit DAMPE, its first space probe dedicated to the search for dark matter, as well as QUESS, the world’s first quantum-communications satellite.

This is making the country an exciting place for international researchers to test ideas for space science, compared to projects run by ESA and NASA, which Produit says are slower-moving. “In China, things go fast. They have the money; they have the will,“ Produit says. “China is where things happen now.”

Still, the main goal for Tiangong 2 and a future space station is not science, Weeden points out. “China wants to build and operate a space station for the same reasons the United States and Soviet Union did in decades past: prestige.”

Nature | doi:10.1038/nature.2016.20611



China launches second space lab : Nature News & Comment

 

[JSCh]

Water supply: China's sponge cities to soak up rainwater

• Dasheng Liu
• Nature 537, 307 (15 September 2016) doi:10.1038/537307c
• Published online 14 September 2016

China's Sponge City programme aims to improve resilience to urban expansion and climate change by enabling cities to save and resupply rainwater. It is crucial for cities such as Beijing and Jinan, which suffer water shortages even after severe flooding. However, several hurdles must be overcome to get it working efficiently.

The programme will involve some 30 pilot cities this year (see www.mohurd.gov.cn). They will create a 'sponge' infrastructure to detain runoff, control flooding, recharge groundwater and reuse storm water. The project still has to recruit enough planners, designers and construction workers to support this colossal initiative. Time is short for completing technical training.

Plans and technology will need to be customized for individual cities, where local weather conditions and the degree of urbanization can vary considerably; a blanket strategy will not work.

Once in place, the sponge infrastructure should be combined with conventional drainage systems, particularly in areas of medium- and high-intensity urbanization.



Water supply: China's sponge cities to soak up rainwater : Nature : Nature Research

 

[JSCh]

Trio of Nations Aims to Hook Asia Super Grid to Grids of the World
By John Boyd
Posted 13 Sep 2016 | 15:32 GMT

Image: Renewable Energy Institute​

Northeast Asia, the region encompassing China, South Korea, and Japan, has not yet gotten around to connecting its electricity grids together. But that’s not stopping these countries from promoting the Asia Super Grid, calculated to become the center of a global energy grid providing abundant, cheap electricity based on renewable energy.

In Japan, the idea emerged following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster. The possibility of a nuclear disaster so shocked Masayoshi Son, founder and head of the telecom and Internet giant SoftBank Group, that he established the Renewable Energy Institute soon after to help develop and promote renewable energy.

“I was a total layman (in renewable energy) at the time of the earthquake,” Son told a packed audience attending a symposium celebrating the fifth anniversary of the institute in Tokyo last Friday.

Yet it was this naïveté that led the entrepreneur to go on and propose the Asia Super Grid to tap wind and solar energy in the Gobi Desert, estimated to be the equivalent of thousands of nuclear reactors. “People said it was crazy, too grand a scheme…politically impossible,” he added.

Nonetheless, entrepreneur Son found kindred spirits in South Korea’s state-owned Korea Electric Power Company (KEPCO) and more recently in the State Grid Corporation of China and the Russian power company PSJC Rosseti. At an international conference on global energy interconnection in Beijing this March, the four entities signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to work together on interconnecting power grids to form the Asia Super Grid.

The idea gained further momentum with the establishment in Beijing in March of the nonprofit Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Organization. GEIDCO is led by Liu Zhenya, former chairman of State Grid. Members include the four Asia Super Grid signatories, as well as utilities, universities, and equipment manufacturers from 14 countries.

GEIDCO’s declared goal is to link the world’s electric grids to meet global power needs by generating electricity from renewables. At Friday’s symposium in Tokyo, Zhenya outlined this vision, saying global energy interconnection (GEI) based on clean energy was the only feasible answer to issues of resource constraints, environmental pollution, and climate change.

The challenge for GEI, he noted, was connecting the world’s alternative energy resources of wind, hydro, and solar to the areas of demand. Such energy sources, he pointed out, are available in a band arcing from North Africa through central Asia to eastern Russia and North Asia. But the closest areas of demand are in Europe, southern Africa, and East and Southeast Asia.

And because “wind and solar power are random, intermittent, and volatile,” noted Zhenya, “only by integrating them into a vast power grid can they enjoy better development.”

He describes GEI as a globally interconnected smart grid using UHV grids as the backbone, with an infrastructure platform on which clean energy can be developed, transmitted, and used worldwide.

The backbone will transmit electricity “at more than 1,000 kilovolts AC and 800 kilovolts DC over thousands of kilometers and interconnect grids across regions, nations, and even continents with a capacity of over 10 gigawatts,” he explained. Nine such grids are already in operation or being constructed in China, he added, so there are no longer any problems concerning the key technologies for GEI.

Meanwhile, the price of wind- and solar-generated power is falling rapidly. Zhenya said recent PV bid prices for projects in the United Arab Emirates and Chile were as low as 3 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour. Consequently, “according to our calculations, the cost efficiency (of wind and solar generation) will be more than fossil fuel energy by 2025,” he predicted.



Continue reading ->

Trio of Nations Aims to Hook Asia Super Grid to Grids of the World - IEEE Spectrum​

 

[JSCh]

Echoes of black holes eating stars discovered
September 15, 2016
NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory

A black hole destroying a star, an event astronomers call 'stellar tidal disruption,' releases an enormous amount of energy, brightening the surroundings in an event called a flare. Two new studies characterize tidal disruption flares by studying how surrounding dust absorbs and re-emits their light, like echoes. This approach allowed scientists to measure the energy of flares from stellar tidal disruption events more precisely than ever before.

This illustration shows a glowing stream of material from a star as it is being devoured by a supermassive black hole in a tidal disruption flare. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech



Echoes of black holes eating stars discovered -- ScienceDaily

Journal References:

1. S. van Velzen, A. J. Mendez, J. H. Krolik, V. Gorjian. Discovery of transient infrared emission from dust heated by stellar tidal disruption flares. The Astrophysical Journal, 2016; 829 (1): 19 DOI: 10.3847/0004-637X/829/1/19
2. Ning Jiang, Liming Dou, Tinggui Wang, Chenwei Yang, Jianwei Lyu, Hongyan Zhou. The WISE Detection of an Infrared Echo in Tidal Disruption Event ASASSN-14li. The Astrophysical Journal, 2016; 828 (1): L14 DOI: 10.3847/2041-8205/828/1/L14

 

[JSCh]

September 15, 2016
Levitating nanoparticle improves 'torque sensing,' might bring new research into fundamentals of quantum theory

This graphic represents a new experiment where levitating a nanodiamond with a laser in a vacuum chamber for the first time was used to detect and measure its "torsional vibration," an advance that could bring new types of sensors and studies in quantum mechanics. (Purdue University image/ Thai M. Hoang)

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Researchers have levitated a tiny nanodiamond particle with a laser in a vacuum chamber, using the technique for the first time to detect and measure its "torsional vibration," an advance that could bring new types of sensors and studies in quantum mechanics.

The experiment represents a nanoscale version of the torsion balance used in the classic Cavendish experiment, performed in 1798 by British scientist Henry Cavendish, which determined Newton's gravitational constant. A bar balancing two lead spheres at either end was suspended on a thin metal wire. Gravity acting on the two weights caused the wire and bar to twist, and this twisting – or torsion - was measured to calculate the gravitational force.

In the new experiment, an oblong-shaped nanodiamond levitated by a laser beam in a vacuum chamber served the same role as the bar, and the laser beam served the same role as the wire in Cavendish's experiment.

"A change of the orientation of the nanodiamond caused the polarization of the laser beam to twist," said Tongcang Li, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy and electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University. "Torsion balances have played historic roles in the development of modern physics. Now, an optically levitated ellipsoidal nanodiamond in a vacuum provides a new nanoscale torsion balance that will be many times more sensitive."

Findings are detailed in a paper that appeared on Thursday (Sept. 15) in the journal Physical Review Letters.

"This is the first experimental observation of torsional motion of a nanoparticle levitated in a vacuum and represents a very sensitive torque detector," Li said. "In principle, we could detect the torque on a single electron or a single proton."

The paper was authored by Purdue postdoctoral research associate Thai M. Hoang; student Yue Ma from Tsinghua University in China; Purdue graduate students Jonghoon Ahn and Jaehoon Bang; Francis Robicheaux, a Purdue professor of physics and astronomy; Zhang-Qi Yin, an assistant research fellow at Tsinghua University; and Li.

The paper details the detection of torsional vibration, a proposal to use the technique for torque sensing and also to achieve torsional "ground state cooling," which could aid efforts to study quantum theory and realize potential applications in quantum information processing and high-precision measurement for sensors.

This cooling reduces "noise" caused by vibrating molecules and atoms, making it possible to precisely measure torque and probe the relationships between motion and electron "spin." Electrons can be thought of as having two distinct spin states, "up" or "down," and this phenomenon might be used in future quantum simulations.

The paper includes experimental and theoretical portions.

"Experimentally, we observed torsional motion, and the theoretical part is a proposal of how to cool down the motion to achieve quantum ground state," Li said.

The nanodiamonds are about 100 nanometers in diameter, or roughly the size of a virus. Future research will include efforts to achieve ground state cooling.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.



Levitating nanoparticle improves 'torque sensing,' might bring new research into fundamentals of quantum theory - Purdue University

Journal References:

Torsional Optomechanics of a Levitated Nonspherical Nanoparticle, Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 123604 – Published 15 September 2016 , dx.doi.org/10.110/PhysRevLett.117.123604​

 

[JSCh]

Making scientists live with farmers makes crop productivity boom
Embedding scientists with farmers in China dramatically increased crop yields.

Diana Gitig - Sep 15, 2016 2:01 pm UTC

The "organic versus conventional farming" debate that runs in hipster circles often ignores a hugely important aspect of agriculture: how either method impacts crop yields. It's pretty easy to rail against the evils of synthetic pesticides when the biggest ramification of your views is having to walk half a block out of your way or spend an extra $1.50 for an all-organic, non-GMO, shade grown, free-range, kale smoothie instead of a regular one.

But it's not quite as simple when trying to grow enough calories to sustain our planet’s growing population on a shrinking number of arable acres. A radical new venture, undertaken in rural China in 2009, has helped maximize crop yields, getting them within a hair of their theoretical maximum. And it didn't rely on any fancy new chemicals or technologies. Rather, it “deployed several time-honored education-extension methods coupled with innovative outreach mechanisms.” In other words, scientists moved in with and tutored the farmers.


Continue reading ->

Making scientists live with farmers makes crop productivity boom | Ars Technica​

Journal References:

Closing yield gaps in China by empowering smallholder farmers, Nature 2016, DOI:10.1038/nature19368​