The Swiss global financial group Cedrus Group announced the establishment of the QFLP Fund on Tuesday to focus on investing in mature, pre-IPO stage companies in the life sciences and agriculture sectors in China, and establishing joint ventures with foreign companies seeking to enter the Chinese market. 

Chairman of Cedrus Group, Rani Jarkas, said that the launch of the fund is a major milestone for the group, and proves that an international financial group like Cedrus is highly committed to China.

The fund will complete the group's ecosystem in life sciences and will enable the company to play an even more active role in the development of highly innovative biotech and pharmaceutic companies in China, by adding a focused capital pool supporting these initiatives, Jarkas noted. 

In addition, it will boost their capabilities to attract highly relevant foreign technology into China, through joint ventures or wholly owned foreign entities, which in turn, will create highly skilled jobs in healthcare and increase local government tax revenues, he said.

The move was announced at the Cedrus Life Sciences Investment Forum in Beijing on Tuesday. Fifty industrial experts were invited to the forum to discuss and offer advice to promote the development of the life science industry. Wei Jianguo, former vice minister of China's Ministry of Commerce, attended the forum and delivered a keynote speech. 

Xia Qinglin, secretary of the work committee of the Party Committee of the Tianjin Binhai Hi-Tech Industrial Development Area and general director of the administrative commission of the area, introduced the area's favorable policies for bio-investment companies, the current scale and layout of biotechnology companies, and the agglomeration effect the area had created through cooperation with Cedrus. 

Relying on the Haihe Laboratory of Cell Ecosystem, the Tianjin Binhai Hi-Tech Industrial Development Area enhanced efforts to improve the level of the local biomedical industry. 

The area issued "double nine policies" to further support the accelerated development of the biomedical industry, to help build the area into a world-class and domestically leading source of basic research and a gathering place for scientific and technological innovation. 

Currently, there are more than 204 city-level and above research and development institutions in the Tianjin Binhai Hi-Tech Industrial Development Area. Among them, more than 30 are at the national level. These institutions have helped to attract talent and created a cluster effect for the area, Wang told the Global Times. 

"For a development region like ours, both our industry and technology must be internationalized. We must constantly connect with international resources to promote our companies to go global while also introducing international companies into our area. After all, technology can only develop through exchanges and mutual learning. This is not only to promote the development of enterprises but also to promote the development of various countries to better serve people's lives and health," Xia said. 

Xiong Juan, chairwoman of the Hainan Leyun Biotechnology Co, Ltd, also shared her opinions on the challenges and opportunities facing Chinese companies on the path of internationalization. 

"We are mainly in the scientific research transformation period in China. As a Chinese life sciences company, we not only want to promote our products in this market in China but also want to go out to Southeast Asia and also to Europe. But as our overseas resources and visibility overseas are limited, so we need an international platform like Cedrus to help combine external resources," Xiong said. 

Over 100 of Tsinghua alumni fell ill following an off-campus dinner gathering marking the university's anniversary, with the local disease prevention and control department attributing the cause to norovirus infection. 

A recent social media post titled "Letter to All Alumni and Current Faculty and Students" brought attention to the issue. The letter revealed that during Tsinghua University's 113th anniversary celebration from April 26 to 28, alumni from various locations attended the festivities and some dined at the Zui Ai Restaurant located outside the southeast gate of the campus. 

Over a hundred alumni fell ill with food poisoning , including vomiting, diarrhea, fever, abdominal discomfort, fatigue, and muscle soreness after dining at the restaurant. As of May 1, 102 individuals have reported experiencing these symptoms, the letter wrote.

The Haidian District Disease Prevention and Control Center in Beijing on Monday released an investigation report saying it has conducted comprehensive testing on samples collected from the restaurant staff, environment, and food. The results of the epidemiological investigations revealed that some samples tested positive for norovirus, leading to the conclusion that the incident was caused by acute gastroenteritis due to norovirus infection. 

The district disease control center has instructed the restaurant to cease operations, carrying out terminal disinfection, and providing health awareness guidance.

With summer being a high-risk period for gastrointestinal infectious diseases, the disease control center has advised catering enterprises to increase the frequency of daily environmental sanitation and disinfection, enhance staff education on preventing gastrointestinal infectious diseases, and improve health monitoring to ensure a safe dining environment for customers. 

Residents are urged to prioritize food hygiene, avoid consuming untreated water, practice frequent handwashing, use public chopsticks when dining out, and seek medical attention promptly if experiencing gastrointestinal symptoms.

From October 26 to 28, the British Council participated in the 24th China Annual Conference for International Education and Expo (CACIE 2023) as a CACIE Honorary Partner, and hosted two sub-forums on higher education: "From Study to Work: Global Talent Mobility and Development" and "English Teaching and Assessment to Enhance International Understanding Education in Secondary Schools." 

The former focused on the current trends and challenges of talent cultivation and mobility in the context of international education, while the latter addressed the hot topic of international understanding education in the K12 sector. 

"Through the two forums, we shared our insights on the mobility and development of Chinese students abroad, and introduced our comprehensive assessment solutions and ecosystem value chain from study to work, represented by the British Council's IELTS test. We were also honored to invite our partners, top universities and enterprises from home and abroad, to share their best practices and explore how to better support the lifelong growth and development of international education in China," said You Zhuoran, director of examinations at the British Council China. 

Researchers from China and the US have jointly created a new type of stable semiconductor graphene, which displays performance 10 times higher than silicon and 20 times larger than that of the other two-dimensional semiconductors. The achievement marks "a leap from silicon chips to carbon chips," Ma Lei, leader of the research from the Tianjin International Center for Nanoparticles and Nanosystems (TICNN) at Tianjin University, who led the research, told the Global Times.

The achievement, jointly made by Ma's team and researchers from School of Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology in the US, was published online on the website of the journal "Nature" on January 3, 2024.

With silicon-based chips gradually approaching the physical limit of two nanometers, there is a surge in global demand for chips based on high-quality semiconductor materials. Two-dimensional materials, due to their excellent electronic transport properties and potential for high integration, have become a new frontier that scientists and semiconductor companies around the world are eager to invest in. 

Graphene, as the first discovered two-dimensional material that can exist stably at room temperature, has been the focus of scientists' efforts since its discovery in 2004 to design a new type of chip that consumes less energy and operates faster than existing semiconductors. However, the unique Dirac Cones of graphene leads to its "zero bandgap" characteristic, which has been the biggest obstacle to its application in the semiconductor field. 

By precisely controlling the epitaxial growth process of graphene, Ma's team introduced a bandgap into graphene, creating a new type of stable semiconductor graphene, which exhibits electron mobility far exceeding that of silicon materials. It displays performance 10 times higher than silicon and 20 times larger than that of the other two-dimensional semiconductors.

"We mainly applied a special growth environment and growth conditions to modulate graphene itself using SiC crystals, achieving the opening of a bandgap in graphene. This transforms the originally gapless graphene into a material with a bandgap," Ma said. He noted that what the team created "is a true single-crystal graphene semiconductor."

The development of this semiconductor not only paves the way for high-performance electronic devices surpassing traditional silicon-based technologies but also injects new impetus into the entire semiconductor industry. As the limits predicted by Moore's Law draw closer, the emergence of semiconductor graphene heralds a fundamental shift in the field of electronics. Its breakthrough properties meet the growing demand for higher computing speeds and miniaturized integrated electronic devices, read a report on the Tianjin University's website.  

Once delivered into large scale production, the single-crystal semiconductor graphene will lay an important foundation for the transition from the silicon era to the carbon era. However, whether graphene semiconductors can lead to a breakthrough in the chip industry still needs time to test, Ma noted.

When asked how far the achievement is from industrialization, Ma said he currently cannot predict. "When it can be put into large-scale industrial applications depends on the process from millimeter-scale single crystals to inch-scale single crystals." 

In a related report on January 4 by yicai.com, Ma was quoted as saying that "I estimate that it will take another 10 to 15 years before graphene semiconductors can truly be fully implemented." 

Ma said that now he and his team are working hard to grow larger-sized graphene semiconductor single crystals.

In order to continue to promote the development of semiconductors, countries and regions all over the world are actively seeking new materials and paradigms in addition to two-dimensional materials. In November 2023, Huawei and Harbin Institute of Technology jointly applied for a "hybrid bonding method for three-dimensional integrated chips based on silicon and diamond." In September 2023, Japanese news outlet Nikkei reported that the Japanese startup company OOKUMA plans to commercialize diamond semiconductors, and will start production as early as the fiscal year 2026. 

With the intensification of competition, the US has been increasing its export control measures on chips to China, unreasonably suppressing Chinese semiconductor companies, and attempting to "strangle" China in the semiconductor chip field. 

In this context, the achievement by Chinese and American teams has attracted special attention. According to Ma, the intensification of China-US semiconductor competition has indeed had an impact on the cooperation between the scientific teams of the two countries, such as information exchange and sample exchange. However, overall, the cooperation between the two teams has been fruitful. 

"Healthy competition is an important factor in promoting development, while malicious competition hinders the development of technology. I hope that cooperation is the mainstream and competition is a stimulant. With cooperation as the mainstream, appropriate competition will make scientific development better and better," Ma noted.

Chinese shipbuilding enterprises have obtained the most orders from global clients, with their scheduled ship delivering time stretching as far-flung as 2028, China Media Group (CMG) reported on Saturday.

The delivery time for ships to be built by the Guangzhou Shipyard International Co has already been scheduled into 2027 and 2028, as ship owners worldwide are drawn to the company by its strengths in green production and environment protection, said Li Hao, an official from the company, the CMG reported.

More than 60 percent of the company's on-hand orders are methanol powered dual-fuel ships or liquefied natural gas fired dual-fuel models. Comparing with the conventional container ships, ultra-large container ships powered by dual-fuel can reduce 20 percent of carbon emissions, in addition to curbing 85 percent of nitrogen oxide and 99 percent of sulfur emissions.

China's shipbuilding industry has been ramping up efforts to advance the industry's high-quality development through intelligence and green technology, and the nation's shipbuilding completions, new orders and orders on-hand have achieved a marked growth in 2023.

From January to November in 2023, China completed shipbuilding of 38.09 million deadweight tons (dwt), a year-on-year increase of 12.3 percent, according to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. New orders recorded an annual growth of 63.8 percent to 68.45 million dwt, and the orders on-hand totaled 134.09 million dwt as of the end of November.

For instance, a mega vessel - with a loading capacity of up to 16,616 standard containers constructed by the company - is one of the largest container ships in tonnage under construction in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Li said.

The intelligent transformation has also boosted shipbuilding efficiency, which is traditionally a labor-intensive process. Through intelligent transformation, the entire workshop for building a ro-ro passenger ship with over 20,000 square meters can be reduced from 200 people to 50 people by integrating more automation and robotics technology.

China's first domestically-built large cruise ship, the Adora Magic City, welcomed its first group of more than 3,000 Chinese and foreign passengers at the Shanghai Wusongkou International Cruise Terminal on the first day of 2024, embarking on its maiden commercial voyage.

Gravity, the inaugural exhibition of the second phase of a youth experimental project, recently opened at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) Art Museum. 

The exhibition showcases the personal works of Chen ­Mingqiang, a faculty member of the Experimental Art and Science and Technology Art College at CAFA. The exhibition features 14 of Chen's recent works, aiming to present the artist's creative thinking and new artistic imagery.

The inspiration for the exhibition came from a serendipitous event during the artist's creation: A bird flying over a courtyard "left a mark" on a work placed in the courtyard due to the force of gravity, which sparked Chen's creative impulse. 

Gravity is a force that humans experience at all times, and all objects are endowed with mutual gravitational influence. 

The artist's creative orientation and inspiration are no different. Everything perceivable in life guides the artist in his self-creation. 

The "Wide Angle Youth Experimental Project Space" is an experimental field for displaying the curatorial and creative work of young teachers at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. It aims to assist and promote young teachers and students to make positive responses to interdisciplinary linkage, regional cultural research, and traditional Chinese culture through diverse exhibition projects. 

This year’s Atlantic hurricane season has already proven to be active and deadly. Powerful hurricanes such as Harvey, Irma and Maria are also providing a testing ground for new tools that scientists hope will save lives by improving forecasts in various ways, from narrowing a storm’s future path to capturing swift changes in the intensity of storm winds.

Some of the tools that debuted this year — such as the GOES-16 satellite — are already winning praise from scientists. Others, such as a new microsatellite system aiming to improve measurements of hurricane intensity and a highly anticipated new computer simulation that forecasts hurricane paths and intensities, are still in the calibration phase. As these tools get an unprecedented workout thanks to an unusually ferocious series of storms, scientists may know in a few months whether hurricane forecasting is about to undergo a sea change.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s GOES-16 satellite is perhaps the clearest success story of this hurricane season so far. Public perceptions of hurricane forecasts tend to focus on uncertainty and conflicting predictions. But in the big picture, hurricane models adeptly forecasted Irma’s ultimate path to the Florida Keys nearly a week before it arrived there, says Brian Tang, an atmospheric scientist at the University at Albany in New York.
“I found that remarkable,” he says. “Ten or so years ago that wouldn’t have been possible.”

One reason for this is GOES-16, which launched late last year and will become fully operational in November. The satellite offers images at four times the resolution of previous satellites. “It’s giving unparalleled details about the hurricanes,” Tang says, including data on wind speeds and water temperatures delivered every minute that are then fed into models.

GOES-16’s crystal-clear images also give forecasters a better picture of the winds swirling around a storm’s central eye. But more data from this crucial region is needed to improve predictions of just how strong a hurricane might get. Scientists continue to struggle to predict rapid changes in hurricane intensity, Tang says. He notes how Hurricane Harvey, for example, strengthened suddenly to become a Category 4 storm right before it made landfall in Texas, offering emergency managers little time to issue warnings. “That’s the sort of thing that keeps forecasters up at night,” he says.
In December, NASA launched a system of eight suitcase-sized microsatellites called the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System, or CYGNSS, into orbit. The satellites measure surface winds near the inner core of a hurricane, such as between the eyewall and the most intense bands of rain, at least a couple of times a day. Those regions have previously been invisible to satellites, measured only by hurricane-hunter airplanes darting through the storm.

“Improving forecasts of rapid intensification, like what occurred with Harvey on August 25, is exactly what CYGNSS is intended to do,” says Christopher Ruf, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the lead scientist for CYGNSS. Results from CYGNSS measurements of both Harvey and Irma look very promising, he says. While the data are not being used to inform any forecasts this year, the measurements are now being calibrated and compared with hurricane-hunter flight data. The team will give the first detailed results from the hurricane season at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December.
Meanwhile, NOAA has also been testing a new hurricane forecast model this year. The U.S. forecasting community is still somewhat reeling from its embarrassing showing during 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, which the National Weather Service had predicted would go out to sea while a European meteorological center predicted, correctly, that it would squarely hit New York City. In the wake of that event, Congress authorized $48 million to improve U.S. weather forecasting, and in 2014 NOAA held a competition to select a new weather prediction tool to improve its forecasts.

The clear winner was an algorithm developed by Shian-Jiann Lin and colleagues at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J. In May, NOAA announced that it would test the new model this hurricane season, running it alongside the more established operational models to see how it stacks up. Known as FV3 (short for Finite-Volume Cubed-Sphere Dynamical Core), the model divides the atmosphere into a 3-D grid of boxes and simulates climate conditions within the boxes, which may be as large as 4 kilometers across or as small as 1 kilometer across. Unlike existing models, FV3 can also re-create vertical air currents that move between boxes, such as the updrafts that are a key element of hurricanes as well as tornadoes and thunderstorms.

But FV3’s performance so far this year hasn’t been a slam dunk. FV3 did a far better job at simulating the intensity of Harvey than the other two leading models, but it lagged behind the European model in determining the hurricane’s path, Lin says. As for Irma, the European model outperformed the others on both counts. Still, Lin says he is confident that FV3 is on the right track in terms of its improvement. That’s good because pressure to work out the kinks may ramp up rapidly. Although NOAA originally stated that FV3 would be operational in 2019, “I hear some hints that it could be next year,” he says.

Lin adds that a good model alone isn’t enough to get a successful forecast; the data that go into a model are ultimately crucial to its success. “In our discipline, we call that ‘garbage in, garbage out,’” he says. With GOES-16 and CYGNSS nearly online, scientists are looking forward to even better hurricane models thanks to even better data.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Helper cells in the brain just got tagged with a new job — forming traumatic memories.

When rats experience trauma, cells in the hippocampus — an area important for learning — produce signals for inflammation, helping to create a potent memory. But most of those signals aren’t coming from the nerve cells, researchers reported November 15 at the Society for Neuroscience meeting.

Instead, more than 90 percent of a key inflammation protein comes from astrocytes. This role in memory formation adds to the repertoire of these starburst-shaped cells, once believed to be responsible for only providing food and support to more important brain cells (SN Online: 8/4/15).
The work could provide new insight into how the brain creates negative memories that contribute to post-traumatic stress disorder, said Meghan Jones, a neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Jones and her colleagues gave rats a short series of foot shocks painful enough to “make you curse,” she said. A week after that harrowing experience, rats confronted with a milder shock remained jumpy. In some rats, Jones and her colleagues inhibited astrocyte activity during the original trauma, which prevented the cells from releasing the inflammation protein. Those rats kept their cool in the face of the milder shock.

These preliminary results show that neurons get a lot of help in creating painful memories. Studies like these are “changing how we think about the circuitry that’s involved in depression and post-traumatic stress disorder,” says neuroscientist Georgia Hodes of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. “Everyone’s been focused on what neurons are doing. [This is] showing an important effect of cells we thought of as only being supportive.”

Immune reactions against proteins commonly used as molecular scissors might make CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing ineffective in people, a new study suggests.

About 79 percent of 34 blood donors tested had antibodies against the Cas9 protein from Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, Stanford University researchers report January 5 at bioRxiv.org. About 65 percent of donors had antibodies against the Cas9 protein from Streptococcus pyogenes.

Nearly half of 13 blood donors also had T cells that seek and destroy cells that make S. aureus Cas9 protein. The researchers did not detect any T cells that attack S. pyogenes Cas9, but the methods used to detect the cells may not be sensitive enough to find them, says study coauthor Kenneth Weinberg.
Cas9 is the DNA-cutting enzyme that enables researchers to make precise edits in genes. Antibodies and T cells against the protein could cause the immune system to attack cells carrying it, making gene therapy ineffective.

The immune reactions may be a technical glitch that researchers will need to work around, but probably aren’t a safety concern as long as cells are edited in lab dishes rather than in the body, says Weinberg, a stem cell biologist and immunologist.

“We think we need to address this now … as we move toward clinical trials,” he says, but “this is probably going to turn out to be more of a hiccup than a brick wall.”

Zeptonewton
ZEP-toe-new-ton n.
A unit of force equal to one billionth of a trillionth of a newton.

An itty-bitty object can be used to suss out teeny-weeny forces.

Scientists used an atom of the element ytterbium to sense an electromagnetic force smaller than 100 zeptonewtons, researchers report online March 23 in Science Advances. That’s less than 0.0000000000000000001 newtons — with, count ‘em, 18 zeroes after the decimal. At about the same strength as the gravitational pull between a person in Dallas and another in Washington, D.C., that’s downright feeble.
After removing one of the atom’s electrons, researchers trapped the atom using electric fields and cooled it to less than a thousandth of a degree above absolute zero (–273.15° Celsius) by hitting it with laser light. That light, counterintuitively, can cause an atom to chill out. The laser also makes the atom glow, and scientists focused that light into an image with a miniature Fresnel lens, a segmented lens like those used to focus lighthouse beams.

Monitoring the motion of the atom’s image allowed the researchers to study how the atom responded to electric fields, and to measure the minuscule force caused by particles of light scattering off the atom, a measly 95 zeptonewtons.