Sci-Tech



Sci-Tech

China Builds Ground Service Center for Satnav System

A ground data center to support China’s independent satellite navigation system received last December the go-ahead to offer location based services (LBS).

Located in central China’s Henan Province, the center includes 63 data stations capable of increasing the resolution of images downloaded from the Beidou Navigation Satellite System from 10 meters to a few millimeters. The data center was developed by the Information Engineering University of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in cooperation with various domestic companies and research institutes. The university also headed the original development of Beidou.

“From chips, to receivers, to servers, all of the center’s components are ‘Made-in-China,’ which makes it the first independent data system under the total control of our country. It is consequently of crucial significance to our country’s infrastructure and information security,” Beidou expert Li Guangyun said. According to Li, the Henan center, the first of its kind at the provincial level, has laid the technical foundations on which the navigation system can share data with more users in the future.

With myriad functions that include satellite navigation, precision time synchronization and speed measuring, the center’s services will first be applied to traffic, water resource, agriculture, and police contexts. A project to monitor the province’s freeway network will furthermore soon go live.

Chinese Scientists Develop Brain-like Computer Chip

The human brain is the world’s most sophisticated computer, and a group of Chinese scientists have developed a computer chip that works in a similar fashion. Jointly developed by scientists from Hangzhou Dianzi University and Zhejiang University in east China’s Zhejiang Province, the new chip, named “Darwin,” was unveiled in December 2015, after more than a year of research.

“It can perform intelligent computer tasks by simulating the human brain’s neural networks wherein neurons connect with one another via synapses,” Dr. Ma De from Hangzhou Dianzi University said.

This black plastic chip, smaller than a dime, contains 2,048 neurons and four million synapses, two of the fundamental units that make up the human brain. The new chip enables a computer to do more while using less electricity. “It can process the ‘fuzzy information’ that foxes conventional computer chips,” scientist Shen Juncheng from Zhejiang University said.

For example, it can recognize numbers in different handwriting, distinguish among various images, and move objects onscreen via the user’s brain signals. The brain-like chip is expected to be used in robotics, intelligent hardware systems, and brain-computer interfaces, but its development is still at the preliminary stage, according to Ma.

TrueNorth, an advanced brain-like chip developed by IBM, is among technologies on which the United States has placed a trade embargo with China, so Chinese scientists had to start their research from scratch. Darwin’s development marked a significant breakthrough in brain-inspired computing research in China. The research findings were published in the online English edition of academic journal Science China: Information Sciences.

43.7 percent

A report by the Asian Development Bank revealed that China’s share in Asian exports of hi-tech products rose from 9.4 percent in 2000 to 43.7 percent in 2014, the highest among all Asian countries. Its leading position is underpinned by high-speed rail, nuclear power and satellite.

Baidu’s Driverless

Car Completes Road Test

Chinese search engine giant Baidu announced on December 10, 2015 that its driverless car had completed road tests in which it automatically negotiated a wide range of road conditions. “Automatic driving raises the difficulties of driving in bad weather and traffic congestion,” Senior Vice President of Baidu Wang Jin said. “Carrying out tests in Beijing, a city riddled with complex road conditions, was a challenge, but we were successful,”Wang said.

The test vehicle left the Baidu building in Beijing’s Zhongguancun Science Park and drove to the Olympic Green Park via the G7 Highway and the city’s Fifth Ring Road, and returned via the same route. A driver was in the vehicle during the test, ready to take control in case of an emergency, according to the company. The vehicle reached a top speed of 100km/h during the test.

Launched in 2013, the company’s driverless car project is based on core “Baidu car brain” technology, which includes high-precision electronic mapping, positioning and decision-making systems.

China Launches Satellite to Shed Light on Invisible Dark Matter

China sent into space last December the country’s first space telescope whose mission is to seek out the smoking-gun-like signals of dark matter – invisible material that scientists believe constitutes most of the universe’s mass. The Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) satellite, nicknamed Wukong after the Monkey King, hero with penetrating eyes of Wu Cheng’en’s classical novel Journey to the West, blasted off on a Long March 2-D rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China’s Gansu Province.

The satellite will enter a sun-synchronous orbit at a height of 500 kilometers in order to observe the direction, energy and electric charge of high-energy particles in space. Scientists hope that the 1.9-tonne desksized satellite might then raise the “invisible cloak” on dark matter and so reveal more about this hypothetical mass.

Originally theorized by scientists flummoxed by absent mass and the strangely refracted light of faraway galaxies, dark matter is now widely accepted in the physics community, even though its existence has never been concretely proven. Scientists now believe that only five percent or so of the total mass-energy of the known universe is composed of ordinary matter, and that dark matter and dark energy make up the rest. Knowing more about dark matter could give humanity a clearer idea about the past as well as future of galaxies and the universe. This is revolutionary for both the world of physics and space science.

Through the new DAMPE satellite, scientists will search for evidence of dark matter, annihilation and decay. Wukong will scan space in all directions during the first two years, and later focus on sections where dark matter is most likely to be observed. More than 100 scientists will study the data Wukong sends back. Initial findings are expected to be published in the second half of 2016.