Nanowerk February 18, 2020 People rely on a highly tuned sense of touch to manipulate objects, but injuries to the skin and the simple act of wearing gloves can impair this ability. Researchers in China have developed a visually aided tactile enhancement system for precise motion control by combining ultrathin, highly sensitive, crack-based strain sensors and signal acquisition circuit with real-time display equipment. With the optimization of the thicknesses of the substrates and sensitive films of the strain sensors, the device has a detection limit as low as 0.01% and an ultrahigh gauge factor of 44 013 at a strain of […]
Tag Archives: S&T China
Quantum memories entangled over 50-kilometer cable
Phys.org February 13, 2020 Researchers in China have demonstrated entanglement of two atomic ensembles in one laboratory via photon transmission through city-scale optical fibres. The atomic ensembles function as quantum memories that store quantum states. They used cavity enhancement to efficiently create atom–photon entanglement and quantum frequency conversion to shift the atomic wavelength to telecommunications wavelengths. They realized entanglement over 22 kilometres of field-deployed fibres via two-photon interference and entanglement over 50 kilometres of coiled fibres via single-photon interference. The experiment could be extended to nodes physically separated by similar distances, which would thus form a functional segment of the […]
China’s Next Five-Year Energy Plan Will Shape the Global Energy Future
Next Big Future January 23, 2020 The 14th Five-Year Plan will cover 2021-25. The full plan will be released around March 2021, but partial drafts and releases will be published in 2020. China is projected to reduce the proportion of coal in its energy mix to below 58% by 2020. There are proposals to set a target of coal usage at 55% of China’s energy mix by 2030 for the 14th five-year plan covering 2021-2025. Greenhouse gas emissions to peak around 2025-2030. In March the China Electricity Council suggested that coal-power capacity should grow to 1,300 GW by 2030. Hydropower […]
Coating helps electronics stay cool by sweating
EurekAlert January 22, 2020 For cooling in phones, phase change materials, such as waxes and fatty acids are used for absorbing heat produced by devices when they melt. However, the total amount of energy exchanged during the solid-liquid transition is relatively low. Researchers in China found MOFs were the most promising for absorbing moisture from the air and release water vapor when heated as they can store a large amount of water and thus take away more heat when heated. They found that MIL-101Cr coating was able to delay the temperature rise of the sheets, and the effect increased with […]
Lasers learn to accurately spot space junk
Phys.org December 24, 2019 Scientists have developed space junk identification systems, but it has proven tricky to pinpoint the swift, small specks of space litter. Researchers in China trained a back propagation neural network to recognize space debris using two correcting algorithms. The Genetic Algorithm and Levenberg-Marquardt optimized the neural network’s thresholds for recognition of space debris, ensuring the network wasn’t too sensitive and could be trained on localized areas of space. The team demonstrated the improved accuracy by testing against three traditional methods. The observation data of 95 stars was used to solve the algorithm coefficients from each method, […]
A review of single molecule-based electronic devices
Eurekalert November 21, 2019 At present traditional electronic devices based on semiconductor materials are facing technical, technological limitations and theoretical limitations. Single molecule electronic devices are considered one of the most hopeful candidates. Researchers in China provide an overview of single molecule electronic devices, including molecular electronic devices and electrode types. Several molecular electronic devices are presented, including molecular diodes, molecular memories, molecular wires, molecular field effect transistors (FET) and molecular switches. The influence of different electrode types of the transport characteristics and other characteristics of molecular devices are briefly introduced, such as potential thermoelectric effects. The future challenges to […]
Researchers capture moving object with ghost imaging
Science Daily November 13, 2019 Ghost imaging has been limited to stationary objects because it takes a long time to project the sequence of light patterns onto the object that is necessary to reconstruct an image making blurry. The ghost imaging technique forms an image by correlating a beam that interacts with the object and a reference beam that does not interact with te object. Individually, the beams don’t carry any meaningful information about the object. To apply ghost imaging to moving objects researchers in China used a small number of light patterns to capture the position and trajectory of […]
Construction starts on first Zhangzhou unit
World Nuclear News October 17, 2019 In mid-2017, China Nuclear Industry No24 Construction Company won the contract for the nuclear island civil engineering. The first phase of the Zhangzhou nuclear power plant has carried out a number of design improvements and optimisations based on the reference power plant, further improving the safety and economy of the unit. Zhangzhou 1 is the fifth Hualong One unit that it is building, and serial construction of the reactor design has officially started…read more.
China Claims Metamaterial Breakthroughs for Stealth Fighters
Next Big Future July 30, 2019 Researchers in China claim that they created the world’s first mathematical model to precisely describe how electromagnetic waves behave when they strike a piece of metal engraved with microscopic patterns. In one test, the new technology cut the strength of a reflected radar signal – measured in decibels – by between 10 and nearly 30dB in a frequency range from 0.3 to 40 gigahertz…read more.
World’s First “Quantum Drone” for Impenetrable Air-to-Ground Data Links Takes Off
IEEE Spectrum June 18, 2019 Researchers in China have developed an eight-rotor octocopter drone whose 35-kilogram weight at takeoff, includes its onboard quantum communication system. The quantum drone can operate while hovering in midair for 40 minutes at a time. It can maintain two air-to-ground links, each roughly 100 meters long, and can receive and transmit entangled photons during the daytime, on a clear night, and even on a rainy night. According to some scientists a communications network featuring quantum drones could be stymied by a number of challenges such as photons scattering, absorbed, or otherwise lost on their way […]