Space feat, SARS research among top achievements

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, January 16, 2004

Space feat, SARS research among top achievements

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China's space achievements, unsurprisingly, head the country's top-10 achievements in science and technology last year, according to results released on Tuesday based on votes of the 582 members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Chinese Academy of Engineers (CAE).

The annual event represents one of the most authoritative reviews of scientific research and technological accomplishments for the previous year.

All the CAS and CAE members, regarded as the best in their respective disciplines, were asked to look through progress in their own disciplines as well as in others over the past year and vote according to academic significance and impact.

Major technological accomplishments as well as progress in issues related to daily life also feature in the list.

China's first manned space mission was top of the ladder not only because it boosted national morale but also because it became a touchstone for the country's overall scientific capacity and technological innovation.

So is another, the initial operation of the colossal Three Gorges Reservoir, says Xu Kuangdi, president of the CAE.

He ascribes the two entries to the strategy of China's scientific research, which now focuses on areas projected to help the country's economic growth and social well-being.

The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic that overran China and the rest of the world last year also helped bring about some of the finest research achievements, such as the sequencing of the genome of the SARS virus by Chinese researchers.

Chinese scientists continued to make outstanding achievements in nanotechnology and biological research of rice, which also find place in the top-10 list.

In the previous two years, research in the two areas -- which have won large sums of government research funds -- featured in the list.

Investment by the government in scientific research has increased tremendously over the past few years, with the CAS research institutes the major beneficiaries.

Billions have been channelled to support a host of key projects in important areas in the hope that Chinese scientists soon come up with advanced accomplishments that lead the world.

So it's no surprise that out of the 10 advances, six were made by institutes under CAS, which is known as the "national team'' of China's scientific research.

Lu Yongxiang, president of CAS, calls for more support from the government for basic scientific research, adding that science advances today not only depend on creativity of scientists, but increasingly hinge on continued, systematic funding.

The following is the top-10 list:

1.China's first manned space mission. After having spent about 21 hours in space travelling more than 600,000 kilometres, China's first astronaut Yang Liwei, aboard the re-entry capsule of Shenzhou-V spaceship, landed safely in Inner Mongolia on October 16 last year. The successful mission makes China the third country in the world to send a man into space.

2.Molecular mechanism for rice production and breakthroughs in super hybrid rice breeding. A team of Chinese plant geneticists headed by Li Jiayang of the CAS Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology reported their discovery on molecular mechanism of rice tillering, an agronomic trait of vital importance in the production of rice, in the April issue of Nature magazine.

The researchers unravelled a long-standing puzzle in crop growth by isolating and characterizing Monoculum 1 (MOC1), a gene having a key bearing on the process of rice tillering.

The "super hybrid rice cultivation programme'' led by Yuan Longping made major progress.

An average of 12.1 tons of rice per hectare was yielded in the 6.8-hectare experimental field in a demonstration zone in Xiangtan County in Central China's Hunan Province.

In another demonstration zone in Longshan County, an average yield was 12.3 tons per hectare. The rice, if planted widely across the country, will increase the total rice output by 30 billion kilograms, enough to feed up to 75 million people.

3. Initial progress in SARS research. Researchers were successful in the isolation of whole genome sequencing and test kit development of SARS coronavirus.

They also made significant progress in their research into the cause of SARS, its clinical diagnosis and treatment, biological protection equipment, anti-SARS drugs and inactivated SARS coronavirus vaccines.

4. Surface-modification technique and fabrication of artificial nanocluster crystals.

Researchers led by Lu Ke of CAS Institute of Metals Research (IMR) solved the problem of nitriding the surface of metal materials, applying nanotechnology.

In a thesis published in the January 30 issue of Science magazine, they show that the nitriding temperature of iron can be greatly reduced, from above 500 degrees centigrade to 300 degrees centigrade, by applying nanotechnology.

A team headed by Jia Jinfeng and Xue Qikun at the CAS Institute of Physics succeeded in fabricating, for the first time, many kinds of artificial nanocluster crystals on silicon substrate, by using magic clustering process on a periodic template.

5. First commercial magnetically-levitated rail system in the world put into operation in Shanghai.

The Shanghai Transrapid Maglev Line is a major outcome of Sino-German science-and-technology co-operation. It takes a train only about eight minutes to cover 33 kilometres, and the maximum speed reached 430 kilmetres per hour.

6. Water storage at the Three-Gorges Reservoir, the world's largest water control project, and the operation of its permanent ship lock and its first batch of power generating units.

7. Progress towards quantum communication over large distances.

Pan Jianwei, a researcher at the Department of Modern Physics at the University of Science and Technology of China, and his co-workers of University of Vienna made contributions that are believed to be an important step towards long-distance quantum communications.

8. New super computer.

Researchers from the CAS Institute of Computing Technology developed Dawning 4000L, a computer super server that is able to perform up to 3 trillion floating-point operations per second.

It is the largest IDC (International Digital Centre) data processing machine in China and is suitable for both high performance scientific computing applications and information services.

9. Progress in controllable thermal nuclear fusion studies. Researchers of the CAS Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP) made exciting achievements in their 2002-03 winter experimental campaign on HT-7, a super-conducting Tokamak unit.

Tomkama is a doughnut-shaped chamber used in fusion research in which plasma is heated and confined by magnetic fields. The scientists obtained repeated high temperature plasma discharge over one minute, keeping China in a leading position in the field.

10. "Four-winged'' dinosaurs. On the basis of their studies on 124-128-million-year-old fossils unearthed in Northeast China's Liaoning Province, researchers led by paleontologists Xu Xing and Zhou Zhonghe from the CAS Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) reported in Nature magazine (January 23, 2003) their discovery of a new species of microraptor with "four wings," that is, its two legs have asymmetrically arrayed feathers, just like its two normal wings.

The discovery supports the hypothesis that the birds' ancestors' flying capability stemmed from their first running increasingly fast and then getting airborne.

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