China science, technology news summary -- Dec. 12

BEIJING, Dec. 12 (Xinhua) -- The following is a summary of published science and technology news of China.

NEW GENERATION SUPERCOMPUTER

China has issued a list of 10 application challenges for its new generation supercomputer, with an aim to build a quintillion-scale supercomputing application ecology, Science and Technology Daily reported on Friday.

The list includes the fusion simulation of a magnetic confinement fusion reactor, fluid mechanics simulation of a full-size aerospace vehicle, dynamic simulation of a digital cell atomic system, as well as refined numerical weather forecasting.

It also covers efficient and high-throughput virtual drug screening, a super-scale artificial intelligence pre-training model, and high-resolution sky survey image processing for Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) observation data.

CHINA'S E-COMMERCE SALES

China's boosting e-commerce market is forecast to see sales volume of nearly 2 trillion U.S. dollars by 2025, said a report on digital megatrends released by FedEx Express.

China, the world's biggest e-commerce market, is embracing significant digitalization-related megatrends alongside its socio-economic growth, said the report.

ACCURATE ASTROMETRIC OBSERVATION

Chinese researchers have proposed a new method to precisely measure the astrometric positions of small near-Earth objects (NEOs), according to a recent research article published in the Astronomical Journal.

The precise astrometric observation of NEOs is valuable for research into the origin and evolution of the solar system, the detection and early warning of small NEOs, and deep-space navigation.