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Asphalt roads reach all counties of Tibet

Southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region had constructed asphalt roads in all its counties by August, the regional transport department said.

The region had also built hard roads in 86.4 percent of its townships and 61.4 percent of administrative villages. So far, it has rebuilt 38,200 km of rural highways, and 86,000 km of rural highways have been opened to traffic, according to the department.

Tibet has a huge amount of land, harsh natural environment and poor transportation conditions due to historical reasons. By the end of 2015, highways had not reached two townships and 230 administrative villages in the region, said Xu Wenqiang, director of the department.

The region has seen accelerated development in rural road construction and transportation in farming and pastoral areas in the last five years. Passenger transport network has also improved in Tibet, with 74 counties, 476 townships and 2,050 administrative villages accessible by buses, Xu added.

So far, 547,000 people have been employed in highway construction projects. Farmers and herdsmen have seen their income increase by 13.72 billion yuan (about 2 billion U.S. dollars) in total, said Tashi Norbu, who works for the rural highway office of the regional transport department. 

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Big Tech Embraces New Cold War Nationalism

Last month, the CEOs of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon were hauled before the U.S. Congress to be interrogated about their companies’ monopolistic behavior. While Democrats relentlessly grilled the four CEOs over their breach of antitrust laws, Republicans were just as interested in questioning their national loyalty and asking whether they had ties with the Chinese military. At the hearing, Republican Rep. Ken Buck accused Google of declining to work with the U.S. Defense Department while falsely claiming that the company collaborated with the Chinese military. In response, Google CEO Sundar Pichai fought nationalism with patriotism, stating that Google was in fact “proud to support the U.S. government” and boasted that they had “recently signed a big project with the Department of Defense.”
Coming from Pichai, the immigrant CEO of a company known for its progressive values, boasting of Google’s collaboration with the Pentagon may just seem like a defensive response to being called treasonous. But Google’s commitment to the military had long preceded this moment. The company’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, has long advocated for deepening ties with the Pentagon and now serves as the chairman of the Defense Innovation Board—an initiative to transfer technological innovation from Silicon Valley to the U.S. military. Last month, a federal advisory commission that Schmidt chairs also recommended the creation of an artificial intelligence (AI) school to directly staff the U.S. government, including the Defense Department, with new technologists.

Google is far from alone. Late last year, Microsoft won a $10 billion cloud contract with the Pentagon with the goal of “increasing [the military’s] lethality.” Amazon, which also fought aggressively for the $10 billion contract, continues to provide cloud infrastructure for the CIA and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Underpinning this new affinity for the U.S. government is a widespread anxiety that the rise of China’s tech industry may spell the end of Silicon Valley’s dominance. In the past year, the tech investor Peter Thiel and Schmidt himself both wrote New York Times op-eds with the same warning: Silicon Valley must start working with the Pentagon, or else China will win.

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Four Chinese COVID-19 vaccines undergoing phase-3 clinical trials

Four Chinese COVID-19 vaccine candidates have started international phase-3 clinical trials, according to the State Council joint prevention and control mechanism against COVID-19.

Some of the phase-3 trials are expected to complete the first round of vaccinations in early September, with preliminary data expected as early as November.

Phase-3 clinical trial usually involves thousands of people to verify the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines, which is the key to their market approval.

As the epidemic has been under control in China, the country no longer has conditions for large-scale clinical trials, so all the phase-3 trials are being carried out overseas.

Two inactivated COVID-19 vaccines developed by the China National Biotec Group (CNBG) have been approved for phase-3 clinical trials in several countries in the Middle East and South America, involving more than 30,000 people, according to Yang Xiaoming, president of the CNBG.

An inactivated COVID-19 vaccine developed by Sinovac Biotech Co., Ltd. is undergoing phase-3 clinical trials in some countries in South America and Southeast Asia, according to Yin Weidong, chairman and CEO of Sinovac.

A recombinant COVID-19 vaccine with the modified defective adenovirus as the vector is also undergoing phase-3 trials.

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China’s largest oceanographic research vessel launched

China’s largest oceanographic research vessel dubbed the “Sun Yat-sen University,” was launched at Jiangnan Shipyard in Shanghai on Friday, about 92 years after China’s first scientific expedition to the Xisha Islands in the South China Sea.

China’s largest oceanographic research vessel dubbed the “Sun Yat-sen University,” was launched at Jiangnan Shipyard in Shanghai on Friday, about 92 years after China’s first scientific expedition to the Xisha Islands in the South China Sea.

Construction of the research vessel began on October 28, 2019. With a length of 114.3 meters, a width of 19.4 meters, and a draft of 9.3 meters, the ship has a range of 15,000 nautical miles. 

The research vessel with a displacement of 6,900 tons is capable of global navigation in unlimited navigation areas and can carry more than a dozen mobile container laboratories. It is capable of completing various kinds of scientific research from the seabed to the sky of 10,000 meters, including ocean, atmosphere, geophysics and the ecological environment.

The ship also has a helicopter landing platform, which is convenient for scientific researchers and materials transport, and it can also be used as a drone landing platform, which could expand the scope of scientific research observation. In the future, a 760-square-meter stationary laboratory will be built on the ship.


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Fujian Longyan Bridge completes second rotation

福建龙岩市龙岩大桥 The bridge had undergone its first rotation a little over four months ago. The bridge tower was rotated 69-degree the first time to allow the completion of the bridge deck installation.
At around 2:30 a.m. the cable-stayed bridge and deck with a total weight of 23,600 tons completed a 21-degree counterclockwise rotation, it took about an hour. It is the first time in the world for the “second horizontal rotation” construction process.

The reason for the second rotation is because there’s a “double risk” in the construction of the Longyan Bridge.
The first is that the Longyan Bridge will cross the existing Ganlong Railway and Longxia Railway 赣龙铁路、龙厦铁路 . Nearly 120 trains pass through these two railroads every day.
The second is that the shortest distance between the main tower and the railway line is only 6.5 meters.
The two turns are to overcome these two risks.
When completed the Longyearbyen Bridge will be an important link in the Longyan expressway system improving the efficiency of local transport operations and helping to accelerate the development of the old area.

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Dual control

There are two main approaches to developing artificial general intelligence. One is rooted in neuroscience, and attempts to construct circuits that closely mimic the brain. The other is grounded in computer science, and uses computers to execute machine-learning algorithms. In this week’s issue, Luping Shi and his colleagues reveal the Tianjic chip 天机芯 — an electronic chip that integrates the two approaches into one hybrid platform. The Tianjic chip has multiple functional cores that are readily reconfigurable, enabling it to accommodate both machine-learning algorithms and brain-inspired circuits. The researchers demonstrate the potential of this approach by incorporating one of their chips into a riderless autonomous bicycle, which can self-balance, is voice controllable and can detect and avoid obstacles, all as a result of the Tianjic chip’s simultaneous processing of versatile algorithms and models.