China successfully launched a reusable experimental spacecraft with a Long March-2F carrier rocket from the Jiuquan 酒泉 Satellite Launch Center in Northwest China on Friday. The spacecraft will return to Earth after some time in orbit, designed for peaceful use of space.
9-6-20 After flying in orbit for two days, China’s reusable spacecraft, which was launched from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on Friday, successfully returned to its designated landing site on Sunday.
China National Nuclear Power Co., a unit of China National Nuclear Corp., said fuel loading started at the Fuqing No. 5 reactor 福清核电5号 , the first to use the domestic technology 华龙一号(原称ACP-1000), on Sept. 4 after securing an operating license from the nation’s Ministry of Ecology & Environment.
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.
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.
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.
According to Nie Wenbin, manager of 中车株洲电力机车有限公司 urban rail system research and development department of CNR Zhuzhou, this high-energy super-capacitor tram will be used in the rapid transit system of Kunming Changshui International Airport, using three groups of 60,000 fara high-energy supercapacitor power supply. 7 modules (i.e. 7 cars) with a maximum capacity of 500 passengers, can be recharged within 30 seconds of passengers loading and unloading, and run 5 km at a maximum speed of 70 km per hour.