Beijing's local government unveiled a new action plan on Wednesday for industrial innovation and development in the robot industry from 2023-2025, aiming to boost self-development across the supply chain in key technology areas. 

The plan comes as a follow-up to government efforts to take an active approach in the preparation for future industry development in areas like robots and artificial intelligence (AI), experts said.

The plan aims to ramp up the industry layout of humanoid robots and support enterprises and universities in developing key robot components. The capital also aims to support the establishment of an innovation center for humanoid robots.

Specific goals are included in the plan. By 2025, Beijing's innovation capability in the robot industry will be greatly improved and 100 types of high-tech and high value-added robot products will be cultivated, along with 100 application scenarios.

The city's robot industry is expected to generate revenue of more than 30 billion yuan by 2025.

The application scenarios for humanoid robots are wide-ranging, with potential demand in industries ranging from the services sector to municipal firefighting, Xiang Ligang, a veteran technology analyst, told the Global Times on Wednesday. "We need to proactively plan and prepare for the future in order to be in the front league of the world," Xiang noted.

Talking about the importance of developing humanoid robots and AI, Xiang said that it requires high levels of technological integration and represents the core of technological development. 

For example, the robots need to be able to move and maintain balance, and they should be able to sense and react to the surrounding environment, while demonstrating certain levels of artificial intelligence and understanding.

China has been an active player in technology development in this area, which gives the country an advantage for reaching its ambitious goals.

In January 2022, fifteen government departments including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Development and Reform Commission rolled out a plan for China to become a global leader in robot technology innovation by 2025. 
China's development in the related industries has been conspicuous in terms of expansion and technology advancement. For example, from 2016 to 2020, the scale of the country's robot industry grew at an average annual compound rate of about 15 percent.

Breakthroughs in key technologies and components such as precision reducers and intelligent controllers have also accelerated, and innovations and application scenarios are constantly emerging.

"We have already made significant progress domestically in terms of technological foundations. As the government takes the lead, providing funding and policy support, we can see that opportunities in the new industries - robots and AI - are about to emerge," Xiang said.

"Surely, this will require long-term investment, and it may take years to see significant results, but in order to take the lead, we must start preparing now," the expert said.

Three men from Southwest China’s Guizhou Province who attempted to illegally cross the border into Myanmar to engage in telecom fraud have been handed prison sentences ranging from four to six months, a local intermediate people’s court announced on Monday. 

Before the three men surnamed Wu, Huang and Yang were apprehended by police in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province when they attempted to illegally cross the border into Myanmar this February, it was discovered that the group had already crossed the border and entered Myanmar on multiple occasions.  

Wu had successfully illegally crossed the border between China and Myanmar in July of 2019, October of 2019, March of 2020 and October of 2020. He was rejected by the local crime syndicates there because he could not type and was unable to be part of the syndicate’s local telecom fraud operations. 

Huang also illegally crossed the border between China and Myanmar in January of 2019, July of 2019 before being apprehended when he attempted to cross the border in August of 2020. 

Yang illegally crossed the border in March of 2019. He illegally crossed the border again in May of 2020 but turned himself in December of 2020 upon returning to China. 

The three defendants had planned to travel to Myanmar together in February but were discovered on route in Yunnan. 

Their behaviors violated the laws and regulations governing border management and committed the crime of illegal border crossing. 

According to China’s Criminal Law, Wu was sentenced to six months in prison and was fined 7,000 yuan ($965). Huang was handed five months in detention and was fined 6,800 yuan while Yang was sentenced to four months detention and fined 6,800 yuan. 

The local judge noted in the decision that the public must remain vigilant to the pitfalls of high-paying jobs abroad and that overseas jobs should be sought through normal employment channels.

China on Tuesday released implementation guidelines as part of standards for new emerging industries, vowing to continuously improve the technical level and internationalization of new industry standards, and to provide solid technical support for accelerating the high-quality development of new industries by 2035.

The guidelines, released by four ministries including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, have been divided into three steps. 

The guidelines said that by 2025, the standard system that supports the development of emerging industries will be gradually improved, and the standards that will lead the innovation and development of future industries will be accelerated.

By 2030, the standard system that meets the high-quality development needs of new industries will continue to improve, and the standardization work system will become more complete.

By 2035, the supply of standards to meet the high-quality development needs of new industries will be more sufficient, and new industry standardization work will be fully formed.

The emerging industries include eight major fields: new generation information technology, new energy, new materials, high-end equipment, new energy vehicles, green environmental protection, civil aviation, ships and ocean engineering equipment. 

As for future industries, the plan said it will focus on the metaverse, brain-computer interface, quantum information, humanoid robots, generative artificial intelligence, bio-manufacturing, future displays, future networks and new energy storage.

To ensure sound implementation, the plan said it will take concrete measures including increasing resource input and promoting national science and technology projects.

The total number of internet users in China has reached 1.079 billion, with internet usage increasing to 76 percent, according to a new report released on Monday. Observers said China's digital infrastructure, especially generative artificial intelligence (AI), is greatly empowering the country's economic and social development.

The number of internet users as of June 2023 saw an increase of 11.09 million compared to December 2022, according to the Report on China's Internet Development by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) on Monday. Also, a total of 2.937 million 5G base stations have been constructed and put into use.

The report showed almost all Chinese internet users are video users, with the number of network video users reaching 1.044 billion, an increase of 13.8 million from December 2022. 

About 82 percent of net users are purchasing online, with the number reaching 884 million, an increase of 38.8 million from December 2022, according to the report.

Observers said the fact that internet usage in China has increased to 76 percent shows that the country's digital infrastructure has entered a phase of rapid development and is likely to continue growing at a fast pace. Some mentioned that promoting internet usage in China's rural villages could offer a new growth point. 

By organizing events such as the Village Basketball Association, counties in Southwest China's Guizhou Province are setting an example for Chinese rural areas about how to use China's mature infrastructure and social media networks to connect with the outside world, which can also generate huge economic benefits.

Mao Li, vice chairman of the China Internet Association, believes that against the backdrop of gradual recovery in the first half of the year, the digital economy has become an important engine for stable growth.

The report said that since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese internet companies such as online retailers, ride-hailing services, and online travel firms, have seized the favorable market conditions and consolidated strong development momentum.

As of June, the user base for online shopping, ride-hailing services, and online travel bookings in China increased by over 30 million people, compared to the data for December 2022. 

In the first half of the year, the national online retail sales reached 7.16 trillion yuan, up 13.1 percent year-on-year, with rural online retail sales amounting to 1.12 trillion yuan, the CNNIC report said. 

The report said that as of June, China has built and put into operation of a total of 2.937 million 5G base stations, with 676 million 5G mobile phone users. 5G applications have also been integrated into 60 major economic sectors, accelerating their expansion into key areas such as healthcare, education, and transport. 

Zhang Hui, vice dean of the School of Economics at Peking University, told the Global Times the rapid construction of digital infrastructure in the first half of 2023 helps to accelerate economic and social development.

In addition, the CNNIC report said the accumulated mobile internet traffic has reached 142.3 billion GB, up 14.6 percent year-on-year. Mobile internet applications have flourished, with a monitored total of 2.6 million active apps in the domestic market, further covering the daily learning, work, and lifestyle needs of internet users.

Wang Changqing, a research fellow from the CNNIC, noted that generative AI techniques have been flourishing in the first half of 2023, which has injected increased vitality into the digital industrial environment. Along with the push to develop generative AI products, China has also rushed to integrate AI with the manufacturing industry, with more than 2,500 digital and intelligent workshops and factories built across the country so far, Wang noted. 

A wandering baby Jupiter could help explain why there are no planets closer to the sun than Mercury and why the innermost planet is so tiny, a new study suggests.

Jupiter’s core might have formed close to the sun and then meandered through the rocky planet construction zone. As the infant Jupiter moved, it would have absorbed some planet-building material while kicking out the rest. This would have starved the inner planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars — of raw materials, keeping them small and preventing any other planets from forming close to the sun, say planetary scientist Sean Raymond and colleagues online March 5 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“When I first came up with it, I thought it was ridiculous,” says Raymond, of the Laboratory of Astrophysics of Bordeaux in Floirac, France. “This model is kind of crazy, but it holds up.”

Rocky planets snuggled up to their suns are common in our galaxy. Many systems discovered by NASA’s Kepler space telescope have multiple planets — several larger than Earth — crammed into orbits smaller than Mercury’s. Though Kepler is biased toward finding scrunched-up solar systems, researchers wonder why there is a large gap between the sun and Mercury.

Scientists suspect that the inner planets of our solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago from a belt of debris that stretched between the current orbits of Venus and Earth. Mercury and Mars were built out of material along the edges of this belt, which explains why they are relatively small. Jupiter, traditionally thought to have formed much farther out, gets the blame for creating the belt’s outer edge. What shaped the inner edge has remained difficult to explain (SN Online: 3/23/15).

Raymond and colleagues ran computer simulations to see what would happen to the inner solar system if a body with three times the mass of Earth started inside Mercury’s orbit and then migrated away from the sun. They found that if the interloper didn’t move too fast or too slow, it would sweep clean the innermost parts of the disk of gas and dust that encircled the young sun and leave just enough material to form the rocky planets.

Raymond and colleagues also discovered that young Jupiter could have corralled enough debris to form a second core — one that got nudged away from the sun as Jupiter migrated. This second core could be the seed from which Saturn grew, the researchers suggest. Jupiter’s gravity could have dragged debris to the asteroid belt, too. Raymond says that might explain the origin of iron meteorites, which some researchers argue should have formed relatively close to the sun.
Jupiter plowing through the inner solar system sounds plausible, says Sourav Chatterjee, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. “But there are several ways this can go wrong.”

Building a giant planet core inside the orbit of Mercury is not hard, he says. Pebbles and boulders in the nascent solar system probably drifted inward. They could have piled up close to the sun where solar magnetic fields created turbulence that trapped infalling material. If just a fraction of this debris stuck together, a rocky orb a few times as massive as Earth could form.

Having proto-Jupiter wander to the outer solar system, however, is asking a lot, says Chatterjee. Gravitational interactions with spiral waves in the disk that surrounded the sun can propel a newborn planet either inward or outward. But how fast, how far and in which direction the planet travels depends on properties such as disk temperature and density, which Raymond and colleagues readily acknowledge. Their simulations assume and simplify disk characteristics to see if building the solar system inside-out is even plausible.

“We’re building up a logical chain that shows [this idea] is not completely crazy,” Raymond says. “We’re not saying it happened. Just if it happened, what would it do?”

Financial health takes a hit among people who smoke a lot of marijuana from adolescence into young adulthood, even if they don’t get hooked on the drug, researchers say.

The more years that individuals smoke pot four or more days a week, the more likely they are to experience serious money problems, say social epidemiologist Magdalena Cerdá of the University of California, Davis and her colleagues. Cash woes include defaulting on credit card payments, struggling to pay for food and rent and going on welfare.
In a representative sample of 947 New Zealanders studied from birth to age 38, adult economic and social problems — which also include a fall from middle-class status, stealing money at work and domestic violence — occurred about equally among regular marijuana and alcohol users, the scientists report March 22 in Clinical Psychological Science. Of 29 persistent pot smokers who grew up in middle-class families, 15 experienced downward social mobility, versus only 23 of 160 middle-class peers who never used marijuana.

Participants who consistently qualified as dependent on marijuana after age 18 encountered the worst money troubles over time, even exceeding those of alcoholic peers.

These findings don’t prove that regular pot smoking caused Kiwis’ financial difficulties, the investigators caution. But the association between marijuana and money troubles remained after accounting for childhood poverty, IQ, teenage delinquency and depression, impulsiveness, self-reported motivation to succeed in life, pot-related criminal convictions and abuse of alcohol and other drugs on top of frequent marijuana use.

Thousands of national parks have been established around the world to preserve wildlife. But towns, farms, ranches and roads have grown up around many of these parks, creating islands of wilderness in a sea of humanity. If the creatures inside are to thrive, they need ways to travel between the islands, contends “Wild Ways,” a new documentary from the TV series NOVA.

Isolation can be especially troublesome for large predators, such as lions, that live alone or in small groups. In some areas of Africa, lions can move between populations to avoid inbreeding. But some lions, such as the few in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater, are cut off from other groups. In such populations, cubs are born smaller, die younger and are more susceptible to disease. And drought or overhunting could easily wipe them out, the show notes.
To connect these smaller populations, conservationists are now building wildlife corridors between parks. One of the most ambitious projects is the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, which aims to create connections between grizzly bears in the Canadian Arctic and the western United States. Other large wildlife corridors are being planned in Central America, eastern Australia and the Himalayas. But there are often roadblocks. It can be difficult to persuade people to spend money on wildlife, and it can be even harder when those animals kill livestock or humans.

“It is important that we provide incentives for local communities, in particular, who should now look at wildlife as some form of economic asset to themselves,” says Simon Munthali of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, which is attempting to connect parks in five countries across southern Africa. With the right incentives, people will be more accepting of wildlife moving across land and may even benefit from it, he says in the documentary. Botswana, for instance, has developed a large ecotourism industry that provides jobs and money for local people, motivating animal protection.

The documentary is a bit too optimistic about the removal of hurdles that stand in the path of wildlife corridors, especially in the American West, where there is ongoing debate about how to manage public lands. And then there is the question of whether these corridors can be created fast enough to save the world’s dwindling animal populations. But, as Michael Soulé, one of the founders of the field of conservation biology, says: “It’s our last chance to protect the diversity of life on Earth.” “Wild Ways” makes a convincing case that we should be willing to try.

Before anybody even had a computer, Claude Shannon figured out how to make computers worth having.

As an electrical engineering graduate student at MIT, Shannon played around with a “differential analyzer,” a crude forerunner to computers. But for his master’s thesis, he was more concerned with relays and switches in electrical circuits, the sorts of things found in telephone exchange networks. In 1937 he produced, in the words of mathematician Solomon Golomb, “one of the greatest master’s theses ever,” establishing the connection between symbolic logic and the math for describing such circuitry. Shannon’s math worked not just for telephone exchanges or other electrical devices, but for any circuits, including the electronic circuitry that in subsequent decades would make digital computers so powerful.

It’s now conveniently a good time to celebrate Shannon’s achievements, on the occasion of the centennial of his birth (April 30) in Petoskey, Michigan, in 1916. Based on the pervasive importance of computing in society today, it wouldn’t be crazy to call the time since then “Shannon’s Century.”

“It is no exaggeration,” wrote Golomb, “to refer to Claude Shannon as the ‘father of the information age,’ and his intellectual achievement as one of the greatest of the twentieth century.”

Shannon is most well-known for creating an entirely new scientific field — information theory — in a pair of papers published in 1948. His foundation for that work, though, was built a decade earlier, in his thesis. There he devised equations that represented the behavior of electrical circuitry. How a circuit behaves depends on the interactions of relays and switches that can connect (or not) one terminal to another. Shannon sought a “calculus” for mathematically representing a circuit’s connections, allowing scientists to be able to design circuits effectively for various tasks. (He provided examples of the circuit math for an electronic combination lock and some other devices.)

“Any circuit is represented by a set of equations, the terms of the equations corresponding to the various relays and switches in the circuit,” Shannon wrote. His calculus for manipulating those equations, he showed, “is exactly analogous to the calculus of propositions used in the symbolic study of logic.”

As an undergraduate math (and electrical engineering) major at the University of Michigan, Shannon had learned of 19th century mathematician George Boole’s work on representing logical statements by algebraic symbols. Boole devised a way to calculate logical conclusions about propositions using binary numbers; 1 represented a true proposition and 0 a false proposition. Shannon perceived an analogy between Boole’s logical propositions and the flow of current in electrical circuits. If the circuit plays the role of the proposition, then a false proposition (0) corresponds to a closed circuit; a true proposition (1) corresponds to an open circuit. More elaborate math showed how different circuit designs would correspond to addition or multiplication and other features, the basis of the “logic gates” designed into modern computer chips.

For his Ph.D. dissertation, Shannon analyzed the mathematics of genetics in populations, but that work wasn’t published. In 1941 he began working at Bell Labs; during World War II, he wrote an important (at the time secret) paper on cryptography, which required deeper consideration of how to quantify information. After the war he developed those ideas more fully, focusing on using his 1s and 0s, or bits, to show how much information could be sent through a communications channel and how to communicate it most efficiently and accurately.

In 1948, his two papers on those issues appeared in the Bell System Technical Journal. They soon were published, with an introductory chapter by Warren Weaver, in a book titled The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Today that book is regarded as the founding document of information theory.

For Shannon, communication was not about the message, or its meaning, but about how much information could be communicated in a message (through a given channel). At its most basic, communication is simply the reproduction of a message at some point remote from its point of origin. Such a message might have a “meaning,” but such meaning “is irrelevant to the engineering problem” of transferring the message from one point to another, Shannon asserted. “The significant aspect is that that actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages.” Information, Shannon decided, is a measure of how much a communication reduces the ignorance about which of those possible messages has been transmitted.

In a very simple communication system, if the only possible messages are “yes” and “no,” then each message (1 for yes, 0 for no) reduces your ignorance by half. By Shannon’s math, that corresponds to one bit of information. (He didn’t coin the term “bit” — short for binary digit — but his work established its meaning.) Now consider a more complicated situation — an unabridged English dictionary, which should contain roughly half a million words. One bit would correspond to a yes-or-no that the word is in the first half of the dictionary. That reduces ignorance, but not very much. Each additional bit would reduce the number of possible words by half. Specifying a single word from the dictionary (eliminating all the ignorance) would take about 19 bits. (This fact is useful for playing the game of 20 Questions — just keep asking about the secret word’s location in the dictionary.)

Shannon investigated much more complicated situations and devised theorems for calculating information quantity and how to communicate it efficiently in the presence of noise. His math remains central to almost all of modern digital technology. As electrical engineer Andrew Viterbi wrote in a Shannon eulogy, Shannon’s 1948 papers “established all the key parameters and limits for optimal compression and transmission of digital information.”

Beyond its practical uses, Shannon’s work later proved to have profound scientific significance. His math quantifying information in bits borrowed the equations expressing the second law of thermodynamics, in which the concept of entropy describes the probability of a system’s state. Probability applied to the ways in which a system’s parts could be arranged, it seemed, mirrored the probabilities involved in reducing ignorance about a possible message. Shannon, well aware of this connection, called his measure entropy as well. Eventually questions arose about whether Shannon’s entropy and thermodynamic entropy shared more than a name.

Shannon apparently wasn’t sure. He told one writer in 1979 that he thought the connection between his entropy and thermodynamics would “hold up in the long run” but hadn’t been sufficiently explored. But nowadays a deep conceptual link shows up not only between Shannon’s information theory and thermodynamics, but in fields as diverse as quantum mechanics, molecular biology and the physics of black holes.
Shannon’s understanding of information plays a central role, for instance, in explaining how the notorious Maxwell’s demon can’t violate thermodynamics’ second law. Much of that work is based on Landauer’s principle, the requirement that energy is expended when information is erased. In developing that principle, Rolf Landauer (an IBM physicist) was himself influenced both by Shannon’s work and the work of Sadi Carnot in discerning the second law in the early 19th century.

Something Shannon and Carnot had in common, Landauer once emphasized to me, was that both discovered mathematical restrictions on physical systems that were independent of the details of the system. In other words, Carnot’s limit on the efficiency of steam engines applied to any sort of engine, no matter what it was made of or how it was designed. Shannon’s principles specifying the limits on information compression and transmission apply no matter what technology is used to do the compressing or sending. (Although in Shannon’s case, Landauer added, certain conditions must be met.)

“They both find limits for what you can do which are independent of future inventions,” Landauer told me. That is, they have grasped something profound about reality that is not limited to a specific place or time or thing.

So it seems that Shannon saw deeply not only into the mathematics of circuits, but also into the workings of nature. Information theorist Thomas Cover once wrote that Shannon belongs “in the top handful of creative minds of the century.” Some of Shannon’s original theorems, Cover noted, were not actually proved rigorously. But over time, details in the sketchy proofs have been filled in and Shannon’s intuitive insights stand confirmed. “Shannon’s intuition,” Cover concluded, “must have been anchored in a deep and natural theoretical understanding.” And it seems likely that Shannon’s intuition will provide even more insights into nature in the century ahead.

A decent office scanner has beaten X-ray blasts from multimillion-dollar synchrotron setups in revealing how air bubbles kill plant leaves during drought.

Intricate fans and meshes of plant veins carrying water are “among the most important networks in biology,” says Timothy Brodribb of the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia. When drought weakens the water tension in veins, air from plant tissues bubbles in, killing leaves much as bubble embolisms and clots in blood vessels can kill human tissue. As climate change and population growth increase risks of water shortage, Brodribb and other researchers are delving into the details of what makes some plants more resistant than others to drought.
The high energy of X-rays destroys delicate leaf tissue. So, based on a chat with microfluidics specialist Philippe Marmottant of the French National Center for Scientific Research, Brodribb tried repeatedly scanning a leaf with a light source below it to reveal darkening lines as air bubbles shot through the veins. A microscope or scanner proved perfect. Tracked this way, an invasion of killer bubbles “looks like a lightning storm,” he says.

He was surprised to see that bigger veins, despite their robust looks, fail before tiny ones (blue indicates earliest failures; red, the latest), as seen in an oak leaf (lower right) and Pteris fern (top). And networks in ferns with simpler branching patterns, as in the Adiantum ferns at bottom left, crash quickly.

This system of visualizing plant plumbing gave better resolution than expensive and elaborate X-ray techniques had, Brodribb, Marmottant and Diane Bienaimé report online April 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Something catapulted a pair of stars from the outer rim of our galaxy, but astronomers aren’t sure what. A binary star known as PB 3877 is rocketing away at about 2 million kilometers per hour — possibly fast enough to escape the galaxy’s gravitational pull — and all the usual explanations for such speedy stars fall short. Astrophysicist Péter Németh of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany and colleagues report the discovery in the April 10 Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Many galactic escapees get kicked out after a close brush with the supermassive black hole in the Milky Way’s center. But PB 3877, first noticed in 2011 and currently about 18,000 light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices, has been nowhere near that behemoth. A supernova could be responsible; it has happened before (SN Online: 3/5/15). But PB 3877 is two stars traveling together. A supernova would have torn the two apart. Németh and colleagues propose that the duo may be left over from a smashup between the Milky Way and a smaller galaxy. If that’s the case, then there might be others like PB 3877 lurking in the galactic outskirts.