Beijing Daxing International Airport had its fourth anniversary on Monday, having been put into operation on September 25, 2019. It had notched more than 80 million passenger trips as of Sunday, the airport said.

The airport has had a total of 682,900 flight takeoffs and landings, a passenger throughput of 82.48 million trips, and a cargo throughput of 557,300 tons, the airport added.

Daxing airport restarted international passenger flights in January this year, and has made efforts to expand routes to Europe, North America, Japan and South Korea, while continuously expanding into the Southeast Asian and Oceanian markets.

As of the end of August, the airport has opened a total of 202 routes, covering 185 destinations in 18 countries and regions.

The airport conducted 7.94 million passenger trips in the two months' summer travel rush that ended on August 31, up 163 percent from the same period last year and the best performance in the summer travel rush since the airport opened.

The Civil Aviation Administration of China is accelerating the resumption of outbound travel.

The number of international passenger flights per week has recovered to 52 percent of the 2019 level, and the number of countries with passenger flight connectivity has recovered to nearly 90 percent of pre-pandemic levels, the administration said earlier this month.

A total of 826 million domestic passenger trips were made in China during the 8-day Mid-Autumn Festival & National Day holidays, a year-on-year increase of 71.3%. Holiday tourism generated 753.43 billion yuan ($104.68 billion), up 129.5% year-on-year, official data showed on Friday.

The first convertor transformer using China-made on-load tap changers have successfully been put into operation on Sunday at a crucial west-to-east power transmission project located in South China's Guangdong Province, according to a report published by xinhuanet.com. 

Feng Dong, a senior executive at a subsidiary of the China Southern Power Grid, was quoted by the report as saying that China had completed the technological breakthrough from scratch in field of convertor transformer on-load tap changers, and has achieved full localization of components and other products' industrial chains.

This marks the fact that China has officially broken through the restrictions of this core technology in high-end electric equipment, Feng said.

Previously, long-distance, large capacity and high voltage direct current facilities are required for the transmission of electricity from western to eastern areas in China, and both terminals for transmitting and receiving power need to use the equipment of converter transformer that weighs more than 300 tons.

On-load tap changers of a convertor transformer are used to adjust the voltage, power load and current, similar to the function of a gearbox in a car. 

Deng Jun, a senior technical expert at the aforementioned company, also said that an on-load tap changer of a convertor transformer has about 1,000 components, and is a highly complex and sophisticated piece of equipment.

According to the Xinhua report, this technology used to be grasped by only a few overseas companies, and when technical fault took place previously, Chinese companies had no choice but to replace the products with imported goods of the same model, whose ordering cycle took about three to four months, thus posing challenges to the safety of power operation in the country. 

The report also cited a deputy general manager of the company as saying that the company has established a team in partnership with upper stream and downstream companies along the industrial chains. 

After more than two years' of efforts, the team has broken through vacuum switch tubes and other technical bottlenecks to successfully research the large capacity convertor transformer on-load tap changer with rated capacity of 6,000 kilovolt-ampere, maximum voltage of 6,000 volt and maximum rated current of 1,300 ampere.

Using the domestically made on-load tap changers could save nearly 40 million yuan ($5.56 million) In the building of ultra-high voltage direct current power transmission projects, the manager said. 

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.

China successfully sent the Land Exploration-4 01 satellite, the world's first high-orbit synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite, into a preset orbit via a Long March-3B carrier rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Southwest China's Sichuan Province at 1:26 am on Sunday.

The Global Times learned from the China National Space Administration (CNSA) which oversaw the organization of the launch and manages the satellite program, that the newly launched satellite is the world's first high-orbit SAR satellite that has entered the engineering implementation phase. Able to provide all-weather and all-day observation of China's territory and surrounding areas, it will further improve the country's space-based disaster monitoring system and is of great significance for comprehensively boosting the country's disaster prevention, reduction, and relief capabilities.

The Land Exploration-4 01 satellite is a remote sensing research satellite listed in the country's Medium and Long Term Development Plan for Civilian Space Infrastructure (2015-2025.)

The satellite operates in an inclined geosynchronous orbit and is equipped with a synthetic aperture radar payload with high resolution, wide coverage, multiple modes, and lightweight advantages, the CNSA revealed.

Compared with low-orbit satellites and optical satellites, the Land Exploration-4 01 satellite combines the advantages of a short revisit period and large imaging swath in high-orbit observation with the advantages of microwave observation that is not limited by weather conditions (all-weather) and not limited by lighting conditions (all-day), which can improve the accuracy and efficiency of identifying abnormal changes in weather and enhance the nation's comprehensive disaster prevention and control capabilities, the CNSA said in a press release sent to the Global Times on Sunday.

With the satellite now in orbit, it will enrich China's key regional observation methods and provide all-weather and all-day observation of China's territory and surrounding areas, meeting the needs of disaster prevention and reduction, earthquake monitoring, land and resources surveying, as well as applications in industries such as the marine, water conservancy, meteorology, agriculture, environmental protection, and forestry industries, according to the press release.

State departments led by China's Ministry of Emergency Management, including the Ministry of Natural Resources, Ministry of Water Resources and China Meteorological Administration, are key users of the satellite and they will carry out construction of ground systems and operation systems according to their specific needs.

The satellite was developed by the China Academy of Spacecraft Technology (CAST.)

This was the second disaster prevention-related satellite launched within a week by China, following the codenamed Environmental Surveyor 2F, launched by a Long March 2C rocket from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in North China's Shanxi Province on Wednesday.

Also developed by CAST in Beijing, the satellite is tasked with using its synthetic aperture radar to obtain images and data to support disaster prevention and mitigation, ecological monitoring and emergency response efforts. Its users are the Ministry of Emergency Management and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment.

On Sunday, space industry observers hailed the country's innovative strength in the space domain, which they say has been increasingly creating value in civilian applications and shows that the country's space development upholds the concept of "putting people first."

During the recent heavy rainfall that impacted the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region in North China as well as Northeast China's Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces, 16 satellites, including Gaofen-3 remote sensing satellites, were deployed to provide rapid imaging services to assist disaster monitoring, according to the state-owned aerospace giant China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) on Saturday.

The CASC told the Global Times on Sunday that these near real-time satellite images taken over the hardest-hit flood areas have provided scientific data services to support disaster relief work.

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.

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?”

The last of a group of dense minerals that make up much of Earth’s crust and upper mantle has been found tucked inside a meteorite that slammed into Australia 135 years ago. The newly discovered mineral, a variety of majorite, is potentially abundant in sinking tectonic plates and could help illuminate the behavior of the deep Earth, its discoverers say.

Each identical component of this mineral contains 32 magnesium atoms, 32 silicon atoms and 96 oxygen atoms arranged in a distorted cube. Natural samples of MgSiO3 tetragonal garnet, the mineral’s scientific moniker, had eluded scientists since the mineral was first artificially produced in 1985.
Naotaka Tomioka, a mineralogist at the Kochi Institute for Core Sample Research in Japan, and colleagues discovered 0.5-micrometer-wide grains of the mineral in a slice of the 19th century meteorite. While many minerals found in meteorites form when slamming into Earth, the new mineral formed in space when two asteroids collided at a relative speed of about 2 kilometers per second, the researchers report online March 25 in Science Advances.

One challenge remains for the researchers: As discoverers of the mineral, they now get to name it.