Month: November 2020

(Peoples Daily Online)14:24, September 03, 2020

China’s digital currency is undergoing internal closed pilot tests in several Chinese cities and will be tested in scenarios at the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, according to the Monetary Policy Department under the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), the country’s central bank, on Aug. 25.

People pay their medical fees through self-service machines in the People’s Hospital of Wuxing district, Huzhou, east China’s Zhejiang province. (Photo/Xinhua)

The tests in Shenzhen in south China’s Guangdong province, Chengdu in southwest China’s Sichuan province, Suzhou in east China’s Jiangsu province and Xiongan in north China’s Hebei province aim to check the theoretical reliability, system stability, convenience, applicability and risk controllability of the digital currency.

“Its functional attributes are exactly the same as paper money, only in digital form,” said Mu Changchun, head of the PBOC digital currency research institute, adding that the digital currency is the electronic version of the country’s currency renminbi, also known as the yuan.

PBOC governor Yi Gang said earlier that the central bank will come up with a package plan to integrate digital currency and electronic payment tools so as to substitute a portion of cash.

The digital currency aims to be the equivalent substitution of the paper currency in circulation, rather than replacing all of it, according to Mu.

If a user’s mobile phone has a wallet, the digital currency can be transferred to another person without a bank account, a mobile or internet network by placing the two phones in physical contact.

“It is different from current digital payment methods such as Alipay and WeChat Pay, but for users, they are almost the same,” said Zhao Xijun, vice director of the School of Finance at Renmin University.

The internal closed pilot tests will not impact the business operations of listed institutions, or the issuance and circulation systems of the yuan, or financial markets, society and economy outside the test environment, the PBOC digital currency research institute said earlier.

The RD and application of the legal digital currency will help meet public demand for legal currency in the digital economy, and improve the convenience, security and anti-counterfeiting level of retail payments, Yi said, adding that the digital currency will also boost China’s digital economy.

The application of the digital currency will definitely have some effects on economic activities. For example, virtual products in electronic games may become digital assets in the future, which will generate related trading platforms, Zhao noted, adding that the recording, storage, and purchase of songs may all be further digitized.

Although China’s central bank emphasized that there is no timetable for the launch of its digital currency, many people are looking forward to using it with the Winter Olympic Games approaching.

(Xinhua)10:42, September 03, 2020

BEIJING, Sept. 2 (Xinhua) — A marine observation test of Chinas newly launched ocean-monitoring satellite HY-1D has been completed, sources with the Ministry of Natural Resources said Wednesday.

Led by the ministrys National Satellite Ocean Application Service, the experiment at sea is an important part of the in-orbit testing of the satellite, which has provided synchronous observation data for payload performance and product authenticity.

China launched the HY-1D on June 11. Together with the HY-1C satellite, launched in 2018, the HY-1D will form the countrys first civil-use satellite constellation to increase its global observation coverage and improve its monitoring of ocean color, water temperature, coastal resources and the environment.

Once built, the constellation will also offer support for industries such as meteorology, agriculture and water conservation, the ministry said.

(Xinhua)13:52, September 03, 2020

SYDNEY, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) — An Australian study has found that young children who spend excessive time in front of a TV or computer screen will on average experience a decline in academic performance.

Published on Thursday, the study showed that 8 and 9 years olds who watch more than two hours of TV per day were impacted in their reading ability by the time they reached 10 to 11 — while just one hour or more on the computer predicted a similar decline in numeracy skills.

However, the study found no such links between video games and academic performance.

Conducted by the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute (MCRI), the research assessed 1239 young people, utilising the results of Australias National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN).

It correlated watching more than two hours of TV a day at the age of 8 or 9 with 12-point lower numeracy and reading score, and using a computer for more than one hour a day with a 14-point lower numeracy result.

Lisa Mundy from the MCRI said electronic media had become the most popular leisure-time activity for children, despite impacting academic performance through reducing physical activity, sleep or time spent on homework, as well as having the potential to diminish concentration.

The mid-primary school years are a time when academic difficulties are often first evident and predictive of lower academic performance and school dropout later, Mundy said.

These middle years are also a time when childrens electronic media use dramatically rises and children have more say over the media they consume.

The researchers said they hope the findings will assist parents, teachers and clinicians to consider the type and timing of TV and computer exposure in developing media plans for children.

(Xinhua)12:32, September 04, 2020

BEIJING, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) — An international team of researchers has used supercomputers in China and Europe to study the internal structures of the smallest clumps of dark matter in a computer-generated universe, which is expected to help scientists learn more about what dark matter is and its role in the evolution of the universe.

Dark matter is thought to account for about 85 percent of matter in the universe, while normal matter, which includes stars, planets and people, only accounts for a small percentage.

Galaxies form and grow when gas cools and condenses at dark matter halos, the centers of enormous clumps of dark matter.

The biggest halos contain collections of hundreds of bright galaxies, called galaxy clusters, weighing 1,000 trillion times more than the sun.

Scientists can infer the structures of large dark matter halos from the properties of the galaxies and gases within them.

However, they have no direct information about smaller dark matter halos that are too small to contain a galaxy. According to current theories, the smallest dark matter halos are thought to have masses equivalent to Earths.

These small halos can only be studied by simulating the evolution of the universe using a large supercomputer, said Gao Liang, a researcher from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

To study the internal structures of a small dark matter halos in as much detail as they do for giant galaxy clusters, the researchers need to enlarge the mass range by 30 orders of magnitude — that is one, followed by 30 zeros. It is comparable to viewing a flea on the surface of the moon.

The research team, led by the National Astronomical Observatories of CAS and including Durham University in Britain, the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, and the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University in the United States, took five years to develop, test and carry out their cosmic zoom.

They simulated the virtual universe on the Tianhe-2 supercomputer in south Chinas Guangdong Province, the COSMA supercomputer in Durham, Britain, and a supercomputer in Munich, Germany.

In the latest issue of Nature, the research team reported that the small dark matter halos have very similar internal structures to those of large and giant ones.

Dark matter halos of all sizes are extremely dense at their centers, and become increasingly spread out with smaller clumps orbiting in their outer regions, said Wang Jie, a researcher from the National Astronomical Observatories of CAS and first author of the study.

Without a measuring scale, it was almost impossible to distinguish an image of a dark matter halo of a massive galaxy from one of a halo with a mass of Earths, Wang noted.

Some scientists have raised theories that dark matter particles may collide near the centers of dark matter halos and are converted into bursts of gamma-ray radiation. Most of the radiation would be emitted by dark matter halos too small to contain stars.

Researchers said that future gamma-ray observatories might be able to detect the emissions, making small dark matter halos visible.

That would help to confirm the hypothesized nature of dark matter, which may not be entirely dark after all, said the researchers.

(Xinhua)17:04, September 04, 2020

HANGZHOU, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) — A brain-like computer with over 100 million neurons, the first of its kind in China, has been developed by researchers in east Chinas Zhejiang Province.

Zhejiang University and Zhejiang Lab on Tuesday jointly introduced the newly developed computer named Darwin Mouse.

This high-tech device contains 792 second-generation brain-like Darwin chips developed by Zhejiang University, said Zhu Shiqiang, director of Zhejiang Lab. It supports 120 million spiking neurons and nearly 100 billion synapses, which are equivalent to the number of neurons in the brain of a mouse. The average power consumption of the computer comes in at only 350-500 watts.

Just like building blocks, we integrated the 792 brain-like computing chips into three standard server chassis to form a powerful rack-mounted brain-like computer, said Pan Gang, leader of the research team, from College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University.

Meanwhile, the team also developed an operating system specifically designed for brain-like computers, named Darwin OS, which realizes effective management and scheduling of the hardware resources and supports operations and applications of brain-like computers.

According to researchers, brain-like computing refers to the use of hardware and software to simulate the structure and operating mechanism of the brains neural network and construct a new artificial intelligence paradigm. It is an innovative computing architecture that is regarded as one of the important ways to solve complex computing-related problems in fields, such as artificial intelligence.

Pan added that this type of brain-like computer has been able to perform a variety of intelligent tasks, such as enabling the collaboration of multiple robots in simulated flood-fighting-and-rescue operations, simulating different regions of the brain and providing faster and large-scale simulation tools for scientific research. Besides, it has also realized mind typing through real-time decoding of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals.

By simulating the human brain, we will be able to understand the working principles of different parts of the brain, which will help cure certain brain diseases that otherwise cannot be diagnosed through biomedical approaches, said Pan. In the future, brain-like computers will have broader application prospects including three major areas of artificial intelligence, brain science and brain diseases.

Brain-like computing is expected to emerge as an important form of computing in the future, said Wu Zhaohui, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and president of Zhejiang University.

It is the latest achievement of the brain science and artificial intelligence research project (referred to as the Double Brain Project). By emulating the structure and mechanism of the brain, this project is expected to develop a new computer architecture that will lead the future, said Wu.