Chang'e-5 Spacecraft's Return With Lunar Samples 

The Chang'e-5 lunar probe was launched on November 24 and its lander-ascender combination touched down on Moon on December 1. The return capsule landed in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in north China with about 2 kg of lunar samples on December 17. China's most complex and technologically advanced space project, it has laid the foundation for manned lunar and deep space explorations in the future.

Homegrown Global Navigation System Completed 

With the launch of the 55th satellite of the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) and the last one of the BDS-3 entering orbit on June 23, the homegrown global navigation system was completed. China has built the system in three steps since the 1990s, with the BDS-1 completed in 2000 and the BDS-2 in 2012, serving users across the Asia-Pacific region. The system was officially launched for world services on July 31.

New Records for Manned and Unmanned Submersibles 

During a voyage completed on June 8, the unmanned submersible Haidou-1, developed by the Shenyang Institute of Automation of CAS, set a new record by diving at a depth of 10,907 meters in the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, the deepest area in the world.

Deep-sea manned submersible Fendouzhe descended 10,909 meters into the Mariana Trench on November 10, setting a new national deep-sea diving record. This put China in a leading position in the field of manned deep diving.

Breakthrough in Flammable Ice Extraction 

A record amount of flammable ice, a natural gas hydrate, was extracted during the second trial exploration in the South China Sea, the Ministry of Natural Resources announced on March 26. About 28,700 cubic meters of the ice was collected per day.

Horizontal well drilling was used for the extraction. China is the first country to adopt the technique to trial mine gas hydrates in the sea.

New Tool to Combat Wheat 'Cancer' 

Fusarium head blight (FHB) is a fungal disease that devastates wheat and is difficult to control worldwide. It is also known as "scab" or "cancer" of wheat. Kong Lingrang, a professor at the Shandong Agricultural University, led his team to clone for the first time an FHB-resistant gene, Fhb7, from a wheat relative, and successfully transferred it into wheat varieties. The researchers found the gene not only effectively reduces FHB by detoxifying a secretion by the pathogen that causes the disease, but also induces resistance to crown rot, another wheat disease caused by a related pathogen. Their findings were published online in academic journal Science on April 10.

Currently, more than 30 organizations use FHB-resistant germplasm materials to improve wheat's resistance to the disease. They have conducted extensive experiments in Shandong, Jiangsu and Anhui provinces in east China, and Henan Province in central China, which have yielded positive results.

Quantum Supremacy Achieved 

A light-based quantum computer prototype named Jiuzhang was created by Pan Jianwei and Lu Chaoyang, professors at the University of Science and Technology of China in Anhui, in collaboration with researchers from the Shanghai Institute of Microsystems and Information Technology, CAS.

The achievement was announced on December 4. This is the second time that a quantum computational advantage has been secured in the world, after the first claimed by Google's quantum computer Sycamore in 2019. 

The supercomputing capacity can be potentially applied in areas like quantum chemistry and machine learning.

Unraveling Paleozoic Biodiversity 

Fan Junxuan, a professor at Nanjing University in Jiangsu, and Shen Shuzhong, a CAS academician, produced the world's first high-precision curve demonstrating the change of marine biodiversity over the 300 million years of the Paleozoic Era, with a resolution 400 times higher than that of similar international studies. They built their own database, developed artificial intelligence algorithms and used the homegrown Tianhe-2 supercomputer to make the breakthrough.

The curve accurately portrays several major extinctions and their relations to environmental changes. The results were published in Science on January 17.

New-Generation 'Artificial Sun' Commissioned 

The HL-2M Tokamak, China's new-generation "artificial sun," went into operation in Chengdu, Sichuan Province in southwest China, on December 4. It is able to generate plasma hotter than 150 million degrees Celsius.

The project was designed and built by the Southwest Institute of Physics of the Nuclear Industry of the China National Nuclear Corp. Designed to replicate the natural reactions that occur in the sun using hydrogen and deuterium gases as fuels, the apparatus will provide clean energy through controlled nuclear fusion. It is the country's largest in scale and highest in parameters. 

Key Mathematical Mysteries Solved 

Chen Xiuxiong and Wang Bing, professors at the University of Science and Technology of China, have solved the Hamilton-Tian and partial C0 conjectures—two problems that confounded mathematicians for over two decades. The research results were published in the Journal of Differential Geometry, a peer-reviewed scientific journal of mathematics, in November.

Award-Winning Machine-Learning Research 

A team of researchers from institutions in China and the U.S. have introduced a new machine learning-based protocol that can simulate more than 1 nanosecond-long trajectory of over 100 million atoms per day.

On November 19, the researchers were awarded the 2020 Association for Computing Machinery Gordon Bell Prize for their project titled Pushing the Limit of Molecular Dynamics With ab initio Accuracy to 100 Million Atoms With Machine Learning.

Molecular dynamics is a computer simulation methodology that analyzes the motion and interactions of atoms during a fixed period of time. For over three decades, researchers have used a simulation method called ab initio for molecular dynamics because it has been proven to be the most accurate. However, the approach requires significant computation resources, limiting its application to smaller systems containing thousands of atoms at the most. BR

Copyedited Sudeshna Sarkar 

Comments to wanghairong@bjreview.com