From the Moon to robots: a 2024 of progress for China

For China, 2024 was a year full of news in the scientific field, which is why the China Media Group (CMG) identified the ten main news stories of the year.

1. On June 24, a meeting combining the national sci-tech conference, the national science and technology awards conference and the general assemblies of members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences was held in Beijing. Chinese Engineering (CAE).
2. On June 25, an extraordinarily important space feat was recorded: the uncrewed lunar mission Chang’e 6 returned to Earth bringing with it some fragments of the Moon’s soil collected from its hidden hemisphere. Yet another historic achievement in the field of space exploration.
3. The Meng Xiang, the first ocean drilling vessel designed and built in China, with a maximum drilling depth of 11 kilometers, officially entered service on November 17 in the metropolis of Guangzhou, in the south of the country. An important step forward in the field of shipbuilding.
4. A research team from the China University of Science and Technology has successfully built a quantum simulator with ultracold atoms to solve the Fermi-Hubbard model, verifying for the first time the antiferromagnetic phase transition in a system with simulation capabilities superior to those of classical computers, an important first step towards obtaining the low-temperature phase diagram of the model and understanding the mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity, as well as paving the way for the construction of a dedicated quantum simulator. The results of the study were published in Nature on July 10.
5. As announced by the Chinese Meteorological Agency on January 12, Beijing has intensified the computerization of meteorological data, launching a new generation of meteorological supercomputing systems with a power 6.5 times greater than the previous one.
6. Last February the humanoid robots of the “Q Family”, developed by the research team of the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, were presented to the public during an event in Beijing.
7. In April, China released a series of 1:2.5 million scale geological atlases of the Moon, which represent the world’s first comprehensive high-definition lunar geological atlases and provide basic mapping data for future lunar research and exploration.
8. Last October 11, China recovered the Shijian-19 satellite, the first experiment attempted by Beijing on satellite technology, or reusable space capsules. The landing took place successfully at 10:39 am (Beijing time) at the Dongfeng landing site in the Gobi Desert.
9. On June 30, China inaugurated the Shenzhen-Zhongshan connection, in Guangdong province, in the south of the country.
10. Researchers from Tianjin University and Southern University of Science and Technology have developed a “brain-on-chip” intelligent interaction system, breaking new ground in the field of brain-computer interface research. The MetaBOC system allows a brain organoid to autonomously control robots for tasks such as grasping objects and navigating a simulated environment, completing the inspired work of various brain-like calculations.