Malaysia seeks to build the world's largest refinery of strategic metals. When completed, the plant will be the first such refinery built outside of China in nearly three decades.

As the Times article states, the $230 million project is an enormous gamble because refining rare earth metals leaves behind thousands of tons of radioactive waste, and its still unsure how that reality will be dealt with. Since environmental political groups are very powerful in the West, we don't build refineries here. So up till now, the world has been content to leave the "dirty work" to China which operates many barely regulated refineries and has created vast toxic waste sites in its own territory. In return for this sacrifice, they now control around 97% of the world's supply of strategic materials crucial for almost every high-tech gadget imaginable, including smartphones, electric cars and the U.S. military ...

read more

Space.com has a nice summary of the ambitious Chinese space program.  Beginning in late 2011, China will begin launching parts of their new space station into orbit. Called "Tiangong" (Heavenly Palace in English), the orbital laboratory is scheduled for completion in 2022, after which it will accommodate 3 astronauts long-term and hold a 10 year lifespan.

The image below represents the 1st public appearance of China's space station.

Photo by CCTV

Two Suns recently appeared over China, but the phenomena apparently can't be explained by optics. Jim Kaler of the University of Illinois stated that its obviously a refraction phenomena, but how it occurred still isn't clear. 

"I doubt it's been computer modeled," he said. "There must have been some blob of atmosphere somewhere that caused this truly spectacular phenomenon, which in a sense is a mirage."

Hmmm...seems these weird Sun optics happen around China a lot. Perhaps, the atmosphere is shaped differently around the Himalayas or perhaps those mountains somehow throw more ice crystals into the air?

Researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai have designed a working tractor beam. Alas, it only works on the nano-scale, so you won't be seeing the USS Enterprise pulling in shuttle crafts anytime soon. Instead, their work has the most immediate application in photonic circuitry where the tractor beam will allow for interesting manipulations within a circuit.

You can see their full research paper here.

I suppose when your country has nearly 2 billion people it's possible to find enough of any kind of people to create a huge online community. The controversial website Xeixe.com boasts a membership of over 700 Chinese women who carry on extra-marital affairs with married men in order to earn their livings. The women share their experiences and best practices to maximize money gained from the cheating husband. In fact, their numbers are so numerous that these Chinese mistresses have decided to hold an annual festival every March 3rd starting this year.

The mistresses attempt to respond to all their recent press coverage here.

Chicago-based Groupon appears to be preparing to open a Chinese subsidiary.  While there haven't been any formal press announcements, Internet watchers have spotted a spike in "Help Wanted" ads in China on behalf of Groupon. China remains home to the world's largest market of Internet users, boasting over 450 million citizens online.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Ame's Laboratory have announced they've managed to increase engine efficiency by 25% by using rare earth materials Cerium and Ytterbium. The development promises to greatly increase motor efficiency in vehicles of all kinds, including military ones. They may even find an application in large power generators eventually.  

Regarding Cerium and Ytterbium, most everyday people don't run across those words very often, but they are part of a group of 15 lanthanides key to the functioning of our modern civilization. These materials are mandatory ingredients in pretty much every new electronic device invented. Some of the bewildering array of applications include civilian uses such as smartphones, tablets, hybrid car components and fiber-optic cables running under the ocean connecting the global Internet. Military applications include lasers, night vision goggles, navy warship engine propulsion, superconductors...you name it.

The reason I mention all ...

read more

Here's some more science news, Kids. An international research effort involving UC Santa Barbara professors Andrew Cleland and John Martinis, along with scientists from Zhejiang University in China and NEC Corporation in Japan, has resulted in a crucial breakthrough towards the construction of a quantum computer.

Quantum computers are the holy grail of computing technology. A mature one can theoretically perform more calculations per second than there are atoms in the universe, as well as outstripping human intelligence by many, many orders of magnitude.

My understanding of quantum physics is quite limited to explain this article, but what they seem to have done is create a logic circuit, an ability to produce a 1 or 0, which is the fundamental requisite for all computing functions. However, since we're dealing in quantum physics, there exists a little twist. The teams had set up two areas and manipulated them in ...

read more

Life is full of competing priorities. If it isn't one thing, it's another. This New York Times article summarizes nicely what's going with wind energy in Texas. My home state is probably the best positioned in the U.S. to exploit wind. However, the Texas panhandle and West Texas have insufficient power transmission lines to transport the energy generated. They need a $5 billion infusion for that construction. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy complains that Texas coastal wind turbines can interfere with their radar. Environmentalists don't like the wind turbines because they kill lots of birds. As fate would have it, birds use strong wind paths as migratory routes. And finally, wind turbine builders worry about the corrosive salt fogs of the coast and the frequent hurricanes.

In the past, Texas has been referred to as the Saudi Arabia of wind power in terms of potential ...

read more

Here's one of the more inspiring, and honestly unexpected, results from crowd-sourcing. However, instead of a technical or science breakthrough, this happy reunion between parent and child reflects a social one. 30 Year-old Peng Gaofeng of Shenzhen was reunited with his 6 year-old son Peng Wenle thanks to social networking. The Chinese used Sina.com, a micro-blog site analogous to Twitter. The father posted his missing son's photo on 13 blogs, including Sina.com.

Soon, over 83,000 Chinese internet users participated in the search, involving 588,870 entries. The search began Jan 25th. His son was found about a week later, after having gone missing for 3 years after his kidnapping. The boy is currently undergoing DNA testing to verify his identity.

The campaign was initiated by Yu Jianjong, a professor with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who called upon internet users to take snapshots and ...

read more

While U.S. patent filings remained mostly level from the previous year at 44,855, Japan, China and South Korea saw a dramatic increase, continuing their trends from recent years. China in particular can boast a 56.2% meteoric increase from the previous year to 12,337. 2nd Place Japan reported a 7.9% increase.

The new stats published by the World Intellectual Property Organization underscore Asia's overall rise in economic and technologic power. Other upcoming economic players didn't fare as well. India remained mostly level at 1,109 filings, up ~%15 from 2009 but fairly level with their 2008 performance. Brazil declined  ~11% to 442

The total digital communications-related patents dominated growth with a 17.3% increase probably reflecting a bit of the results from Moore's Law and the high speed of electronics advancement in general. A 17% rate equates to a doubling every ~5 years ...

read more

Beginning Marching 1, Chinese online gaming companies will be required to set up a website, supervising channels, and a hotline call center for parents interested in monitoring, regulating or banning their child's gaming. 

The video game companies will be responsible for monitoring each child's behavior and block them from playing improper games, or those unapproved by the parents. 

China's government hopes to fight gaming addiction through these measures. Don't tell the Tiger Mom about these new tools, you just might give her ideas.  Officials from the Chinese government have stated they only want children playing games 2 hours a week.

China has initiated research and development for a thorium molten-salt reactor.  They also intend to obtain the intellectual property rights for its use. An MSR (molten salt reactor) is an extremely powerful and flexible type of fission nuclear reactor where the main coolant isn't water but a mixture of molten salt.  

One of the many benefits of an MSR is its great reduction in size. The salt being much more efficient at removing heat from a fission core, there exists less need for piping and pumping other coolants. The small size also makes these reactors safer. 

Finally, Thorium is 3 to 4 times more abundant than Uranium and packs roughly 200 times the amount of power.

Thorium reactors were first conceived roughly 40 years ago. However, Uranium fission produces Plutonium (a crucial element in building nuclear weapons) as a byproduct.  And so, research into Thorium fell by the wayside ...

read more

Fearing that the intense desire for political reform in Egypt might spill over into their country, China banned the word "Egypt" from Chinese search portals Sina.com and Sohu.com...both being a Chinese version of Twitter.

The Chinese government routinely blocks social networking sites including Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube.

Credit: Reuters/Jessica Rinaldi

This linked article represents a follow-up to Logic-Cool's entry on January 27. Several major news outlets including Time and CNN reported that China intends to unify 9 cities into one giant super-city of 42 million residents.  

On Thursday, a senior consultant on the project Ma Xiangming clarified that China will not actually unify the governments of the 9 cities. Instead, they simply intend to integrate the public services and transportation.

The Chinese continue their current penchant for doing everything huge, this time by creating a giant rabbit sculpture using 30,000 porcelain plates. The sculpture was presented earlier today.

Aiming to merge most of their manufacturing heartland into one united municipality, China plans to combine 9 cities into one.  The sprawling super-city will be 26 times the size of Greater London, twice the size of Wales, house 42 million people and will account for 10% of China's economy.

This enormous urbanization project is only one of several the Chinese government has in the works, some of which are plans to create urban areas with 50 to 100 million people in residence.

This batch of military news doesn't seem very surprising. Back in the 90's when President Clinton ordered the bombing of Yugoslavia, one U.S. stealth fighter jet was shot down, an F-117 Nighthawk.  In the aftermath, the Chinese government (and the Russians) sent agents buying up all the scrap pieces and debris from the local farmers who had kept parts of the wreckage as souvenirs. 

As always, war results in unintended consequences...in this case the advancement of Chinese air-superiority technology. I remember this being reported back during Clinton's terms, so I suppose this development was a long time in the making.

Adm. Davor Domazet-Loso, Croatia's military chief of staff during the Kosovo War, says:

"We believe the Chinese used those materials to gain an insight into secret stealth technologies ... and to reverse-engineer them."

Alexander Huang of Taipei's Tamkang University, an expert on China's ...

read more

In an attempt to stem horrendous levels of animal abuse, China has outlawed all live animal performances thoughout the country. The laundry list of animal malpractices in the Telegraph article make for a bit of grim reading. I would imagine though that black market animal deathmatches will continue under the radar, just as they do here in the U.S.

In 2010, China installed 16 GW of new wind-power capacity, as opposed to 5 GW of new wind-power in the US, bringing the totals to 41.8 vs. 40.2. China's momentum will most likely continue as they intend to reach 100 GW in roughly 3 years

The Xinhua article makes the claim that the U.S. wind power industry suffered because the U.S. failed to pass climate change regulation. However, their point is moot because it takes many years to get large scale energy projects moving. Even if U.S. climate regulations changed tomorrow, you can't just come up with 16 GW of new power at the drop of a dime.

The more likely explanation is that America has steadily been losing its manufacturing base due to lower costs and lower safety regulations for manufacturers abroad. Even in 2009, when the jobs stimulus bill was passed ...

read more