CMG: Top 10 scientific news from China in 2024

China Media Group (CMG) on Monday released the top 10 scientific news stories from China for 2024.

Top 10 scientific news from China 

1. China held a meeting conflating the national sci-tech conference, the national science and technology award conference, and the general assemblies of the members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering on June 24.

2. The returner of the Chang'e-6 probe touched down on Earth on June 25, bringing back the world's first samples collected from the moon's far side, marking another remarkable achievement in China's space exploration endeavors.

3. The Meng Xiang, China's first domestically designed and built deep-ocean drilling vessel, has a maximum drilling depth of 11 kilometers and was officially commissioned in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou on November 17.

4. A research team from the University of Science and Technology of China reported observing antiferromagnetic phase transition in a large and uniform quantum simulator, according to a study published in the journal Nature on July 10. The quantum simulator is the first to achieve the simulation of the fermionic Hubbard model beyond classical computers using ultracold atomic quantum simulators.

5. China has ramped up informationization of meteorological data, launching a new generation of meteorological supercomputing system with 6.5 times higher computing power, the China Meteorological Administration announced on January 12.

6. "Q Family" humanoid robots developed by the research team at the Institute of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences made their public debut in Beijing in February.

7. China in April released a set of geologic atlases of the global moon with a scale of 1:2.5 million, which are the first complete high-definition lunar geologic atlases in the world, providing basic map data for future lunar research and exploration.

8. China successfully recovered its first reusable and returnable test satellite, the Shijian-19, at the Dongfeng Landing Site in the Gobi Desert in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region on October 11, 2024, according to the China National Space Administration.

9. China opened the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Link in Guangdong Province, south China, on June 30, 2024.

10. Chinese researchers have developed a brain-on-a-chip intelligent interaction system, shedding new light on brain-computer interface research. The system, MetaBOC, enables a brain organoid to autonomously control robots for tasks such as obstacle avoidance, tracking and grasping, completing inspired work of various brain-like computing.