The night skies might soon have company: Chinese scientists are planning to launch an artificial moon into orbit by 2020 to illuminate city streets after dark.
Scientists are hoping to hang the man-made moon above the city of Chengdu, the capital of China’s southwestern Sichuan province, according to a report in Chinese state media. The imitation celestial body — essentially an illuminated satellite — will bear a reflective coating to cast sunlight back to Earth, where it will supplement streetlights at night.
Swiss firm ABB is investing big money to conquer the Chinese robotics market.
Swiss robotics company ABB has revealed that it’s spending $150 million to build an advanced robotics factory in Shanghai — one that will use robots to build robots. The company will rely on its YuMi single-arm robots, which it once used to conduct an orchestra, for small parts assembly. It also plans to make extensive use”of its SafeMove2 software in the facility, which it says will allow its YuMi models and other automated machines to safely work in close proximity with human employees.
For much of the emerging world, the key to reducing pollution is making the transition to battery-powered motorcycles and scooters.
Even those who can afford cars often prefer two-wheelers.
Given recent market turmoil, it would easy to overlook the upcoming IPO of Niu Technologies, a Chinese manufacturer of electric mopeds. The $95 million the company plans to raise is a pittance compared to the billions burnt by Tesla Inc. But, the technologies developed by Niu and other pioneers of electric two-wheel vehicles will transform transportation as much as anything dreamed up by the likes of Elon Musk.
The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.
In 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service, known today as Amazon Prime Video. Based in Portland, Ore., Elemental made software for compressing massive video files and formatting them for different devices. Its technology had helped stream the Olympic Games online, communicate with the International Space Station, and funnel droone footage to the Central Intelligence Agency. Elemental’s national security contracts weren’t the main reason for the proposed acquisition, but they fit nicely with Amazon’s government businesses, such as the highly secure cloud that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was building for the CIA.
For years, Kathleen McLaughlin smuggled American plasma every time she entered China, home to the world’s largest and deadliest blood debacle. She had no other choice.
I started my decade-long turn as an international blood smuggler in 2004 with a mundane task: packing. I gently stacked a dozen half-liter glass vials into two soft-sided picnic coolers. The bottles held the components of a syrupy mix, a powerful medicine made from the immune system particles collected from thousands of people. A nurse would infuse the syrup into my veins, a treatment to keep my immune system under control, to halt its potentially paralyzing attacks on my nerves.
Tea topped with cheese foam has been stuck on the cusp of trending stateside
“Cheese tea? What’s that?”
Mention it to anyone who’s hearing about it for the first time and you’ll likely get a scrunched-up nose and a look of confusion. Perhaps even a shake of the head. To many Americans, the combination of tea and cheese sounds downright unappetizing. But, as any cheese tea purveyor will tell you, cheese tea tastes better than it sounds. In fact, the drink isn’t that different from bubble tea, which is now firmly entrenched in the mainstream. And given cheese tea’s popularity in Asia, as well as the successful migration of other Asian desserts (like matcha-flavored sweets and shave ice) to major U.S. markets, cheese tea should be on its way to making it big in America. So what’s taking so long?
Cheese tea is the name for cold tea (usually green or black tea, with or without milk) topped with a foamy layer of milk and cream cheese and sprinkled with salt. The drink is sweet, like boba, but has a savory finish. Using a straw is prohibitive to getting enough of that tangy cream overlay, so the method of sipping it from the top of the cup at a 40- to 45-degree angle is integral to enjoying cheese tea. Shops that specialize in cheese tea, like international franchises Happy Lemon and Gong Cha as well as independent shops like Steap in San Francisco, Little Fluffy Head in Los Angeles, and Motto in Pasadena, supply a lid, not unlike a coffee lid, that circulates just the right amount of air for sipping and shields the drinker from a foam mustache.
Speaking at a private event hosted by Village Global VC yesterday night, tech luminary and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicted that the internet will bifurcate into Chinese-led and US-led versions within the next decade.
Under Sundar Pichai’s leadership, Google has explored the potential to launch a censored version of its search engine in China, stirring up controversy internally and outside the company.
Eric Schmidt, who has been the CEO of Google and executive chairman of its parent company, Alphabet, predicts that within the next decade there will be two distinct internets: one led by the U.S. and the other by China.
The government is pumping funds into research, education and innovative projects, as Chinese tech firms flourish and investors and venture capitalists flock.
With rising production costs, an ageing population and shrinking return on investments it is clear why China’s economy has shifted from labour-intensive manufacturing to an innovation-driven paradigm in just a few years.
Today, Huawei is the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world and JD.com, Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu are among the world’s top 10 internet companies in terms of revenue. These companies, and the new tech-based businesses seeking to emulate their success, have all benefited from the “innovation ecosystem” China is developing.
So what are the key elements that make up this ecosystem and have enabled China’s economy to rapidly climb the value chain?
China’s internet population has now grown beyond 800 million, according to the latest data from the Chinese government.
A new report [in Chinese] issued by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) put the number of people in China with access to the internet at 802 million. The agency — which is a branch of the Ministry of Industry and Information and is responsible for controlling the .cn country code — estimates that 29.68 million people in China came online for the first time in the second half of 2018.
In a quest to cut the cost of clean electricity, power utilities around the world are supersizing their solar farms.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in southern Egypt, where what will be the world’s largest solar farm — a vast collection of more than 5 million photovoltaic panels — is now taking shape. When it’s completed next year, the $4 billion Benban solar park near Aswan will cover an area 10 times bigger than New York’s Central Park and generate up to 1.8 gigawatts of electricity.
That’s roughly the output of two nuclear power plants combined and almost double the planned capacity of the vast Villanueva facility now growing in the Mexican state of Coahuila — currently the largest facility in the Americas. (The largest solar farm in the U.S. is the 580-megawatt Solar Star facility near Los Angeles.)
She’s not your ordinary jewelry dealer. Going by the online moniker “Xiaotian,” she commands a big fan base, jokes with her customers, and models for her own business.
“Hi bao bao,” she greets her potential buyers during a livestream session one afternoon in Hong Kong, using a common, endearing nickname for online shoppers. “This is a new design that came out this week. You want me to try it on? Alright!”
Comments piled on. Some complimented the good looks of the designer who stood beside her. Others wanted to see the necklace up close. Still, others asked about the price.
That the Chinese are shopping on the internet in droves is not news. But a new trend is emerging among sellers on ecommerce platforms: they’re ditching old marketing playbooks and are turning to more personal interactions instead.
Taobao is at the forefront of that effort. Already, the Chinese equivalent of Amazon has legions of daigou agents: Chinese expats who buy foreign brands for their compatriots back home.
