
China, US reduce majority of tariffs, KMT slams ‘denial of history': SCMP daily highlights
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China and the United States have agreed to remove the majority of tariffs imposed since April 2, a breakthrough following high-stakes talks that could help resolve a trade war that had raised import duties to unprecedented levels.
A thaw in relations between China and India is expected to be tested after Pakistan said it used a Chinese-made jet fighter to bring down Indian military aircraft, observers say.
System developed by teams from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Atmospheric Physics and Computer Network Information Centre delivers unparalleled precision in modelling global ocean dynamics and climate patterns. Photo: Shutterstock
Chinese researchers have unveiled the world's most advanced ocean simulation system with a resolution of 1km (0.6 mile) – an unprecedented benchmark.
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South China Morning Post
2 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
Chinese factories keep up robot roll-out despite global decline
China bucked a global downturn in industrial robot installations last year, according to the latest figures. The installation volume of industrial robots globally declined to around 520,000 units in 2024, according to preliminary data from the International Federation of Robotics. Major industrial robotic markets showed a general decline, with Japan recording a 7 per cent decline to 43,000 units, the United States reporting a 9 per cent decrease to 34,000 units and the European Union logging a 6 per cent fall to 86,000 units. Installation in China, however, recorded a 5 per cent increase to around 290,000 units, accounting for 54 per cent of the global volume, compared to 51 per cent in 2023. In the first half of this year, China's industrial robot production increased by 35.6 per cent year on year, totalling nearly 370,000 units, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. 'For the past four years, new installations in China are trending more or less sideways,' federation president Takayuki Ito said at the World Robot Conference in Beijing on Saturday.


South China Morning Post
10 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
Will China's new chromosome editing tool unlock new wave of genetic advances?
A group of Chinese scientists has overcome a challenge that stumped biologists for decades by developing a new gene-editing tool that can precisely manipulate millions of base pairs – the building blocks of DNA. The innovation has been hailed as 'very significant progress' by Professor Yin Hao, a gene editing specialist at Wuhan University's medical research institute, who was not involved in the study. He added that it would help lay the foundation for future advances in genetic engineering in biomedicine and agriculture A single human cell contains around 3 billion base pairs. Well-known technologies such as Crispr are widely used for the precise editing of specific genes and nucleic acid bases. However, biologists have struggled to scale up the process to precisely manipulate thousands or even millions of bases. Play Now, a team led by Gao Caixia – a principal investigator at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing – has solved the riddle by making the decade-old gene editing tool much easier to use and more efficient. The study was published by the peer-reviewed journal Cell on Monday. The new genome editing technologies, collectively known as programmable chromosome engineering (PCE) systems, can edit large DNA fragments with precision by 'handling bases ranging from the thousands to the millions in higher organisms, especially plants', according to the institute. The toolset holds promise for transforming the way scientists conduct research in emerging fields such as agricultural seed cultivation and synthetic biology. According to a CAS branch institute in Beijing, by manipulating genomic structural variation, the technology will 'open up new avenues for crop trait improvement and genetic disease treatment'. The advance could also accelerate the development of artificial chromosomes, which have promising applications in emerging fields such as synthetic biology.


South China Morning Post
11 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
Robotics' ‘ChatGPT moment' could come within 2 years, founder of China's Unitree says
The 'ChatGPT moment' for the robotics industry could arrive in as little as two years if powerful artificial intelligence technology develops to propel robots' movements, according to the founder of China's industry leader Unitree Robotics Wang Xingxing defined this moment as the first time a robot could perform a task, such as cleaning a room or bringing a bottle of water to a targeted person, in a venue that it had never been to before. 'If things develop fast, it could happen in the next year or two, or maybe two to three years', he said on Saturday at the World Robot Conference in Beijing. Although both robot hardware, such as dexterous hands, and training data were good enough to enable the feat, the crucial element of 'AI for embodied intelligence is completely inadequate', he said. He had 'doubts' about whether popular vision language action (VLA) models, which used a rather 'dumb' architecture, were up to the task, he said. Although Unitree also used such models, along with reinforcement learning to improve pre-trained VLAs in downstream tasks, the approach required a lot of optimisation, he said. Another approach, generating a video or interactive model based on text prompts and making robots follow this to perform tasks, could have a 'higher probability' of succeeding in robot motion control, Wang said. He cited Google's general-purpose Genie 3 'world model', which was launched on Tuesday and is billed as capable of generating models of dynamic worlds that include information on physical properties, as an example of technology development in this area.