Top 10 Chinese scientific stories for 2023 unveiled: newspaper

BEIJING, Dec. 26 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese newspaper unveiled a list of the country's top 10 scientific and tech stories for 2023, to sum up its advances in areas such as frontier science, biotechnology, space probe, and engineering.

The establishment of a central science and technology commission topped the list, according to Science and Technology Daily on Tuesday. The commission was set up to beef up the CPC Central Committee's centralized and unified leadership over science and technology-related work.

In space probe, China's orbiting Tiangong space station, which functions as a national space laboratory, has been put into operation.

The country's FAST telescope found key evidence for the existence of nanohertz gravitational waves, which can help solve puzzles in supermassive black holes, the history of galaxy mergers, and the formation of large-scale structures in the universe.

In biotechnology, Chinese scientists identified a key gene in a crop that might, via genetic engineering, substantially improve crop yields in alkaline soil.

Also, a team from Shenzhen constructed a high-resolution dynamic map of human prenatal immune system development across 18 gestational stages and 19 tissues, which offered promising avenues for potential therapeutic interventions.

In computing science, the quantum researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China generated a genuine entanglement up to 51 superconducting qubits. The team from Tsinghua University reported a fully integrated chip consisting of multiple memristor arrays and all the necessary peripheral circuits to support complete on-chip learning.

Among the country's engineering wonders in 2023 are the first commercial flight of its self-developed large passenger aircraft C919, the delivery of China's first domestically-built large cruise ship, the "Adora Magic City," and the commercial operation of the Shidaowan high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) nuclear power plant, the world's first fourth-generation nuclear power plant, according to the yearly selections.