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Since Xi put out the call to build up the new area, China’s tech giants have piled in. Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings, Baidu, Zhongguancun Science Park and Tsinghua University have all established projects in Xiongan. The projects include the use of sensors, 5G networks and facilities for supercomputing and big data in the pursuit of building up the smart city. Alibaba is the parent company of the Post.


JD Digits, the e-commerce giant’s big data arm, is building a smart city operating system that uses artificial intelligence for urban management.

A Singaporean mom who beat COVID-19 while pregnant has given birth to a baby with antibodies against the virus, according to a report.

Celine Ng-Chang, 31, gave birth this month to the baby boy, who tested negative for the virus but did have the antibodies, the Straits Times reported.

“My doctor suspects I have transferred my COVID-19 antibodies to him during my pregnancy,” she told the newspaper.

Scientists at Osaka University develop a label-free method for identifying respiratory viruses based on changes in electrical current when they pass through silicon nanopores, which may lead to new rapid COVID-19 tests.

The ongoing global pandemic has created an urgent need for rapid tests that can diagnose the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the pathogen that causes COVID-19, and distinguish it from other respiratory viruses. Now, researchers from Japan have demonstrated a new system for single-virion identification of common respiratory pathogens using a machine learning algorithm trained on changes in current across silicon nanopores. This work may lead to fast and accurate screening tests for diseases like COVID-19 and influenza.

In a study published this month in ACS Sensors scientists at Osaka University have introduced a new system using silicon nanopores sensitive enough to detect even a single virus particle when coupled with a machine learning algorithm.

The tech giant Google has announced they will begin accepting Google Learning Certificates in place of college degrees, offering six-month courses for prospective employees to train for in-demand jobs in a fraction of the time it would take at University. The qualification will see successful students graduate with a Google Career Certificate, which will be viewed by the company as the equivalent of a four-year degree for similar roles.

Bringing back extinct animals by cloning through ancient DNA is the dream of many – from conservationists to Spielberg – but it has not come to fruition yet. However, we may be a step closer thanks to an incredible discovery made in Siberia.

Scientists have reportedly managed to extract liquid blood from the mummified remains of a 42,000-year-old extinct baby horse.

In August last year, the perfectly preserved remains of the young male foal were discovered in the Batagaika crater in Yakutia, northern Russia.

Astronomers have to be extra clever to map out the invisible dark matter in the universe. Recently, a team of researchers have improved an existing technique, making it up to ten times better at seeing in the dark.

Dark matter is frustratingly difficult to measure. It’s completely invisible: it simply doesn’t interact with light (or normal matter) in any way, shape, or form. But we know that dark matter exists because of its gravitational influence on everything around it – including the normal matter that makes up stars and galaxies.

As an example of this, take a look at gravitational lensing. A massive object, whether made of dark or normal matter, will bend the path of any light that passes close by. It’s usually an incredibly tiny effect, but definitely measurable. We can see lensing of starlight around the sun, for example, which is how we knew that Einstein’s theory of general relativity must be correct.

Looks like you can now use this flying car in Holland.


We’ve all had the experience of sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic with nothing but miles of red taillights ahead, wishing we could somehow break away from the pack and zoom off to our destination traffic-free. Now drivers in the Netherlands are one step closer to making this vision a reality, as a commercial flying car has just been approved for use on roads there.

The car is called the PAL-V Liberty, and it’s made by Dutch company PAL-V. It looks a lot like what you’d probably expect or imagine a flying car to look like: a cross between a small helicopter and a very aerodynamic car (with a foldable propeller on top).