Youngest Professor

(XINHUA)

Liu Lu, a senior undergraduate at Central South University in central China's Hunan Province, was hired as a professor-level researcher by the university in March for his talent in mathematics.

Liu, 22, became the youngest of his kind and was awarded 1 million yuan ($158,900) by his university to upgrade his experimental facilities and improve his living conditions. The university has also given him special approval for successive postgraduate and doctoral programs of study to help him make greater contributions to science.

In 2010, Liu won international acclaim by solving a problem of reverse mathematics, namely the Seetapun Enigma, a conjecture put forward by English logician David Seetapun in the 1990s concerning the Ramsey Theorem of Pairs.

During the past two decades, countless mathematicians have made efforts to solve the problem but without any results. Liu solved the open question and provided a negative answer to Seetapun's conjecture.

Liu first knew about this conjecture in August 2010. After reading many papers on the issue, he was suddenly struck with an idea that could solve the problem. He finished a paper in a night and sent it to the Journal of Symbolic Logic , an internationally prestigious academic journal on mathematical logic, using his pen name Liu Jiayi.

Scientific Input

The Chinese Government plans to allocate more than 15 billion yuan ($2.38 billion) from the central budget to the country's National Natural Science Foundation, said Chen Yiyu, Director of the foundation, on March 27.

China's central budget has been steadily increasing its support for the foundation over the past few decades. In 1986, its earmark funds were only 80 million yuan ($12.68 million).

Figures show that the foundation granted a total of 18.28 billion yuan ($2.9 billion) to 34,836 projects out of 153,800 applications it received in 2011.

According to Chen, the foundation will increase the average financing amount for main projects that are led by senior scientists and researchers. Meanwhile, more support will be given to local scientific projects and those led by young scientists.

Fishing Ban

A two-month fishing ban on south China's Pearl River took effect on April 1, in an effort to protect the area's fish stocks.

All fishing activities are banned during the period on the main stream of the Pearl River, as well as on all tributaries and lakes connected to it, the Fishery Bureau of the Ministry of Agriculture said on March 27.

The Pearl River is the second largest river in China in terms of run-off volume, exceeded only by the Yangtze River.

The fishing ban in the Pearl River was initiated by the Ministry of Agriculture in 2011. More than 29.05 million fish fry were released into the river during the previous ban and monitoring data showed that the average density of the fish fries in May 2011 had grown by 23.2 percent from the year earlier period.

Panda Census

Forestry authorities in northwest China's Shaanxi Province said on March 26 that they had begun combing forests for giant pandas in order to determine how many of the endangered animals are living in the wild.

The census in Shaanxi, one of the major habitats of giant pandas, is part of a once-adecade nationwide panda census ordered last year by the State Forestry Administration.

This is the fourth nationwide giant panda census since the program was launched in the 1970s.

Field research in Shaanxi is expected to finish by October 2013.

The previous census counted 1,596 wild pandas in China. At that time, 273 of them lived in Shaanxi and a majority of the rest lived in neighboring Sichuan Province.

Sichuan started the census last October.

Rural Services

China has formed a nationwide network to provide agricultural science and technology services in rural areas, according to the China Rural Special Technique Association.

There are now 133,000 primary-level organizations for promoting agriculture technology across the country, with 11.3 million members.

Since 2006, the Chinese Government has invested 1.05 billion yuan ($166.9 million) in rewarding organizations and personnel for providing agriculture technology services and supporting primary-level service units.

Cabin Entertainment

Chinese and French companies on March 27 agreed to set up a joint venture to develop cabin entertainment systems for China's homegrown C919 passenger planes.

The joint venture will be set up in Chengdu, southwest China's Sichuan Province, in the third quarter this year with an initial investment of 300 million yuan ($48 million), according to the deal signed between the France-based Thales and China Electronics Technology Avionics Co. Ltd.

The new company will provide cabin entertainment systems for the C919 and other China-made business and large passenger jets.

Test flights of the C919, China's first independently developed passenger jet, are scheduled for 2014 and the aircraft is expected to hit the market two years later. So far, at least 235 orders have been placed for the single-aisle jet.

Sustainable Development

A seminar entitled Combat Desertification and Sustainable Development in Inner Mongolia of China—Maowusu Biomass Thermoelectric Project was held at the UN Headquarters in New York City on March 26.

As a side event of the Third Intersessional Meeting of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, the seminar highlighted the public-private partnership in China for exploring low-carbon development, combating desertification, utilizing biomass for energy and even producing nutritional supplements.

The Maowusu Biomass Thermoelectric Project is an integrated management system to combat desertification while developing a sustainable green economy, which is characterized by the Tri-Carbon green economy to serve the carbon absorption (planting shrubs in the desert to fix sand dunes), carbon emission reduction (biomass power generation) and carbon sequestration (capture the CO2 emission to produce spirulina in green houses), in addition to generating employment and income for people of ethnic groups to reduce poverty.

Luc Gnacadja, Executive Secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, suggested at the seminar that the integrated approach to combating desertification could be introduced as a good model for African and other developing countries' sustainable development initiatives.