MEDICAL PROGRESS: A woman displays how to operate a piece of medical equipment at the 26th International Medical Instruments and Equipment Exhibition in Beijing on March 21. On March 31, the Chinese Government unveiled a new regulation on the supervision of medical equipment. Under the new rule, medical equipment in China will be registered and divided into three categories based on the potential health risks they might pose to the public. The regulation will come into effect on June 1(ZHAO BING)

Logging Ban

Heilongjiang Province in northeast China will ban commercial logging of its natural forests from April 1.

The measure was important in restoring the nation's forest resources and insuring ecological security, said Zhao Shucong, chief of the State Forestry Administration.

He said that industries such as tourism and green agriculture should be developed as substitutes for logging.

Heilongjiang is home to 18.5 million hectares of state forests.

Ocean Regulation

China will issue a policy on regulating the country's maritime area commercial use via tender, auction or listings in 2014, said the State Oceanic Administration (SOA) on March 31.

According to a SOA guideline on sea area management in 2014, it will improve the system of maritime property deals and jointly release a mortgage policy on the right of maritime use with the central bank.

The administration will make utmost efforts to complete the establishment of county-level oceanic functional zones and improve a three-tier oceanic zone system including national, provincial and city and county levels, the guideline said.

The SOA will also tighten implementation of the country's sea reclamation plan, establish a multi-level coastal protection mechanism, and promote the protection and use of provincial-level coastlines.

CAS Ranking

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) topped the Asia-Pacific region in the Nature Publishing Index (NPI) released on March 27, a benchmark for research success and achievement.

The CAS was ranked sixth in the NPI 2013 Global Top 200, up eight positions from the previous year. The University of Tokyo was ranked eighth in the global list and second in the Asia-Pacific region.

The CAS published 165 articles in Nature, a well-known scientific journal, in 2013.

University of Science and Technology of China, affiliated with the CAS, ranked 57th in the global list and tops the Chinese universities on the list.

Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, all in the United States, were the top three on the global list.

The NPI ranks institutions according to the number of primary research articles they publish in the Nature journal, regarded as a pre-eminent platform for publication of international research.