China and France should uphold mutual benefits, jointly oppose acts of "decoupling" and disrupting industrial and supply chains, and say no together to building barriers, President Xi Jinping made the remarks on Monday when holding talks with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron in Paris.

China and France should uphold independence and jointly fend off a "new Cold War" or bloc confrontation, Xi said, the Xinhua News Agency reported. Xi also attended a welcome ceremony held by Macron on Monday. 

Earlier on the day, Xi attended a China-France-EU trilateral meeting with President Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at Elysee Palace.

In a signed article published Sunday in French media Le Figaro, Xi said we live in a world that is far from being tranquil and is once again facing a multitude of risks. China is ready to work with France in the spirit that guided the establishment of our diplomatic ties to forge a stronger comprehensive strategic partnership between our two countries and make new contributions to stronger cooperation of the global community.

Strategic guidance

Wang Yiwei, director of the Institute of International Affairs at the Renmin University of China, told the Global Times on Monday that Xi's visit to France marks the climax of China's diplomacy toward Europe this year. And EU is crucial in the process of promoting political multipolarity and economic globalization.

On Tuesday, Macron will take Xi to the Pyrenees, a mountainous region dear to the French President as the birthplace of his maternal grandmother, according to Reuters. 

Such a special arrangement by Macron has the meaning of courtesy and shows the special relationship between the two heads of state, as well as a kind of frankness, analysts said.  

Tian Dewen, deputy director of the Institute of European Studies of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times that in the past five years, China-EU relations have encountered difficulties, but China-France relations have been relatively stable. This is directly related to the Macron government's implementation of positive and pragmatic relations with China. 

China is a very important external force for France and Europe to realize strategic autonomy, and it can certainly consolidate France's leading position in Europe if it can maintain a communicative and interactive relationship with China, experts said. 

Seeking consensus

China regards Europe as a priority of its major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics, and an important partner in achieving Chinese modernization, Xi said at China-France-EU trilateral meeting held earlier on Monday.

As the world enters a new period of turbulence and transformation, China and the EU, as two major forces in the world, should continue to see each other as partners, stay committed to dialogue and cooperation, deepen strategic communication, enhance strategic mutual trust, build strategic consensus, carry out strategic coordination, work for steady and sound growth of China-EU ties, and continue making new contributions to world peace and development, Xi said.

According to AFP, Macron told Xi that coordination with Beijing on "major crises" including Ukraine and the Middle East was "absolutely decisive" and essential.

He Zhigao, a research fellow with the Institute of European Studies from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), said that the trilateral meeting highlights an important opportunity for China and Europe to strengthen high-level exchanges, communicate on major issues, and enhance strategic consensus. 

"By talking about some of the current challenges facing China-Europe relations and the demands of both sides, they can continue the stability and cooperation space of the current relations, so that the relations will not slide into a new Cold War led by the US. China-Europe relations now play a more important role in shaping global order than ever," He told the Global Times. 

Von der Leyen said that it is important that the EU maintains good relations with China, and this will determine whether global challenges such as climate change and the Ukraine crisis can be better addressed.

Xi urged the two sides to properly address economic and trade frictions through dialogue and consultation, and accommodate each other's legitimate concerns.

Whether viewed from the perspective of comparative advantage or global market demand, there is no such thing as "China's overcapacity problem," Xi said.

Sense of autonomy

Sun Keqin, a research fellow at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, told the Global Times that the US has very deep involvement in European affairs. 

"US interference remains, but Europe has kept a certain degree of autonomy and is able to cooperate with China, especially the French leadership which has always had a strong sense of strategic autonomy in a pragmatic manner," said Sun.

Through the visit of the Chinese top leader, Europeans will also have the opportunity to think about how to handle its relations with China, whether to follow the US to engage in confrontation and lose their own interests, or to jointly develop mutual benefits and get win-win results, the expert said. 

In the science fiction movie "The Wandering Earth," artificial intelligence system "Moss" is able to explore all solutions to save the Earth in just a few seconds.

This miraculous scene is gradually transitioning from science fiction to reality. The ultra-high-performance optoelectronic chip proposed by the research team at Tsinghua University adopts a new architecture of optoelectronic fusion, which is disruptive to existing chip technologies, the team told the Global Times on Wednesday.

The technology not only opens up a new path for this future technology to become part of daily life, but also provides inspiration for the integration of other future high-performance technologies such as quantum computing and in-memory computing with current electronic information systems.

The results, titled "Purely Analog Optoelectronic Chips for High-Speed Visual Tasks," had been published in the recent issue of the journal "Nature."

In 1965, Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, proposed "Moore's Law," which has influenced the chip industry for over half a century. It predicts that the number of transistors on integrated circuits will double approximately every two years.

The semiconductor field has prospered for decades based on Moore's Law, and "chips" have become an important engine for humanity's entry into the era of digital intelligence. However, as transistor sizes approach their physical limits, Moore's Law has slowed down or even faced failure in the past decade. How to build a new generation of computing architecture and establish a "new" order of chips in the era of artificial intelligence has been a frontier hotspot of international concern.

To address this challenge, a joint research team from Tsinghua University, including Academician Dai Qionghai from the Department of Automation, Assistant Professor Wu Jiamin, Associate Professor Fang Lu from the Department of Electronic Engineering, and Associate Researcher Qiao Fei, proposed a new computing architecture that "breaks free" from Moore's Law: optoelectronic analog chips. In practical tests for visual tasks, the computing power of these chips reached over 3,000 times that of current high-performance commercial chips.

From a physical perspective, optoelectronic chips are based on a disruptive technology that is different from existing chip technologies, the research team explained in an interview with the Global Times on Wednesday. They noted that, at current stage, their work is focused on intelligent visual tasks, and they are also conducting further exploration to see if the new technology can achieve tasks of the same or even higher complexity as current chips, such as large language models.

In this small chip, the Tsinghua University research team creatively proposed an optoelectronic deep fusion computing framework. Starting from the most fundamental physical principles, it combines optical computing based on electromagnetic wave propagation in space with pure analog electronic computing based on Kirchhoff's law. It "breaks free" from the physical bottlenecks of data conversion speed, accuracy, and power consumption that constrain traditional chip architectures, and overcomes three international challenges: large-scale computing unit integration, efficient nonlinearity, and high-speed optoelectronic interfaces.

In the demonstrated intelligent visual scene tests in the paper, the system-level computing power of the optoelectronic fusion chip was thousands of times higher than that of existing high-performance chip architectures. However, such astonishing computing power is just one of the many advantages of this chip. In the intelligent visual tasks and traffic scene calculations demonstrated by the research team, the system-level energy efficiency (the number of operations that can be performed per unit of energy) of the optoelectronic fusion chip reached 74.8 Peta-OPS/W, which is over 4 million times that of current high-performance chips. In other words, the amount of electricity that can power existing chips for one hour can power this chip for over 500 years.

One key factor currently limiting chip integration limits is the heat dissipation problem caused by high density. The optoelectronic fusion chip, which operates at ultra-low power consumption, will greatly improve the chip's heat dissipation problem and bring all-round breakthroughs to the future chip design. Furthermore, the minimum linewidth of the chip's optical part is only in the hundreds of nanometers, while the circuit part uses 180 nanometers Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology, achieving a performance improvement of multiple orders of magnitude compared to 7 nanometers process high-performance chips. At the same time, the materials used are simple and easily obtainable, and the cost is only a fraction of the latter.

Will the emergence of this cutting-edge chip technology help China achieve a "overtaking on the curve" in chip research and development? In response to this question, the research team told the Global Times that the research and development competition in the traditional chip technology field is becoming increasingly fierce, and facing international challenges such as the slowing down of Moore's Law, the world is seeking new computing architectures. It can indeed be understood as a kind of "curve" opportunity. Whether we can achieve "curve overtaking" depends on the joint efforts and ecological construction of all sectors. We are also working towards this goal.

A special review of this research, invited by the journal Nature, pointed out that the appearance of this chip may allow the new generation of computing architecture which will be integrated into daily life much earlier than expected. Academician Dai Qionghai, one of the corresponding authors of the paper, stated, "Developing a new computing architecture for the era of artificial intelligence is a summit, but truly implementing the new architecture in real life to solve major national and livelihood needs is a more important challenge and our responsibility."

The tourism phenomenon triggered by Harbin, the ice city in Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, shows no sign of abating and most recently its popularity has led to a fierce competition among tourism authorities in several Chinese cities, as they strive to leverage the internet's potential to convert online engagement into real tourist footfall.

Starting from January 9, the official Douyin account of the Department of Culture and Tourism of Henan Province has seen an increase in the number of videos being posted, with 20 to 30 clips being released per day and a total of 112 in four days, enthusiastically showcasing its cultural and tourism resources. By posting videos such as "Shaolin Kung Fu" and "mutton stewed noodles" to show off its local cuisine, the account gained nearly one million followers within just a few days.

In January, North China's Shanxi and Central China's Henan provinces announced their partnership in tourism, achieving mutual exemption of admission tickets for 114 A-level scenic spots in six cities.

While culture and tourism authorities in Shanxi and Henan provinces are boasting their enriched tourism resources on social media, East China's Shandong Province, famous for being the birthplace of Confucius and the location of the famous Taishan Mountain and the Yellow River estuary, has also attracted much online attention.

The Department of Culture and Tourism in North China's Hebei Province changed their short video official name overnight, from "Hebei Tourism" to "Hebei Cultural and Tourism." This alteration was prompted by the fierce online competition to attract tourists, resulting in the phrase "cultural and tourism" gaining significant popularity across various social media platforms.

More interesting is that the video of the head of culture and tourism in Harbin's Acheng district dancing with performers from Harbin Ice-Snow World, the world's largest theme park of its kind, on short video platforms, has entertained millions of netizens.

These diligent efforts made by the local head of culture and tourism in Harbin to attract tourists to the city were joined by netizens across the country as they playfully boasted about the exceptional skills possessed by their own heads of culture and tourism bureaus, all in an effort to achieve similar success in their own cities.

Netizens from Southwest China's Sichuan Province, known for its giant panda bases, jokingly claimed that their head of local culture and tourism bureau has the extraordinary ability to "give birth to" giant pandas. While, netizens from Central China's Hunan Province proudly boasted that their head of cultural and tourism can devour a staggering 50 kilograms of red peppers. Hunan Province is renowned for its diverse pepper varieties and spicy cuisine, which locals take great pride in.

Netizens from Southwest China's Yunnan Province went as far as bragging that their head of cultural and tourism can consume three kilos of raw wild mushrooms. Yunnan is famous for its different types of wild mushrooms, some of which can be poisonous if not cooked properly.

With the rapid proliferation of social media, Harbin has swiftly become the most coveted tourist destination in the country. Recognizing this trend, cultural and tourism authorities aim to harness the power of the internet to transform online engagement into actual tourist visits.

Cities surrounding Harbin have also attempted to take advantage of the huge tourist flow brought with Harbin by frequently uploaded interesting videos.

Tourism in Harbin hasn't become popular overnight. It is a result of the long-term promotion of ice and snow sports in Northeast China, reflecting the booming popularity of China's ice and snow tourism, Jiang Yiyi, deputy head of the School of Leisure Sports and Tourism at Beijing Sport University, told the Global Times on Sunday.

Jiang believes it might be difficult to reproduce the popularity of Harbin tourism. Its popularity and the booming Zibo barbecue phenomenon in 2023 are the results of unintentional efforts. However, both places have achieved good interaction with the tourists.

These two major tourism events in China and the popularity of a grassroots basketball tournament known as Village BA are not only developed based on the tourism resources in these regions, but also achieved by actively grafting them with local culture, Jiang noted.

Industry observers noted that the key to turning one-time booming tourism into a persistent trend lies in the continuous cultivation of a pleasant destination to visit and fostering a warm-hearted hospitality.

In the beginning of this winter, Harbin has effectively addressed tourists' complaints regarding the organization and services of Harbin Ice-Snow World, as well as overcharging by local restaurants. This crisis management has left a positive impression of the city. Harbin has also taken the initiative to provide considerate services to tourists, media reports said. For example, numerous free warm and comfortable rest stations have been established at major tourist attractions, which have been well-received by visitors.

Both last year's Zibo barbecue and this year's ice and snow fever reflect the fast recovery of China's tourism industry. As winter, the traditional tourism off-season, draws new tourism fever, these events signal the fast tourism development in China, Jiang noted.

From the Adora Magic City's completion of its maiden commercial voyage on Sunday to Chinese shipbuilders obtaining the most orders from global clients in 2023, China's high-end manufacturing sector, represented by the steadily progressing shipbuilding industry, has become a new driving force in the country's economic development. 

The Adora Magic City, China's first domestically built large cruise ship, completed its maiden commercial voyage on Sunday after taking more than 3,000 tourists from 16 countries and regions for a seven-day trip to destinations in South Korea and Japan. 

China has been advancing its shipbuilding technology especially in high-value added segments with strong international competiveness. The ability to build ultra-large container ships and use green fuels is also leading the world, Zheng Ping, chief analyst with industry news portal chineseport.cn, told the Global Times on Sunday. 

Last year, Chinese shipyards won the highest number of global orders, with deliveries as far off as 2028, according to media reports. 

The delivery dates for Guangzhou Shipyard International Co run into 2027 and 2028, as fleet operators worldwide are attracted by the company's strengths in green production and environmental protection, said Li Hao, an official from the company, as China Media Group (CMG) reported on Saturday.

More than 60 percent of the company's on-hand orders are methanol-powered dual-fuel ships or LNG- fired (liquefied natural gas) () dual-fuel models. Compared with conventional container ships, ultra-large container ships powered by dual-fuel sources can reduce carbon emissions by 20 percent, nitrogen oxide emissions by 85 percent and sulfur emissions by 99 percent, CMG reported.

In 2023, Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding Group delivered 17 vessels, which was 106 percent of the annual plan. The number of medium- and high-end vessels exceeded 90 percent of the total deliveries, the company said in a statement it sent to the Global Times earlier. Hudong-Zhonghua is now building 16 LNG vessels simultaneously, and it plans to deliver nearly 50 LNG carriers in the next five years.

China has basically closed the technological gap with South Korea in building high-value added ships, Zheng said, and China's shipbuilding boom will persist this year.   

In 2023, Chinese shipbuilders won the most new orders worldwide for a total of 24.46 million compensated gross tons (CGT), 59 percent of the total, data from UK-based Clarksons Research showed. South Korea was second for the third consecutive year with 10.01 million CGT. 

China's shipbuilding industry is striving to advance its high-quality development through intelligent and green technology. 

The intelligent transformation has also boosted the efficiency of shipbuilding, which is traditionally a labor-intensive process. Through intelligent transformation, the entire workshop for building a ro-ro passenger ship with more than 20,000 square meters can be reduced from 200 people to 50 people by integrating more automation and robotics technology, according to the CMG report. 

Intelligent ports are becoming popular in China with the expanding utilization of autonomous trucks and other types of smart equipment, Zheng said. 

He said that the domestic industry is still in the early stages of smart development, and  more emerging technologies will be  integrated into future manufacturing.  

From January to November 2023, China completed ships totaling 38.09 million deadweight tons (dwt), up 12.3 percent year-on-year, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. 

New orders rose 63.8 percent to 68.45 million dwt, and orders on hand totaled 134.09 million dwt as of the end of November.

Situated in Li county in Northwest China's Gansu Province, commonly seen as the birthplace of China's Qin Dynasty (221BC-206BC) culture, a local archaeological site has recently been found to have been a large-scale architectural complex used for sacrificial ceremonies.

The Sijiaoping Ruins are located on an excavated flat platform on the top of a mountain in the county. The ancient man-made platform covers an area of 28,000 square meters and was encircled by a rammed earth wall. At the center of the site is a square platform with annexes on either side of it.

Archaeologist Wang Meng told the Global Times that the entire configuration of the site delivers a "sense of grandeur and solemnity." The symmetrical and square designs are often seen in many ancient Chinese designs, especially in high-grade and royal architecture. The "symmetrical" design is particularly common as it embodies Chinese people's belief in harmony.

Exquisitely made ancient objects like eaves tiles, also known as wadang, decorated with cloud patterns and tiles featuring a rope pattern were found scattered inside the ruins. Those artifacts gave experts the clues they needed to narrow down the specific time period of the site.

Hou Hongwei, the lead expert of the Sijiaoping archaeological project, said that the tiles and eaves tiles were "very similar" to the ones discovered in the mausoleum of the Qin Dynasty Emperor Qin Shi Huang.

"According to the production techniques and decorative details on those unearthed building materials, we can preliminarily identify the Sijiaoping site as a high-level ceremonial building from the Qin Dynasty," the expert said.

Besides the visible structures, the Qin ceremonial site also contained a half-crypt space. The space was covered with tiles on both the walls and floor. Experts predict it was once a water pool. The pool was most likely closely tied to the Qin people's "belief in the virtues of water," Hou remarked.
While the function of the Sijiaoping ruins is only recently identified, their importance had already been noticed by scholars when the site was first discovered in 2019.

The Sijiaoping site was discovered near another site, the Dabaozi Mountain site, which is also in Gansu Province. The Dabaozi Mountain site is a tomb cluster covering some 18 square kilometers.

Archaeologist Xue Ruiming told the Global Times that the Dabaozi Mountain site reveals that Li county was once the "center of the Qin regime during the Spring and Autumn Period (770BC-476BC)."

The Sijiaoping architectural complex was established after the Qin Kingdom was unified. The Sijiaoping site is the only "systematic" and complete building complex from the time period discovered to date. It demonstrates the burial and ritual traditions of the Qin.

"The close connections between the two sites help our contextual analysis of the Qin Dynasty's burial and ritual traditions. Such a discovery contributes to scholar's analysis of early Chinese sacrificial traditions," said Xue.

Unlike Western ceremonial buildings that often carry a religious mission, ancient ritual buildings in China reflect the country's ancient philosophy.

Their unique shapes and configurations during different historical periods were manifestations of ancient Chinese people's perspectives on people-to-people relations, the dynamic between human beings and nature and ethics.

Compared to the Qin Dynasty's "solemn" style, ceremonial buildings of the Xia Dynasty (c.2070BC-c.1600BC) were more pragmatic as they hosted collective activities. During the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (770BC-256BC), the design of ritual buildings paid closer attention to the ease of transportation.

When things heat up, spinning electrons go their separate ways.

Warming one end of a strip of platinum shuttles electrons around according to their spin, a quantum property that makes them behave as if they are twirling around. Known as the spin Nernst effect, the newly detected phenomenon was the only one in a cadre of related spin effects that hadn’t previously been spotted, researchers report online September 11 in Nature Materials.

“The last missing piece in the puzzle was spin Nernst and that’s why we set out to search for this,” says study coauthor Sebastian Goennenwein, a physicist at the Technical University of Dresden in Germany.
The effect and its brethren — with names like the spin Hall effect, the spin Seebeck effect and the spin Peltier effect — allow scientists to create flows of electron spins, or spin currents. Such research could lead to smaller and more efficient electronic gadgets that use electrons’ spins to store and transmit information instead of electric charge, a technique known as “spintronics.”

In the spin Nernst effect, named after Nobel laureate chemist Walther Nernst, heating one end of a metal causes electrons to flow toward the other end, bouncing around inside the material as they go. Within certain materials, that bouncing has a preferred direction: Electrons with spins pointing up (as if twirling counterclockwise) go to the right and electrons with spins pointing down (as if twirling clockwise) go to the left, creating an overall spin current. Although the effect had been predicted, no one had yet observed it.

Finding evidence of the effect required disentangling it from other heat- and charge-related effects that occur in materials. To do so, the researchers coupled the platinum to a layer of a magnetic insulator, a material known as yttrium iron garnet. Then, they altered the direction of the insulator’s magnetization, which changed whether the spin current could flow through the insulator. That change slightly altered a voltage measured along the strip of platinum. The scientists measured how this voltage changed with the direction of the magnetization to isolate the fingerprints of the spin Nernst effect.

“The measurement was a tour de force; the measurement was ridiculously hard,” says physicist Joseph Heremans of Ohio State University in Columbus, who was not involved with the research. The effect could help scientists to better understand materials that may be useful for building spintronic devices, he says. “It’s really a new set of eyes on the physics of what’s going on inside these devices.”

A relative of the spin Nernst effect called the spin Hall effect is much studied for its potential use in spintronic devices. In the spin Hall effect, an electric field pushes electrons through a material, and the particles veer off to the left and right depending on their spin. The spin Nernst effect relies on the same basic physics, but uses heat instead of an electric field to get the particles moving.
“It’s a beautiful experiment. It shows very nicely the spin Nernst effect,” says physicist Greg Fuchs of Cornell University. “It beautifully unifies our understanding of the interrelation between charge, heat and spin transport.”

MINNEAPOLIS — To destroy plastic, caterpillars go with their gut bacteria.

Caterpillars that nibble through polyethylene plastic cultivate a diverse community of digestive bacteria that process the plastic, researchers reported November 13 at the annual meeting of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry North America. Dousing old plastic in a similar mix of bacteria might speed the breakdown of the persistent pollutant.

Polyethylene is widely used to make plastic bags and other packaging materials, but it hangs around in landfills for decades, perhaps even centuries. Recently, scientists identified several species of caterpillars that appear to eat and digest the plastic, breaking it down. But dumping old shopping bags into a den of caterpillars isn’t really a practical large-scale strategy for getting rid of the plastic. So to figure out the insects’ secret, researchers fed polyethylene to the larvae of pantry moths, Plodia interpunctella, and then looked at the bacteria in the caterpillars’ guts.
Caterpillars that ate a control diet of bran and wheat had guts mostly dominated by Turicibacter, a group of bacteria commonly found in animals’ digestive tracts. But the caterpillars that munched on the plastic had a much more diverse native microbial community. In particular, they had high levels of a few types of bacteria: Tepidimonas, Pseudomonas, Rhizobiales and Methylobacteriaceae.

Some of these bacteria have been shown to colonize and help degrade plastics in the ocean, says study coauthor Anisha Navlekar of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, so it makes sense that the microorganisms also appear to be helping the caterpillars break down plastics.

A new kind of artificial cartilage, made with the same kind of fiber that fortifies bulletproof vests, is proving stronger than others.

The fabricated material mimics the stiffness, toughness and water content of natural cartilage, researchers report in the Jan. 4 Advanced Materials. This synthetic tissue could replace the cartilage in a person’s body that naturally wears down and heals poorly (SN: 8/11/12, p. 22), alleviating joint pain and potentially sparing many people from having to undergo joint replacement surgery.
Scientists have been trying to fashion artificial cartilage for decades, says Kara Spiller, a biomedical engineer at Drexel University in Philadelphia not involved in the work. But earlier materials were either weaker than the real thing or didn’t pack enough water to transport nutrients to surrounding cells.

The new material is a polymer mixture called a hydrogel that’s mostly water and contains nanoversions of the aramid fibers used to make bulletproof vests. Nicholas Kotov, a chemist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and his colleagues tested how well their material held its shape when squeezed or stretched, and how easily it was broken. Both versions of the hydrogel — one, about 70 percent water; the other, about 92 percent water — either matched or exceeded the stiffness and toughness of real cartilage.

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The new material has “a lot of different possibilities,” Spiller says. “The biggest market is going to be osteoarthritis patients, because most patients with osteoarthritis have no damage to the bone, just damage to the cartilage.” Many of the 30 million adults in the United States who suffer from osteoarthritis undergo whole knee or hip replacements. If doctors could simply replace worn down cartilage with this material, that could lower the risk of surgical complication. “That would be really huge,” Spiller says.
This kind of hydrogel “could also be used for all sorts of sports injuries, where you have damaged tendons or ligaments, [or] even for back pain,” she adds.

It remains to be seen how well this material can integrate into a person’s body, says Benjamin Wiley, a chemist at Duke University not involved in the work. Researchers still need to make sure it can anchor to bone and doesn’t irritate surrounding tissue.

Who needs curtains? One day, you could block out afternoon glare and heat with changeable windows that absorb sunshine to charge your electronics.

A high-tech prototype panel described online January 22 in Nature Materials, switches between transparent pane and dark-tinted solar cell. The layer in the panel that’s responsible for soaking up sun has atoms that only arrange themselves into a light-absorbing crystal structure at high temperatures. When heated, these atoms form a dark-tinted crystal known as a perovskite, a new darling of the solar cell industry (SN: 8/5/17, p. 22).
Letian Dou, a chemical engineer at Purdue University, and colleagues were only able to form these light-harvesting crystals in their solar cells by cranking the heat to 105° Celsius, much hotter than your average sun-blasted window. The team is working to lower that threshold to below 70° C so that sunshine alone would trigger the switch.

Currently, the perovskite’s atoms stay locked in crystal configuration until exposed to moisture, which jumbles up the atoms and turns the material transparent again. The researchers still need to find a way to deactivate the solar cell mode without needing a spray bottle of water on hand.

The technology could someday be used for windshields that recharge electric vehicles and keep a parked car’s interior cool while the sun bakes outside.

A pair of dark loners wander a distant cluster of galaxies. The two small gas clouds have been roaming the Virgo cluster, some 55 million light-years away, for at least a billion years. Such small, isolated clouds of gas shouldn’t be able to form stars on their own — and yet they are doing just that.

Astronomer Michele Bellazzini of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in Bologna and his colleagues found the small, dim clouds in 2014 in the SECCO survey, which looks for the building blocks of galaxies. The two are moving at the same speed and have the same chemical composition, so the researchers think they have the same origin story.
Together, the clouds, called SECCO 1, have just 160,000 solar masses’ worth of stars, but 20 million solar masses of hydrogen gas—a lot more hydrogen than found in other small starry bodies. Dwarf galaxies typically have 10 times more hydrogen than stars; SECCO 1 has more than 100 times more. And the duo is abnormally isolated: the nearest potential parent galaxies are about 815,000 light-years away. “This is a novelty,” Bellazzini says.

Simulations suggest SECCO 1 was stripped from a trio of interacting dwarf galaxies, the researchers report online at arXiv.org on February 16 . Weirdly, it started forming stars long after it wandered away, which researchers didn’t think was possible. Its latest bout of star formation started only 4 million years ago. How did the tiny clouds compress enough gas to form stars?

Bellazzini thinks the key could be the clouds’ home within the Virgo cluster. Hot gas there could surround the clouds and compress them enough to make them light up.

Editor’s note: This story was updated March 7, 2018, to correct the photo credit and mention where the simulations were reported. On March 9, 2018, the distance to nearest potential parent galaxies was corrected.