Category: China

Chinese firm halves worker costs by hiring army of robots to sort out 200,000 packages a day

On By A.P.In China, KebmodeeLeave a comment

A viral video showing an army of little orange robots sorting out packages in a warehouse in eastern China is the latest example of how machines are increasingly taking over menial factory work on the mainland.

The behind-the-scenes footage of the self-charging robot army in a sorting centre of Chinese delivery powerhouse Shentong (STO) Express was shared on People’s Daily’s social media accounts on Sunday.

The video showed dozens of round orange Hikvision robots – each the size of a seat cushion – swivelling across the floor of the large warehouse in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province.

A worker was seen feeding each robot with a package before the machines carried the parcels away to different areas around the sorting centre, then flipping their lids to deposit them into chutes beneath the floor.

The robots identified the destination of each package by scanning a code on the parcel, thus minimising sorting mistakes, according to the video.

The machines can sort up to 200,000 packages a day and are self-charging, meaning they can operate around the clock.

An STO Express spokesman told the South China Morning Post on Monday that the robots had helped the company save half the costs it typically required to use human workers.

They also improved efficiency by around 30 per cent and maximised sorting accuracy, he said.

“We use these robots in two of our centres in Hangzhou right now,” the spokesman said. “We want to start using these across the country, especially in our bigger centres.”

Although the machines could run around the clock, they were presently used only for about six or seven hours each time from 6pm, he said.

Manufacturers across China have been increasingly replacing human workers with machines.

The output of industrial robots in the country grew 30.4 per cent last year.

In the country’s latest five-year plan, the central government set a target aiming for annual production of these robots to reach 100,000 by 2020.

Apple’s supplier Foxconn last year replaced 60,000 factory workers with robots, according to a Chinese government official in Kunshan, eastern Jiangsu province.

The Taiwanese smartphone maker has several factories across China.

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2086662/chinese-firm-cuts-costs-hiring-army-robots-sort-out-200000

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the It’s Interesting community.

Boy cuts off his index finger during argument with father over phone use

On By A.P.In ChinaLeave a comment

The 11-year-old boy, from Suzhou, China, is said to have sliced off the digit after having an argument with his father about his smartphone addiction.

As his father chastised him for being constantly glued to his phone, the boy is said to have grabbed a knife and plunged it into his left index finger in a fit of rage.

The argument is said to have started when his father told him to put down the phone and help his brother with his homework.

The boy was taken to hospital where surgeon Ren Zhourong attempted to reattach the severed finger during a three-hour operation.

It will be a week until doctors know if the surgery was a success.

Boy ‘cuts off finger during argument with father over phone use’

China Telescope to Displace 9,000 Villagers in Hunt for Extraterrestrials

On By A.P.In alien, Alien life, Aliens, China, Extraterrestrial life, Space and TimeLeave a comment

By EDWARD WONG

The Chinese government is relocating thousands of villagers to complete construction by September of the world’s biggest radio telescope, whose intended purpose is to detect signs of extraterrestrial life.

The telescope would be 500 meters, or 1,640 feet, in diameter, by far the largest of its kind in the world. It is called FAST, for Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, and costs an estimated 1.2 billion renminbi, or $184 million.

The mass relocation was announced on Tuesday in a report by Xinhua, the state news agency. The report said officials were relocating 2,029 families, a total of 9,110 people, living within a three-mile radius of the telescope in the area of Pingtang and Luodian Counties in the southwestern province of Guizhou.

Officials plan to give each person the equivalent of $1,800 for housing compensation, the report said. Guizhou is one of China’s poorest provinces.

Forced relocations for infrastructure projects are common across China, and the people being moved by officials often complain both of the eviction from their homes and inadequate compensation. The Three Gorges Dam displaced more than one million people along the Yangtze River, and the middle route of the gargantuan South-North Water Diversion Project has resulted in the relocation of 350,000 people to make way for a series of canals.

The Chinese government has announced ambitious plans for its space program, at a time when the American one is in retreat. China aims to put an astronaut on the moon and a space station in orbit. The FAST project is another important element in the larger plan.

The telescope is being built in a wide depression among karst hills. The depression is far from cities and ideal for picking up radio transmissions, the Xinhua report said. Scientists began looking for a site in 1994 and finally settled on the Dawodang depression.

If the truth is out there, then some Chinese scientists are confident that the giant telescope will find it. The current largest operational radio telescope is the 300-meter-diameter Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, but FAST in Guizhou will far surpass that.

Li Di, a chief scientist with the National Astronomical Observatories under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told China Daily last year that “with a larger signal receiving area and more flexibility, FAST will be able to scan two times more sky area than Arecibo, with three to five times higher sensitivity.”

Last November, scientists successfully tested the telescope’s “retina,” which weighs 33 tons and is suspended 460 to 525 feet above the reflector dish, which was half-finished at the time, China Daily reported.

The telescope has 4,500 panels that are mostly triangular and whose sides measure 36 feet, the report said. Those create a parabolic shape. The panels move and, by doing so, alter the shape of the antenna, which is supposed to pick up radio signals from distant corners of the universe. Those signals would then be reflected to a focal point.

Mr. Li told China Daily that engineers were aiming to install all the panels by this June and complete debugging by September.

“Ultimately, exploring the unknown is the nature of mankind,” he said, adding that it was “as visceral as feeding and clothing ourselves.”

“It drives us to a greater future,” he said.

Subway passenger dubbed the ‘watermelon brother’ is scaring commuters in China

On By A.P.In China, Human Behavior1 Comment

A man who likes to put a watermelon on his head before his daily commute has caused a stir in China.

The man has been nicknamed the ‘watermelon brother’ by web sleuths who are trying to figure out the mystery man’s identity.

One commuter told the Beijing Morning Post he was freaked out by the man who loves to put on the hollowed-out fruit helmet and reported him to police.

“It was so scary last night when I was on the metro,” he said.

“This guy was just hanging around on the train wearing a watermelon mask with a beer bottle … apparently he was totally drunk.”

“I was scared by this watermelon brother too,” said another passenger. “I posted some pictures of him on Weibo.”

Beijing Metro Police questioned the man after being alerted to his location by passengers and subway staff.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/11362787/Riding-the-tube-with-a-watermelon-on-your-head-could-land-you-in-trouble.html

Inside an internet addiction treatment centre in China

On By A.P.In China, Internet1 Comment

IN CHINA, if you are a kid who spends a long time online, you had better watch out. Your parents may send you off for “treatment”.

At the Internet Addiction Treatment Centre in Beijing, children must take part in military-style activities, including exercise drills and the singing of patriotic songs. They are denied access to the internet. One of the first experiences internees undergo is brain monitoring through electroencephalography (EEG). The programme is run by psychologist Tao Ran, who claims the brains of internet and heroin addicts display similarities.

The rise of such centres has, in some cases, been coupled with reports of brutality. One camp in Henan province was recently criticised after it was alleged that a 19-year-old girl died following corporal punishment doled out by officers.

“We had heard stories about electroshocks, physical torture and confinement, but we found none of those,” says Aldama.

“The children usually get angry when they know that they’ll be locked in the centre, where parents put them without prior notice. They deny suffering an addiction. But as time goes by, I believe they are more sociable and calm. They get in better physical shape thanks to the sports training,” Aldama says.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429990.100-inside-an-internet-addiction-treatment-centre-in-china.html

London’s Dirty Secret: Pollution Worse Than Beijing’s

On By A.P.In Beijing, China, England, Kebmodee, London, PollutionLeave a comment

London has a dirty secret.

Levels of the harmful air pollutant nitrogen dioxide at a city-center monitoring station are the highest in Europe. Concentrations are greater even than in Beijing, where expatriates have dubbed the city’s smog the “airpocalypse.”

It’s the law of unintended consequences at work. European Union efforts to fight climate change favored diesel fuel over gasoline because it emits less carbon dioxide, or CO2. However, diesel’s contaminants have swamped benefits from measures that include a toll drivers pay to enter central London, a thriving bike-hire program and growing public-transport network.

“Successive governments knew more than 10 years ago that diesel was producing all these harmful pollutants, but they myopically plowed on with their CO2 agenda,” said Simon Birkett, founder of Clean Air in London, a nonprofit group. “It’s been a catastrophe for air pollution, and that’s not too strong a word. It’s a public-health catastrophe.”

Tiny particles called PM2.5s probably killed 3,389 people in London in 2010, the government agency Public Health England said in April. Like nitrogen dioxide, or NO2, they come from diesel combustion. Because the pollutants are found together, it’s hard to identify deaths attributable only to NO2, said Jeremy Langrish, a clinical lecturer in cardiology at the University of Edinburgh.

“Exposure to air pollution is associated with increases in deaths from cardiovascular disease such as heart attacks and strokes,” Langrish said. “It’s associated with respiratory problems like asthma.”

The World Health Organization says NO2 can inflame the airways and worsen bronchitis in children.

London isn’t alone in having bad air in Europe, where 301 sites breached the EU’s NO2 limits in 2012, including seven in the British capital. Paris, Rome, Athens, Madrid, Brussels and Berlin also had places that exceeded the ceiling. The second and third-worst sites among 1,513 monitoring stations were both in Stuttgart after London’s Marylebone Road.

“Nitrogen dioxide is a problem that you get in all big cities with a lot of traffic,” said Alberto Gonzalez Ortiz, project manager for air quality at the European Environment Agency, which is based in Copenhagen. “In many cases it’s gotten worse because of the new fleets of diesel cars.”

The EU limits NO2 to a maximum of 40 micrograms per cubic meter of air. The concentration on Marylebone Road, a stone’s throw from Regent’s Park, was almost 94 micrograms in 2012, according to the most recent data from the EEA.

The level for the site last year was 81 micrograms, and it’s averaging 83 micrograms this year, according to King’s College London. In 1998, when the King’s College data begins, it was 92. That’s about the time the switch to diesel started.

In contrast, Beijing had a concentration of 56 micrograms last year, according to China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection. The Chinese capital has a worse problem with other pollutants, registering almost triple the level of PM10 particles (bigger than PM2.5s) as on Marylebone Road.

London’s air has improved since the “pea-souper” fogs in the 1800s and 1900s. In 1952, the so-called Great Smog killed 4,000 people. East Londoners couldn’t see their feet through a choking blanket of smoke caused when cold air trapped industrial emissions and coal fumes. That led to passage of a clean-air law in 1956, seven years before the U.S. Clean Air Act.

Air pollution and particulates are “invisible and there isn’t the same pressure on politicians” as in the 1950s, said Joan Walley, an opposition Labour Party lawmaker who leads the Parliament’s cross-party Environmental Audit Committee. “It requires a long-term strategy.”

Walley’s committee began an inquiry on May 2 to assess government efforts to improve air quality, calling for written submissions by June 5.

While the government blamed an April spike in pollution on dust from the Sahara alongside domestic emissions and particles from continental Europe, the prevailing winds mean London typically exports its own problem.

“It’s not rocket science to figure out that we contribute mostly on westerly winds to our neighbors,” said Martin Williams, professor of air quality at Kings College.

Europe-wide policy triggered the problem. The “dieselisation” of London’s cars began with an agreement between car manufacturers and the EU in 1998 that aimed to lower the average CO2 emissions of new vehicles. Because of diesel’s greater fuel economy, it increased in favor.

The European Commission, the EU regulatory arm, “is and always has been technologically neutral,” said Joe Hennon, a spokesman. “It does not favor diesel over petrol-powered cars. How to achieve CO2 reductions is up to member states.”

EU rules enforced since 2000 allowed diesel cars to spew more than three times the amount of oxides of nitrogen including NO2 as those using gasoline. New rules that took effect in September narrow that gap.

“The challenge is much greater that we had thought just a few years ago,” said Matthew Pencharz, environment and energy adviser to London Mayor Boris Johnson. “A lot of that is due to a well-meant EU policy that failed. We’re stuck now with these diesel cars — about half our cars are diesel, whereas 10, 15 years ago, it was lower than 10 percent.”

The U.K. Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in 2011 estimated it would take London until 2025 to comply with the 2010 rules. The government didn’t ask for an extension to comply because doing so comes with a requirement to show it was possible by 2015.

For Green Party Leader Natalie Bennett, the solution is simple: Get people out of their cars.

“Fifty-six percent of journeys we make in Britain are less than 5 miles,” Bennett said in an interview. “If you turn a significant percentage of those into walking and cycling journeys, then you’ve made huge progress.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net James Hertling

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-27/london-s-dirty-secret-pollutes-like-beijing-airpocalyse.html

New research shows that whales and dolphins can’t taste anything except salt

On By A.P.In bitter, cetacean, China, Danielle Reed, DNA, dolphin, Dolphins, Dr. Rajadhyaksha, Evolution, Evolutionary Biology, gene, Genome Biology and Evolution, Huabin Zhao, Jianzhi Zhang, Monell Chemical Senses Center, Nature, raoellid, Salt, salty, savory, Science, sour, sweet, taste, taste receptor, umami, University of Michigan, whale, Whales, Wuhan University, zoologyLeave a comment

Tastes are a privilege. The oral sensations not only satisfy foodies, but also on a primal level, protect animals from toxic substances. Yet cetaceans—whales and dolphins—may lack this crucial ability, according to a new study. Mutations in a cetacean ancestor obliterated their basic machinery for four of the five primary tastes, making them the first group of mammals to have lost the majority of this sensory system.

The five primary tastes are sweet, bitter, umami (savory), sour, and salty. These flavors are recognized by taste receptors—proteins that coat neurons embedded in the tongue. For the most part, taste receptor genes present across all vertebrates.

Except, it seems, cetaceans. Researchers uncovered a massive loss of taste receptors in these animals by screening the genomes of 15 species. The investigation spanned the two major lineages of cetaceans: Krill-loving baleen whales—such as bowheads and minkes—were surveyed along with those with teeth, like bottlenose dolphins and sperm whales.

The taste genes weren’t gone per se, but were irreparably damaged by mutations, the team reports online this month in Genome Biology and Evolution. Genes encode proteins, which in turn execute certain functions in cells. Certain errors in the code can derail protein production—at which point the gene becomes a “pseudogene” or a lingering shell of a trait forgotten. Identical pseudogene corpses were discovered across the different cetacean species for sweet, bitter, umami, and sour taste receptors. Salty tastes were the only exception.

“The loss of bitter taste is a complete surprise, because natural toxins typically taste bitter,” says zoologist Huabin Zhao of Wuhan University in China who led the study. All whales likely descend from raccoon-esque raoellids, a group of herbivorous land mammals that transitioned to the sea where they became fish eaters. Plants range in flavors—from sugary apples to tart, poisonous rhubarb leaves—and to survive, primitive animals learned the taste cues that signal whether food is delicious or dangerous. Based on the findings, taste dissipated after this common ancestor became fully aquatic—53 million years ago—but before the group split 36 million years ago into toothed and baleen whales.

“Pseudogenes arise when a trait is no longer needed,” says evolutionary biologist Jianzhi Zhang of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who was not involved in the study. “So it still raises the question as to why whales could afford to lose four of the five primary tastes.” The retention of salty taste receptors suggests that they have other vital roles, such as maintaining sodium levels and blood pressure.

But dulled taste perception might be dangerous if noxious substances spill into the water. Orcas have unwittingly migrated into oil spills, while algal toxins created by fertilizer runoff consistently seep into the fish prey of dolphins living off the Florida coast.

“When you have a sense of taste, it dictates whether you swallow or not,” says Danielle Reed, a geneticist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was not involved with the current work, but co-authored a 2012 paper that found the first genetic inklings that umami and sweet taste receptors were missing in cetaceans, albeit in only one species—bottlenose dolphins.

Flavors are typically released by chewing, but cetaceans tend to swallow their food whole. “The message seems clear. If you don’t chew your food and prefer swallowing food whole, then taste really becomes irrelevant,” Reed says.

http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/05/whales-cant-taste-anything-salt

Thanks to Dr. Rajadhyaksha for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

China Mulls Construction of a High Speed Train to the U.S.

On By A.P.In Alaska, Beijing Times, Bering Strait, Canada, China, Daniel Politi, Engineering, English Channel, Kebmodee, train, transportation1 Comment

by Daniel Politi

It sure sounds far-fetched but a story in the Beijing Times claims China is considering building a high-speed train that would connect China’s northeast with the United States. The project would cross Siberia and the Bering Strait to Alaska, and then go across Canada into the United States, according to the English-language report published in the state-run China Daily. To cross the Bering Strait into Alaska, the railway would need a 125-mile underwater tunnel, which implies it would be around four times the length of the tunnel that crosses the English Channel, notes a very skeptical Washington Post article on the report.

China Daily claims that the technology to construct such a long underwater tunnel already exists and will be used to build a tunnel to connect China’s Fujian province with Taiwan. “Right now we’re already in discussions. Russia has already been thinking about this for many years,” said a railway expert cited by the Beijing Times, according to the Independent’s report on the story. The train would reportedly travel at around 220mph, meaning the entire trip between the United States and China would take around two days.

What is being called the China-Russia-Canada-America line is one of four large-scale international high-speed rail projects the country wants to build, the Guardian writes, citing the Beijing Times:

The first is a line that would run from London via Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Kiev and Moscow, where it would split into two routes, one of which would run to China through Kazakhstan and the other through eastern Siberia. The second line would begin in the far-western Chinese city of Urumqi and then run through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran and Turkey to Germany. The third would begin in the south-western city of Kunming and end in Singapore.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/05/10/china_mulls_construction_of_a_high_speed_train_to_the_u_s.html

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

New study shows how to win Rock-Paper-Scissors

On By A.P.In China, classical game theory, collective cyclic motions, conditioned response, Da Brayn, mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium, Rock Papers Scissors, Zhejiang UniversityLeave a comment

If you are about to engage in an intense – because when are they not intense – game of rock-paper-scissors with a friend or loved one, do not let them read this article.

You, however, will want to take notes.

A team of researchers from China have just released the results of the first large-scale study of the game and their conclusions on player behavior could help you win the next round.

The study, led by three researchers at China’s Zhejiang University, recruited 360 undergraduate and graduate students to play a total of 300 rounds of rock-paper-scissors while their actions were recorded.

When a student won a round, the researchers found, they tended to stick with the same action (i.e. rock, paper or scissor) instead of switching to another.

When a student lost a round, they most often switched to another action, rotating in a clockwise direction, from rock to paper to scissor.

So, if you can think fast enough during each round’s three-second countdown, you can anticipate your opponent’s next move by whether they won, and thus would stay with the same action, or lost, and thus would switch to the next action, which you’d be able to determine by going clockwise.

The findings upend the previously held notion that rock-paper-scissors followed classical game theory, or mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium (NE), “in which every player chooses the three actions with equal probability,” the study’s authors write.

Instead, according to this study, those who win at rock-paper-scissor appear exhibit “collective cyclic motions” and “conditioned response.”

“Our theoretical calculations reveal that this new strategy may offer higher payoffs to individual players in comparison with the NE mixed strategy, suggesting that high social efficiency is achievable through optimized conditional response,” the authors write.

Translation: You can beat the pants off your opponents if you think it through properly.

The researchers say the work they did on just rock-paper-scissors could be extended in future studies to human psychology.

“Whether conditional response is a basic decision-making mechanism of the human brain or just a consequence of more fundamental neural mechanisms is a challenging question for future studies,” they conclude.

http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/win-rock-paper-scissors-study-shows-really-175713622–abc-news-lifestyle.html

Thanks to Da Brayn for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.