Las empresas chinas lideran la adopción de iluminación LED en los cines a nivel mundial
Desafía a gigantes tecnológicos establecidos como Samsung y LG
Las pantallas LED son prometedoras a nivel mundial, con una penetración hasta ahora de sólo el 0,5%
Compañías globales completas como Samsung y LG Actualmente domina el mercado de pantallas de cine LED, que parece que va a cambiar a medida que las empresas chinas, impulsadas por el éxito local, comiencen a liderar la adopción global de la tecnología de cine LED.
Un informe reciente de fuerza de tendencia Afirma que las pantallas de cine LED están ganando impulso en China, impulsadas por políticas gubernamentales de apoyo.
Empresas líderes como China Film Global Technology Limited (CFGDC), HUAXIA LEYARD, QSTECH, Unilumin y LOPU están promoviendo soluciones de cine LED a nivel nacional y en mercados extranjeros, incluidos América del Norte, Europa, Japón y Corea del Sur.
Mucho espacio para crecer
fuerza de tendencia China Film Group Corporation (CFGC) anunció recientemente que un cine en Dinkelsbühl, Alemania, compró 10 de sus sistemas de proyección CINITY, creando una experiencia cinematográfica completamente basada en LED. LEYARD ha instalado pantallas LED en más de 20 cines internacionales, incluidas ubicaciones en Francia, Estados Unidos y España.
A principios de 2024, Rio-tech y Timewaying introdujeron pantallas HeyLED, que miden 10 metros (32,8 pies) de ancho y 5,5 metros (18 pies) de alto, en los cines de Rumania.
Estas pantallas, que eliminan la necesidad de proyectores tradicionales, han ganado terreno en Europa, América y Medio Oriente. Mientras tanto, las pantallas de cine LED transparentes de LOPU también están atrayendo el interés de inversores internacionales y en CinemaCon en abril de 2024, Cineappo exhibió sus productos VLED, reportando un gran interés por parte de los operadores de cine globales.
Anteriormente escribimos sobre Unilumin, que creó un Proyección gigante en el Cine Internacional Xinjiekou En Nanjing Diji Plaza, China. Su pantalla de 20,48 m (67 pies) de ancho y 10,8 m (35 pies) de alto sirve como alternativa a IMAX y utiliza el sistema de proyección de películas UCine LED. Unilumin también ha instalado pantallas en el Regency Theatre de Los Ángeles y en el San Ya Cinema de la provincia de Hainan.
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fuerza de tendencia Los proyectos globales de luminarias LED alcanzarán las 160 unidades este año. Con una penetración en el mercado de pantallas de cine LED de sólo el 0,5% hasta el momento, hay mucho espacio para el crecimiento, y las empresas chinas están claramente dispuestas a aprovechar esta oportunidad.
Según se informa, OpenAI planea bloquear el acceso a su API en China, y las empresas chinas están interviniendo para llenar el vacío que se avecina.
Según el periódico estatal chino Securities Times (vía Reuters), los usuarios en China recibieron un correo electrónico indicando que se encontraban en una “región que actualmente no es compatible con OpenAI” y que se tomarían medidas adicionales para bloquear el tráfico API de algunas regiones a partir del 9 de julio.
ChatGPT no está disponible en China continental, pero los usuarios han podido solucionar este problema utilizando la API OpenAI. Según el Securities Times, varias nuevas empresas chinas han creado aplicaciones utilizando la interfaz de programación de aplicaciones (API).
Velocidad de la luz triturable
No está claro qué impulsó a OpenAI a comenzar a restringir el acceso a la API. Pero la empresa investigó recientemente y recortó cinco “Operaciones de influencia encubiertasUna de esas redes era una red china llamada “Spamouflage” que, según se informa, utilizaba modelos OpenAI para investigar y crear publicaciones en las redes sociales dirigidas a críticos del gobierno chino. La administración Biden ha determinado que los modelos generativos de IA representan un riesgo de ciberseguridad y ha ordenado pruebas de seguridad. Y evaluación de modelos fundacionales en Orden ejecutiva de Amnistía Internacional.
Como resultado del aparente movimiento de OpenAI, las empresas chinas con sus propios modelos de IA han anunciado incentivos para atraer usuarios de OpenAI a sus plataformas. Según Reuters, Baidu ofrece una migración gratuita a su chatbot Ernie con tokens adicionales para su modelo insignia Ernie 3.5. Asimismo, Alibaba Cloud ofreció tokens gratuitos y migración a su modelo Qwen-plus, y Zhipu AI lanzó un “programa de migración especial” para usuarios de API OpenAI, alegando que su modelo GLM cumple con los mismos estándares que los modelos OpenAI.
Onboard this Long March 5 rocket, Chang’e-6 is waiting to lift off from the Wenchang Space Launch Centre on Hainan Island, southern China.Credit: Xinhua/Shutterstock
China has successfully launched its historic Chang’e-6 mission.The 53-day odyssey will be the most complex and challenging Moon mission China has carried out. If all goes according to plan, scientists will be examining the first rocks from the Moon’s far side by late June.
The 7.2-metre-tall, eight-tonne spacecraft lifted off aboard a Long March 5 rocket on Friday afternoon local time, piercing through a tropical rainstorm from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Centre on Hainan Island. Just over one hour into the flight, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced the launch “a complete success”, after the craft separated from the rocket and entered the designated Earth-Moon transfer orbit.
Quentin Parker, an astrophysicist at the University of Hong Kong, hails the launch as “flawless”. “China’s accomplishments in space exploration over the past few years are without precedent. If successful, this mission will be another science bonanza,” he says.
Two-faced Moon
The lunar far side, which always faces away from us because the Moon is tidally locked to Earth, could not be more different than its near side, says planetary scientist Bradley Jolliff at Washington University in St Louis. Most of the ancient volcanic activity on the Moon happened on the near side, while the far side remained quieter under a thick and heavily cratered crust. “You would hardly know that they are from the same body by comparing the two sides,” Jolliff says.
What China’s mission to collect rocks from the Moon’s far side could reveal
A total of 10 missions, manned or unmanned, have brought back Moon rocks for analysis — all from the near side. Landing on the Moon’s far side requires, among other things, a communications satellite to relay signals with Earth.
This is why China launched the Queqiao-2 satellite in March, which is equipped with a 4.2-metre-diameter radio antenna — the largest of its kind used in deep space exploration — to orbit the Moon and wait for the arrival of Chang’e-6.
After arriving at the Moon early this week, the spacecraft will gradually lower its orbit and prepare for landing in one of three pre-selected areas within the South Pole-Aitken basin (SPA). The SPA is the largest and oldest impact basin on the lunar surface, and samples from there will provide clues to the Moon’s two-face mystery and the early history of the solar system.
In early June, the spacecraft will drop a lander, which aims to drill and scoop up two kilograms of soil and rocks. Then an ascender will blast off from the lander and ferry the samples back to the orbiter for the trip back home. Thanks to Queqiao-2, the spacecraft and Earth will remain in contact during the mission’s critical moments, such as the 15-minute descent and touchdown, two-day sampling, and 6-minute ascent.
“The geological conditions on the far side are less clear. Whether we’ll actually be able to scoop up or drill down, all remains to be seen when the sampling begins,” Pei Zhaoyu, a senior CNSA official and chief designer of China’s upcoming Chang’e-8 mission, told China Central Television during the launch livestream.
Scientists hope Chang’e-6 will also return material from beyond its landing site, such as rock fragments thrown over to the landing site from far distant locations during powerful impacts, Jolliff says. The material collected at the Chang’e-6 site “will be like a treasure chest”, he says. “The samples collected will be analysed for decades to come, and hopefully with access provided to the international research community,” he says.
Chang’e-6 is expected to return to Earth around June 25. If successful, the precious samples will land at the Siziwang Banner Landing Site in Inner Mongolia and be retrieved within 48 hours, according to CNSA.
Later this week, China will embark on the world’s second-only trip to the Moon’s far side. The goal is to collect the first rocks from inside the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin, the largest and oldest impact crater on the lunar surface, and bring them back to Earth for analysis.
A stack of four spacecraft needed to complete this unprecedented and highly challenging mission, known as Chang’e-6, is now tucked into the nose of a 57-metre-tall Long March 5 rocket, waiting to lift off from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Centre on southern China’s Hainan Island.
“The whole process is very complex and risky,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
But he says it’s a risk worth taking: “Samples from the SPA basin would be very interesting scientifically and tell us a lot about the history of the Moon and of the early Solar System.”
Far side science
Because the Moon is tidally locked to Earth, humans were only able to see its near side for thousands of years. In 1959, the first lunar far-side images returned by the Soviet probe Luna 3 revealed a face pocked with mountains and impact craters, in contrast to the relatively smooth near side. Scientists have since been collecting data from satellites orbiting the Moon to understand its little-known other half. In 2019, China’s Chang’e-4 became the first spacecraft to soft land and conduct surveys on the Moon’s far side.
The upcoming Chang’e-6 mission, with its landing site carefully chosen by Chinese scientists and international colleagues, aims to give the first accurate measurements of the age and composition of the geology of the Moon’s far side. It might provide key clues to why the two sides of the Moon are so different — the so-called lunar dichotomy mystery — and help test theories about the early history of the Solar System.
The SPA Basin is a vast indentation on the lower half of the far side some 2,500 kilometres wide and 8 kilometres deep. Inside the northeastern part, Li’s team has identified three potential landing areas. They believe the sites could have a variety of materials formed during repeated asteroid impacts and volcanic eruptions over two billion years, and therefore could be scientifically rich.
The South Pole-Aitken Basin is the blue area in the centre of this false-colour image. The indentation is 2,500 kilometres wide.Credit: NASA/GSFC/University Of Arizona
The most likely rock to be collected is basalt — dark-coloured cooled lava — which has previously been brought back to Earth for analysis from the Moon’s near side. With the first far-side basalt samples, scientists will be able to date them and assess their chemical composition, giving clues to their formation. “Then we can make comparative studies to understand why volcanic activities happened on a much smaller scale and ended much earlier on the far side of the Moon,” says Long Xiao, a planetary scientist at the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan.
Being able to pin down the SPA Basin’s age would also be a major achievement, says planetary geologist Carolyn van der Bogert from the University of Münster, Germany. It will help settle the long-standing debate about whether the Moon and the inner Solar System was battered by a massive cluster of asteroids between 4.0 and 3.8 billion years ago. If the SPA Basin is older, then it would cast doubt on the heavy bombardment theory.
Besides basalts, scientists hope that Chang’e-6 will also pick up fragments of other rocks that have been scattered during impact events. If the Chinese mission strikes ejecta the from the deeper lunar crust or mantle, it will be scientific gold.
Engineering challenges
Chang’e-6 was originally built as a backup for the Chang’e-5 mission, which successfully returned 1.73 kilograms of samples from the Moon’s near side in 2020. Because the two craft are identical, site selection for Chang’e-6’s landing was constrained to similar latitudes as Chang’e-5’s and needed a relatively flat surface, says Chunlai Li, the mission’s deputy chief designer from the National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing.
Like its predecessor, Chang’e-6 does not pre-determine its landing site but will use its instrumentation during the descent process to find the safest and most favourable spot. “The landing of Chang’e-6 would be more challenging than Chang’e-5 simply because the far side landing site is more rugged,” says Xiao.
Chang’e-6, like its twin, consists of an orbiter, a lander, an ascender and a re-entry module. When the spacecraft arrives at the Moon, it will separate into two parts, with the lander and ascender headed for the lunar surface while the orbiter and re-entry module remain in orbit.
If it pulls off the difficult soft landing, the lander will drill and scoop up two kilograms of soil and rocks. The sampling process needs to be completed within 48 hours, after which the ascender is intended to blast off from the lander and return to the lunar orbiter. There it is supposed to dock and transfer the precious samples to the re-entry module for the trip home.
During the sample collection and lunar surface liftoff, the Chang’e-6 lander would be unable to directly communicate with Earth. Every command will need to go through a relay satellite named Queqiao-2. Launched last month and now operating in a highly elliptical orbit around the Moon, Queqiao-2 is more powerful than the Queqiao satellite which served the Chang’e-4 mission. Its 4.2-metre umbrella-shaped antenna has the ability to simultaneously serve up to ten spacecraft working on the Moon’s far side.
International collaboration
Chang’e-6 is also carrying scientific payloads from France, Sweden, Italy and Pakistan. The Detection of Outgassing RadoN (DORN), which will be the first French instrument on the Moon, plans to use radon released from the lunar surface as a tracer to study the origin and dynamics of the Moon’s faint atmosphere. Pierre-Yves Meslin, a planetary scientist at the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse, France, says previous spacecraft have measured radon gas movement from orbit, but surface-level radon information is the missing piece of the puzzle.
The Negative Ions at the Lunar Surface, a payload developed in Sweden with funding from the European Space Agency, will seek to answer the question of why no negative ions have yet been detected on the lunar surface. Negative particles could be short-lived, formed either by atoms at the surface snatching electrons from the solar wind, or by molecules breaking apart from the high-energy solar radiation. The biggest challenge for this instrument is overheating, since it needs to face the Sun, says ESA project manager Neil Melville. But he says one hour of operation should be enough to gather the data.
Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics is sending a laser retroreflector for distance measurements. And Pakistan has piggy-backed its first lunar satellite to the Chang’e 6 orbiter, which will deploy after entering the lunar orbit.
Both surface instruments need to complete their work and send data back to Earth within the 48-hour window. “As soon as the samples lift off, the ascender will bring with it the communications and control system it shares with the lander. Even if the instruments on the lander continue to take data, there is no way to receive them here on Earth,” Li says
He says that like Chang’e-5 samples, the returned Chang’e-6 samples will be shared with the international community.
“When those samples come back to Earth, they will be like a Christmas present — whoever opens it will be happily surprised,” Bogert says.
On the outskirts of Beijing sits a set of unassuming buildings marked ‘X’, for ‘extreme’. Inside the Synergetic Extreme Condition User Facility (SECUF), researchers from all over the world are pushing matter to its limits with extreme magnetic fields, pressures and temperatures, and examining it in new ways with extremely precise resolution in time.
One particularly tantalizing goal of many researchers using this $US220-million toolbox is to discover new superconductors, materials that conduct electricity without resistance. “This kind of combination of extreme conditions offers a very good chance for new discoveries,” says SECUF’s founding director Li Lu, a condensed-matter physicist at the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Physics (IOP) in Beijing.
Understanding the mechanisms that underlie superconductivity is an important step in the global race to finding a material that exhibits this phenomenon at room temperature, instead of under frigid conditions. Such a discovery could open the door to faster computers and cut electricity consumption, among other benefits.
Under extreme conditions, matter exhibits properties that would otherwise remain hidden. For instance, when some ordinary-seeming materials are subjected to high pressures and extreme cold, they become superconductors. But measuring superconductivity can be finicky, because it can show up differently depending on the technique used, says Konstantin Kamenev, a physicist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who specializes in extreme-conditions engineering and instrumentation. The ability to mix and match such conditions at a single facility allows researchers to characterize their samples more fully and efficiently than they could otherwise. “It’s like a one-stop shop,” says Jinguang Cheng, a condensed-matter physicist at the IOP.
Extreme toolbox
Since September last year, all 22 experimental stations at SECUF have moved to full operation after a one-year trial period. Tucked into a corner of one of SECUF’s brightly lit rooms, Cheng oversees a station that combines a cubic anvil cell — a device that squeezes materials under enormous pressure on six sides — with two superconducting magnets and helium-based cooling systems. The sample-torturing instrument can be used to measure a range of electronic properties and characteristics. Although conventional high-pressure tools, such as diamond anvils, can accommodate samples that are only the width of a human hair, SECUF’s cubic anvil cell can compress larger samples, making it easier to measure electronic properties in finer detail, says Cheng.
He says that he and his colleagues have, in this way, discovered a handful of superconductors, including a rare magnetic one1 and another based on manganese2.
The quantum oscillation station combines two superconducting magnets with ultra-low temperatures. Credit: Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Behind a yellow warning barrier at the other end of the room sits a powerful superconducting magnet. Rui Zhou, a condensed-matter physicist at the IOP, and his colleagues have set up a station that combines the magnet with ultra-low temperatures to perform nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements. The technique tracks the behaviour of atomic nuclei in high magnetic fields. It offers a way of peering into the mechanisms that underlie high-temperature superconductors — those that operate above −195.8 °C.
SECUF’s magnet produces a weaker field — just 26 tesla — than do those at other facilities, such as the record-holding 45 T hybrid magnet, which is partially superconducting, at the US National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL) in Tallahassee, Florida, and the 37 T resistive magnet at France’s National Laboratory for Intense Magnetic Fields in Grenoble, which require a lot of power to run. But it can maintain a stable magnetic field for up to one month instead of a few days or hours, because it guzzles much less power, says Zhou. That makes it possible for researchers to conduct longer experiments on the same sample, he explains.
The cubic anvil cell is located on the back wall, with black and yellow hazard tape. It can accommodate much larger samples than other high-pressure devices.Credit: Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Another magnet system is enabling other types of superconductivity research. Gang Li, a condensed-matter physicist at the IOP, heads a station that combines blisteringly cold temperatures with a 30 T superconducting magnet and a 20 T one to detect quantum oscillations — physical phenomena that are used to map the electronic ‘fingerprint’ of materials. Last July, Alexander Eaton, a condensed-matter physicist at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues spent two weeks using the station to unpick the electronic properties of an unusual superconductor called uranium ditelluride3. “It was the only place we could do the experiment we wanted to do,” says Eaton.
Mix and match
Other superconductivity researchers are using multiple tools at SECUF. Guanghan Cao, a condensed-matter physicist at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, used the cubic anvil cell and NMR to probe an intriguing chromium-based material he had discovered by accident. Cao and his colleagues spotted hints of superconductivity when they subjected it to high pressures using the cubic anvil cell4. Over at the NMR station, the researchers were also able to catch a glimpse of the compound’s magnetic properties. The ability to measure the material in multiple ways in one location enabled the researchers to conduct a more in-depth study in less time. “That’s really convenient for us,” Cao says.
Superconductivity isn’t the only phenomena researchers are pursuing at SECUF. Some researchers are using ultrafast lasers to study the properties of semiconductors, whereas others are using a range of instruments to hunt down elusive quantum states of matter. The facility is open to domestic and international users alike, and all proposals are considered equally, says Cheng. But the process will be more selective for all researchers this year to give successful applicants more time at each station, he adds.
Although researchers from all over the world are using the facility, Ali Bangura, a condensed-matter physicist at the NHMFL, says that SECUF could give China an edge over other countries in the quest to achieve room-temperature superconductivity. By expanding the scope of measurements on offer in one location, SECUF “substantially increases the likelihood of groundbreaking discoveries”, says Bangura.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has released the highest-resolution geological maps of the Moon yet. The Geologic Atlas of the Lunar Globe, which took more than 100 researchers over a decade to compile, reveals a total of 12,341 craters, 81 basins and 17 rock types, along with other basic geological information about the lunar surface. The maps were made at the unprecedented scale of 1:2,500,000.
“Every question in geology starts with looking at a geological map,” says Ross Mitchell, a geophysicist at the CAS Institute of Geology and Geophysics in Beijing. The new lunar atlas is “really a resource for the whole world”, he says.
The CAS also released a book called Map Quadrangles of the Geologic Atlas of the Moon, comprising 30 sector diagrams which together form a visualization of the whole Moon.
Jianzhong Liu, a geochemist at the CAS Institute of Geochemistry in Guiyang and co-leader of the project, says that existing Moon maps date from the 1960s and 1970s. “The US Geological Survey used data from the Apollo missions to create a number of geological maps of the Moon, including a global map at the scale of 1:5,000,000 and some regional, higher-accuracy ones near the landing sites,” he says. “Since then, our knowledge of the Moon has advanced greatly, and those maps could no longer meet the needs for future lunar research and exploration.”
China will use the maps to support its lunar ambitions and Liu says that the maps will be beneficial to other countries as they undertake their own Moon missions. Three spacecrafthave launched aiming for the Moon so far this year, and in May, China intends to send a craft to collect rocks from the Moon’s far side.
Scientists will use the new lunar maps to better understand the Moon’s history.Credit: Chinese Academy of Sciences via Xinhua/Alamy
With the updated atlas, scientists will be able to better understand the history of the Moon, evaluate potential lunar resources and conduct comparative geological studies. It will also inform the location choices of future missions, including where to build a lunar research base, Liu says.
Carolyn van der Bogert, a planetary geologist at the University of Münster in Germany, says she was impressed by the amount of work that Chinese colleagues have put into compiling the new atlas.
“We are looking forward to being able to interact with the map in a very detailed way,” she says.
Other-worldly cartography
The atlas, which is available in both Chinese and English, was assembled using data from China’s lunar exploration programme, especially the Chang’e-1 mission, which surveyed the lunar surface from orbit between 2007 and 2009, according to Liu. “Chang’e-1’s camera conducted observation of lunar topography and geological structures, while its interference imaging spectrometer played a key role in identifying different rock types,” he says.
The new atlas was assembled using data from China’s lunar exploration programme.Credit: Chinese Academy of Sciences via Xinhua/Alamy
Observations made on the Moon’s surface by the Chang’e-3 and Chang’e-4 lander missions in 2013 and 2019, respectively, helped to verify the accuracy of the Chang’e-1 data. The atlas team also used data from missions such as the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, both launched by NASA, and India’s Chandrayaan-1 probe. “Some observations were highly complementary to the Chang’e missions. For instance, GRAIL’s data helped us identify all the deep fractures on the lunar surface,” Liu says.
Chinese researchers started to compile the maps in 2012 as they were searching for the next targets to explore on the Moon. In partnership with Russia and more than a dozen other countries and organizations, China is leading the construction of the International Lunar Research Station, which is intended to take shape in the mid-2030s at the Moon’s south pole for scientific exploration and resource exploitation.
“Contributing to lunar science is a profound way for China to assert its potential role as a scientific powerhouse in the decades to come,” says Mitchell.
Liu says that his team has already started work to improve the resolution of the maps, and will produce regional maps of higher accuracy on the basis of scientific and engineering needs. In the meantime, the completed atlas has been integrated into a cloud platform called the Digital Moon, and will eventually become available to the international research community.
WhatsApp and Threads are no longer available for download in China’s App Store. Photo: Unsplash
Following a request from the Chinese government, Apple has reportedly pulled WhatsApp and Threads from China’s App Store. Other Meta apps, like Facebook and Instagram, are still available for download in the country.
The Cyberspace Administration of China asked Apple to take down the two Meta apps, citing national security concerns.
New Chinese government regulations possibly behind WhatsApp’s removal
It is not immediately clear what national security issues led the Chinese government to ask Apple to delist the Meta apps. iPhone users with WhatsApp and Threads installed can continue using it without issues. However, new users cannot download it from the App Store now.
In an emailed statement to the Wall Street Journal, Apple confirmed the removal of the two Meta apps. Its spokesperson said, “The Cyberspace Administration of China ordered the removal of these apps from the China storefront based on their national security concerns.”
The removal comes as Chinese regulators start clamping down on apps that have yet to register with the government based on a directive issued in August 2023. It aims to reduce scams and fraud, with the registration deadline of March 2024. As part of the regulation, app developers must have a mechanism to handle “illegal information.”
Telegram and Signal also removed from China’s App Store
WhatsApp is not the only popular messaging app that is unavailable for download on the iPhone in China. Telegram and Signal have also been removed from the App Store.
This is not the first time Apple has removed popular apps from the Chinese App Store at the government’s request. In 2020, Apple booted over 94000 games from China’s App Store following a new government regulation. Before that, it had removed apps like Quartz and Tripadvisor for violating the App Store or the Chinese government guidelines.
Apple supplier BOE has taken the lead in becoming the OLED panel supplier for the fourth-generation iPhone SE, IT Home reports.
Samsung Display, BOE, and Tianma have all been in discussions with Apple to supply the OLED panels, but today’s report claims that Samung has withdrawn from negotiations due to pricing problems, despite having an existing iPhone 14 OLED inventory to draw from.
Apple has reportedly been holding out for $25 per panel, but Samsung’s final offer was $30, which is lower than the two Chinese manufacturers. That leaves BOE and Tianma as potential suppliers, however Tianma has not yet met Apple’s stringent quality requirements, leaving BOE in pole position to win the majority of the orders, if not all of them.
The panel prices for the iPhone SE 4 are said to be a lot lower than suppliers charge for the OLED displays used in the iPhone 15, since the panels for the SE will use legacy parts identical to those used in the iPhone 13 and iPhone 14, so the suppliers won’t need to make new investments in R&D. Display manufacturers are believed to have been bidding to supply the panels since at least last August.
The fourth-generation iPhone SE is rumored to feature an iPhone 14-like design with a 6.1-inch OLED display, Face ID instead of Touch ID, a USB-C port, an Action button, and an all-screen look that does away with the Home Button.
Earlier this month, CAD renders of the device corroborated previous design rumors for the iPhone SE 4, which is expected to launch in 2025. Despite the rumored upgrades, the iPhone SE 4 may face faster depreciation than Apple’s higher-end models, according to one report.
China wants to use and manufacture more of its own medical equipment.Credit: VCG via Getty Images
As a sinology student in the early 1990s at Nanjing University, Elisabeth Staudinger “got a flavour of what health care felt like for the people in China”. As part of her studies, she had to venture more than 2,000 kilometres to Yunnan in China’s southwest corner. Back then, parts of the province were so remote that people who needed medical attention would often have to wait for Mondays to roll around, when visiting merchants, physicians and dentists would set up shop in a weekly market.
“Fast forward to today, you have very reasonable hospitals and health-care infrastructures across the country” alongside near-universal health coverage, says Staudinger, who is now a managing board member of the global medical technology company Siemens Healthineers in Erlangen, Germany. “Things are massively better than it used to be,” she says. “But there’s still a lot of work to do.”
Nature Spotlight: Medical devices in China
China has a population of around 1.4 billion people, one-fifth of whom are over the age of 60. A burgeoning middle class and the accompanying rise in medical conditions linked to affluence, such as type 2 diabetes and hypertension, has meant that China has embraced preventive care, alongside treatment, says Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau, an analyst who studies science, technology and innovation at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), a think tank in Berlin. But this has meant opening up the market to expensive treatments and technology, he says.
Aware of the costs, the Chinese government began a drive around a decade ago to produce and use more locally manufactured medical devices, says analyst Alexander Brown, also at MERICS. In particular, the focus has been on high-end equipment such as X-ray scanners, which can aid early disease detection. The push intensified further in 2021, in the hope of slashing costs and meeting the evolving health-care needs of an ageing population, while also boosting innovation and enhancing national security by curtailing imports.
The strategy is affecting both China’s medical-device sector and the medical-technology industry as a whole. Medical technology includes devices that use information technology to detect, collect and upload data. Hospitals in China have been instructed to procure products made in the country when possible, and domestic and foreign manufacturers have altered their business operations and focus. In 2021, the most recent year for which data were available, China held 20% of the medical-device market share, second only to the United States.
Gathering momentum
The Chinese government promotes its ‘make local, buy local’ strategy in a variety of ways: dedicated innovation parks, subsidies and research funding for domestic medical-technology companies, and centralized volume-based purchasing for public hospitals.
“But technically there is only one regulation on the books that is explicitly around Chinese-product procurement,” says Helen Chen, a managing partner based in Shanghai at the global firm L.E.K. Consulting. In May 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Ministry of Finance introduced Order 551, which comprises a list of 315 products. Around half of these are medical equipment such as ophthalmic lenses and medical lasers, while the rest includes items such as those used in marine, geological and geophysical work — ground-based radars, for example. State-owned firms looking to procure such items must ensure that the equipment is made of 25–100% of locally manufactured parts.
Unleashing the power of big data to guide precision medicine in China
Order 551 must be viewed in the broader context, says Chen, “which is that China, in general, is trying to be much more self-sufficient in its health-care products”. The directive came just a month after the Chinese government outlined a five-year plan aimed at propelling six or more Chinese companies into the world’s top 50 medical-device firms — up from the 4 that were in the top 100 in 2021. The country’s ambition for its medical-device sector can be traced back further, however. In 2010, medical devices were identified as one of 20 Strategic Emerging Industries — alongside biotechnology, renewable energy, and the Internet of Things — and the central government began dedicating five-year plans to the sector.
In 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping highlighted the cause further, announcing: “It is necessary to accelerate the localization of high-end medical devices to decrease production costs and to promote the continuous development of national enterprises.” The pivot to producing products such as high-value imaging, diagnostic and treatment equipment — including computed tomography (CT) scanners, ultrasound and dialysis machines, as well as implantables such as pacemakers — is particularly notable because up until that point, medical manufacturing had centred mainly on producing syringes, gloves, gauzes and other low-end disposables (see ‘Medical machines’).
Source: Alexander Brown/Merics
But for industry watchers such as Chen, the real game-changer occurred in 2015, when the government announced its Made in China 2025 (MIC2025) initiative. The strategic plan boldly declared the country aimed to become a global manufacturing powerhouse for ten industries — including robotics, electric vehicles and medical devices — by 2025. China hopes to achieve this by boosting local industrial capabilities in research and development, design, and the procurement of crucial components, as well as by moving assembly processes into the country.
Among other targets, MIC2025 calls for 70% of mid-to-high-end medical devices to be produced domestically by 2025, and for this to rise to 95% by 2030.
With only a year to the first deadline, Brown says: “I think they still have a way to go. They haven’t been able to catch up as much as they would have liked in contrast to something like new-energy vehicles.”
“But it’s not for the lack of effort — China has been funnelling a lot of money into the sector. I think the hurdles are partly to do with the highly specialized nature of medical devices,” Brown adds. “Still, Made in China has had the greatest impact in terms of building up local industrial capacity.”
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And it’s a tried-and-tested approach. The country has gained dominance in industries such as pharmaceuticals, solar panels and machine tools, according to a report by Brussels-based think tank, the European Centre for International Political Economy. Policymakers first identify sectors and technologies that they think are important to the country’s economic development and security. The government then initiates policies to grow domestic industries that can challenge global firms (see go.nature.com/49rlyhv).
China’s ambitions for its medical-device industry look no different. A profusion of policy and fiscal initiatives to boost local production and use of medical devices appeared after MIC2025. In April 2022, for instance, provincial governments in Anhui, Hubei and Shanxi told hospitals to limit their use of medical and testing equipment to those produced domestically.
The government also began offering incentives, such as reduced rent, to entice firms to move or set up offices in four medical-device industrial zones — the Bohai Economic Rim including Beijing; the Yangtze River Delta encompassing Shanghai; the Pearl River Delta, made up of Guangdong, Shenzhen and a handful of other cities; and Central China, which includes Wuhan, Chengdu and Chongqing. It also increased tax benefits for research and development investments: rising from 1.7 billion yuan (US$236 million) in 2017 to 11.4 billion yuan in 2022, according to a MERICS analysis of 122 medical-technology firms listed on the Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing stock exchanges (see go.nature.com/3urvdkn).
In July 2023, the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology began mass producing a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) instrument it had developed. And at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, United Imaging Healthcare in Shanghai supplied more than 100 domestically produced CT scanners and X-ray machines to hospitals including those in Wuhan, Shanghai and Beijing.
In 2019, one of China’s biggest medical-technology firms, MicroPort in Shanghai, reported that surgeons had completed the first successful surgery, a prostatectomy, with its lacroscopic robot Toumai. The four-armed Toumai can do complex surgeries in narrow spaces in the body, such as urethral reconstructions. It can even be operated remotely.
Ripples far and wide
According to a 2021 analysis by consultancy firm Deloitte (see go.nature.com/3uyujzw), the market revenue of China’s medical-device industry more than doubled between 2015 and 2019, constantly outpacing the expansion in gross domestic product with an annual growth rate of roughly 20% since the launch of MIC2025.
Some sectors have even begun to turn the tide on trade — manufacturers of pacemakers, for instance, saw their global exports grow by 110% between 2015 and 2020. Meanwhile, sales of pacemakers by foreign competitors to China rose by 2%.
Overall, the market share of domestic brands producing high-end devices has risen from 20% to 30% in the past decade. US and European multinationals such as Siemens, GE HealthCare and Medtronic continue to dominate the sector, however, says Rohit Anand, an analyst at the consulting firm GlobalData in Hyderabad, India. This difference in market share boils down to “substantial disparity in product quality, scale and efficiency”, he says.
Parts of high-end devices such as computed tomography scanners are now made in China.Credit: Feature China/Future Publishing via Getty
Brown observes that medical devices are niche products that require specialized knowledge, and Chinese firms have struggled to gain a foothold.
Citing medical robotics as an example, he adds: “There isn’t a big market in China because they are very expensive. The average Chinese customer just can’t afford to pay for that, and the ones that can afford to would probably opt for a leading American firm over some inexperienced Chinese one.”
Attitudes among medical professionals are changing, however. A 2020 survey of Chinese hospital workers, conducted by the firm L.E.K. Consulting, found that 3% “use Chinese materials when possible”. In a follow-up survey a year later, after Order 551, around 30% said they always use Chinese materials (see go.nature.com/3iba26v).
Often, the decision comes down to practicalities, says Deloitte analyst Alan MacCharles in Shanghai. “You might have two or three options and the doctor might say: ‘The Western device is slightly better but because I haven’t had training on that system in awhile, I’m much more proficient with the Chinese brands.’”
Because of new purchasing regulations, many international manufacturers have opted to establish local operations in China. Some partner with local firms, setting up joint ventures, such as the ones between Sinopharm Imaging in Beijing and US firm GE Healthcare, or between Shanghai Electric and Siemens.
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A handful of prominent foreign firms have established their own manufacturing plants in the country. Sysmex in Kobe, Japan, now assembles its blood and urine testing equipment in Shandong. Similarly, Dutch firm Philips produces a handful of high-end scanners in China, such as its EPIQ Elite ultrasound series, which includes an AI-powered cardiovascular machine. In 2020, Philips launched its Ingenia Ambition MRI, which is made in China and boasts a 50% reduction in scan times. It is the first MRI to operate without helium gas, a non-renewable resource that is in scarce supply.
And at an international trade fair last May, GE Healthcare displayed 23 medical devices, 18 of which were made and developed in China. One highlight was the ultra-high-end Revolution CT scanner, which boasts the ability to conduct a coronary examination “in one heartbeat under any heart rate and rhythm conditions”, according to GE Healthcare. The firm began manufacturing the scanner at its Beijing factory in 2020. Of the CT equipment that the company ships to customers worldwide, 70% are made at that factory.
Making the decision to start manufacturing in China isn’t taken lightly. “It’s not an easy process because the cost of building these plants for high-end devices is high,” says MacCharles. “You can have local supply-chain and intellectual-property issues, it takes years to get fully certified and basically you can’t produce anything for quite some time.”
US firms, in particular, face challenges, given the ongoing tensions between the two nations, says Grace Fu Palma, founder of China Med Device in Beijing, a consultancy that offers regulatory and business advice to foreign firms looking to enter the Chinese market. “The political situation is definitely having a negative impact on the entry of foreign firms.”
Staudinger says that China continues to be a priority location for Siemens, which has been operating there for more than 30 years and has six research and development sites in the country, despite increasing pressures for consumers to buy from local firms. “The regulations are sometimes projected as this thing where they want to get foreign companies out of the country,” she says. “But that is not what we have experienced.”
“As long as you’re part of the journey and a part of supporting the direction of building a robust, high-quality health-care system in China,” says Staudinger, “you’ll feel very welcome.”
Seven hundred metres below the rolling green landscape of Kaiping, southeast China, construction workers are furiously finishing a 35-metre-diameter orb-shaped detector that aims to observe ghostly subatomic particles known as neutrinos in exquisite detail. If all goes to plan, the US$376 million Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) will be ready to start detecting by the end of this year, says JUNO’s on-site manager Yuekun Heng, a physicist at the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing.
That will make it the first of several ambitious new neutrino detectors currently being built around the world to go online. Two others — in Japan and the United States — are due to start collecting data in 2027 and 2031.
JUNO’s main goal will be to help researchers determine which type of neutrino has the highest mass and which has the least, one of the biggest mysteries in physics. Solving this problem could help physicists to understand what neutrinos are and why their mass is so small. Researchers at JUNO aim to do this by measuring neutrinos pouring in from two nuclear-power stations located more than 50 kilometres away from the observatory. Another goal is to study neutrinos streaming in from other sources, including the Sun, atmosphere, exploding stars and natural radioactive decay processes within the Earth.
On 7 March, researchers at the observatory started to fill a miniature version of the detector with liquid scintillator — a cocktail of solvent and organic chemicals that emits light when neutrinos zip through it. This model will test whether the scintillator is pure enough to help researchers to crack the mass-order problem.
JUNO’s approach sets it apart from the other detectors being built. Japan’s planned Hyper-Kamiokande detector will use purified water as its neutrino-detecting medium, whereas the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment in the United States will rely on liquid argon to measure the elusive particles, says Mary Bishai, a physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and co-spokesperson for the US observatory. Both of these future detectors will measure neutrinos beaming in from nearby particle accelerators rather than nuclear reactors.
Like telescopes that view the cosmos at different wavelengths, having several neutrino detectors that use distinct techniques to observe neutrinos from various sources, such as the Sun and nuclear power stations, will allow researchers to develop a better understanding of neutrino characteristics and the role of these particles in the Universe, says Bishai. “It gives us a unique way of checking that our picture is consistent,” she says.
The liquid scintillator must contain only minuscule traces of uranium and thorium, radioactive elements that can mimic neutrino events when their decay accidentally coincides with other signals and can destroy experiment results. If levels of these elements are too high, it will be almost impossible to measure neutrinos with the sensitivity needed to solve the mass-ordering problem, says JUNO team member Alberto Garfagnini, a physicist at the University of Padua, Italy. The team is therefore filling the miniature version of JUNO — called OSIRIS — to test the fluid’s radiopurity before it is pumped straight into the main detector next door. It’s important to get this step right, because there’s no going back once JUNO is filled with 20,000 tonnes of the liquid. “It has to be pure from the beginning,” says Garfagnini.
Photomultiplier tubes will detect flashes of energy produced when neutrinos interact with matter.Credit: Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Ghostly particles
Observing a neutrino sounds like it should be easy, given that they are the most abundant particles that have mass in the Universe, with billions of them passing through every cubic centimetre of Earth each second. But their properties remain mostly a mystery, because most of them barely interact with matter while they glide through the cosmos, making it difficult to detect them directly. However, neutrinos might hold clues about how the Universe evolved, says Garfagnini. “They are an important ingredient in cosmology,” he says.
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Physicists know that there are three flavours of neutrinos: electron, muon and tau (each named after the fundamental particles they are produced with). More than two decades ago, the Super-Kamiokande experiment in Hida, Japan, and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada discovered that neutrinos morph from one flavour into another as they travel1,2, which physicists could explain only if the particles had mass. And in 2012, the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment outside Shenzhen, China, precisely measured one of the parameters that describes the rate at which neutrinos switch between flavours3.
Neutrinos also have three mass states — ν1, ν2 and ν3 — and each flavour is a mixture of all of them. Physicists have deduced that ν2 is slightly more massive than ν1, and that there’s a big difference between ν3 and the others. But they still haven’t figured out whether ν3 is heavier or lighter than its better understood counterparts. The answer to this mass-ordering problem has remained elusive, because it demands larger, more-sensitive detectors that are close enough to a well-understood neutrino source, says Bishai. “You have to be in the sweet spot for the effect you are looking for.”
More than 40,000 neutrino-detecting photomultiplier tubes cover the main detector sphere.Credit: Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
A giant orb
JUNO is located beneath a granite hill, which will act as a shield against cosmic rays — supercharged particles from space that can drown out faint neutrino signals. Every day, fluorescent-vested researchers and construction workers take a 15-minute cable-car ride down a steep 1.3-kilometre tunnel to continue building the detector inside a pristine, temperature-controlled hall. The acrylic sphere, which is roughly two-thirds complete, will soon be submerged in 35,000 tonnes of high-purity water, which will further shield the detector from background radiation. Once the liquid scintillator has passed its radiopurity test, it will be funnelled into the main detector. The entire process will take six months, says Heng.
Safeguarding JUNO’s sensitivity has been no easy feat. When construction started in 2015, the team were hoping to finish the building work in three years. But removing the huge volumes of groundwater resulted in delays. “Water was a big problem,” says Heng. To address this, the team installed a system that pumps 500 cubic metres of water out of the snaking underground tunnels every hour. To control levels of radon — a radioactive gas produced naturally by granite and other rocks that doesn’t play well with sensitive neutrino experiments — the cavernous facility is dotted with whirring, cylinder-shaped fans.
The reason for its difficult location lies on the surface. JUNO sits between two nuclear power stations, each located 53 kilometres away, that will supply the detector with a steady stream of electron antineutrinos, which have the same mass as neutrinos. The sheer number of them churned out by these power plants will give researchers a chance of measuring them with the precision needed to determine their mass order, says Heng.
Neutrinos cannot be detected directly, so to figure out their mass, physicists measure the energy of other particles produced on the rare occasion that a neutrino interacts with matter. In JUNO’s case, when an electron antineutrino bumps into a proton in the liquid scintillator, the interaction will produce a positron and a neutron, a process called inverse beta decay. The energy from the positron results in a flash of light, while the neutron produces another flash when it is captured by a proton. These telltale flashes — 200 microseconds apart — will be measured by more than 40,000 bubble-shaped photomultiplier tubes that will cover the sphere. The time difference between these flashes will help researchers to separate neutrinos from cluttering background signals, says Garfagnini. “It’s a clear signature,” he says. The researchers hope to detect 100,000 neutrinos over the next six years.
Its size, shielded environment and proximity to nuclear power sources will make it one of the most sensitive neutrino detectors in the world, says Geoffrey Taylor, a physicist at the University of Melbourne in Australia. This gives it a good chance of solving the mass order of neutrinos before other experiments get off the ground, he adds. “It’s on track to be a winner.”
