ICO Congress Held in China for First Time

The 20 th Congress of the International Commission for Optics (ICO20) opened on Aug. 22 in Changchun, More than 1,000 experts in the field of optics from 38 countries and regions attended the congress.

This is the third time that ICO held its congress in Asia since the founding of the organization, but the first time in China. Wang Daheng, member of CAS and CAE, and pioneer and founder of the Chinese optical development, acted as honorary chairman of the congress. He delivered a speech at the opening ceremony. The theme of the ICO Congress was Challenges of the Optical Science and Technology in the New Century. The congress covered academically all the optical fields necessary for innovative development in the 21 st century. Charles H. Townes, a Nobel Prize Laureate, and other famous optical experts and scholars from both China and other countries delivered lectures.

Lu Yongxiang Awarded Honorary Doctor of Science from Loughborough University

Lu Yongxiang, Vice Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress and President of CAS, was awarded Honorary Doctor of Science of the Loughborough University, UK in Shanghai.

Shortly after he was awarded the degree, Lu Yongxiang delivered a brief speech. He said, “the honor of being awarded the Honorary Doctor of Science of the Loughborough University does not only belong to me, but also to my family and my colleagues, and those colleagues from home and abroad who have long supported me in scientific research, education, and administration.” He also praised the Loughborough University for having been dedicated to the cooperation with the Chinese education circle and having admitted several hundred Chinese students. Meanwhile, he sincerely hoped that the education and science circles will join hands for cooperation, benefit each other and adhere to knowledge innovation and science and technology innovation, strengthen education of talents, and make greater contribution to the civilization and progress for both China and Britain and even the whole mankind.

New Astronomical Achievements Published on Nature

Profs Zhibo Jiang and Ji Yang from the Zijinshan (Purple Mountain) Observatory, CAS, and their partners from Japan and the United Kingdom published their recent research achievement on the Sep. 1 issue of Nature , a leading weekly magazine in the fields of natural sciences. They obtained high resolution near infrared polarization images of a famous protostellar object in the Orion constellation. These images indicate the presence of a circumstellar disk associated with this object. The discovery has provided important insight into the formation mechanism of massive stars. The work indicates that the relevant research in China has stepped into the frontier of the field of massive star formation research in the world.

I n Sep. 2, the web edition of Nature reported the latest research findings made by the National Astronomical Observatory on the basic issue of dark matter in the universe at the headline on the front page. Through the study of the basic property of the particles of dark matters revealed by astronomical observation, Dr. Qin Po from the National Astronomical Observatory, Prof. Ue-Li Pen from the University of Toronto and Prof. Joseph Silk from the Oxford University discovered that the universal gravitation may begin to divert from the Newton's squared inverse ratio on a scale smaller than one nano and presents 1/r^5. This suggests that there are three larger extra dimensions of one nano in the space. This may be the first evidence for the presence of extra dimensions that has ever been discovered and thus has provided experiments and observation test on superstring theory. This paper has aroused great attention in the world.

Latest Findings Published in Cell