Headline News

Bai Chunli Takes Office as President of TWAS

CAS President Bai Chunli took office as President of TWAS on Jan 1, 2013, which was the first time that a Chinese scientist served such a leadership position after the inception of this international organization about 30 years ago. Bai pledged to fulfill his commitment to further increase the role and reputation of TWAS in promoting the scientific excellence and capacity of the developing world as well as in promoting global sustainability, through even greater efforts to promote South-South and South-North cooperation in S&T. His planned initiatives included: increasing the number of TWAS Fellows selected from the outstanding scientists from the developing world; increasing the ratio of women scientists among the TWAS Fellows; attracting the support and participation of more scientists and scientific institutions from developed countries to achieve TWAS’s goal; encouraging more communications between young scientists from the developed and developing countries; allowing more autonomy and flexibility of regional offices in coordinating and implementing various programs and activities; encouraging more effective exchanges and cooperation between regional offices; increasing the visibility of TWAS among national governments, the public and various agencies; reducing the knowledge gap between developing countries by making more emphasis to promote scientific capacity building of the less developed countries (LDC); and enhancing scientific cooperation between China and the rest of the developing world through the platform of TWAS.

Science：Highly Commented theDaya Bay Neutrino Experiment Achievement

On Dec. 20, 2012, Science announced the top ten Breakthroughs of the Year 2012 to the public. The discovery of a new kind of neutrino transformation by the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment was selected as one of the nine runners-up of this year’s breakthrough, and the winner went to the discovery of the Higgs Boson. It is written in Science that scientists in China have measured the third and final “mixing angle” that can be used to describe neutrinos. Sometimes it's not the result itself so much as the promise it holds that matters most. This year, physicists measured the last parameter describing how elusive particles called neutrinos morph into one another as they zip along at near–light speed. And the result suggests that in the coming decades neutrino physics will be every bit as rich as physicists had hoped—and may even help explain how the universe evolved to contain so much matter and so little antimatter. The Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment is a China-based multinational particle physics project studying neutrinos. The multinational collaboration includes researchers from China, the United States, Taiwan, and the Czech Republic. The US side of the project is funded by the US Department of Energy's Office of High Energy Physics. The experiment studies neutrino oscillations and is designed to measure the mixing angle θ13 using antineutrinos produced by the reactors of the Daya Bay Nuclear Power Plant and the Ling Ao Nuclear Power Plant. On March 8, 2012, the Daya Bay collaboration announced discovery of a new kind of neutrino transformation and an accurate measurement of theta13. This significant achievement received strong responses from the international field of physics and was commented as a milestone in the research of neutrino physics.

Winners of CAS International Cooperation Award for 2012 Announced

On Jan. 23, 2013, CAS announced the Winners of its International Cooperation Award for 2012. They were: Prof. C.N.R. Rao(India), Prof. Herbert Jaeckle(Germany), and Prof. G. A. Zherebtsov(Russia). CAS President Bai Chunli congratulated them on this prestigious honor and conferred them with the medals and certificates. Prof. C.N.R. Rao had made great contributions to promoting cooperation between TWAS and CAS, to facilitating Sino-India scientific cooperation and talent exchange, and to promoting the scientific capacity building of the developing world. Prof. Herbert Jaeckle had played an active role in promoting the combination of MPG’s scientific management model with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ management practice. As a result of close collaborations, the CAS-MPG Partner Institute on Computational Biology has been a successful example of establishing a first-class team of international standards with highly productive performances. Prof. G. A. Zherebtsov had been very instrumental to promoting scientific cooperation between the Russian Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Sciences in the field of space science. Thanks to his endeavors, a Sino-Russian Joint Research Center on Space Weather had been established since 2001. Prof. Zherebtsov was also active in leading the Russian-China cooperation under the Kuafu Project of CAS Space Science Priority Research Program.