Sitting at the entrance of Chengdu’s East Railway Station, Fu Guobin stared at a screen displaying infrared images of people passing through the station’s gates. As each person entered, a number popped up next to their image indicating their body temperature.“This is making my life much easier,” the station employee said as he sat in his booth. “Before this, I’d have to test everyone’s temperature with an ear thermometer.

With cities facing disastrous climate stresses and shocks in the coming years, one would think they would be rushing to implement mitigation and adaptation strategies.

In just four decades, China’s economy has achieved an unprecedented level of wealth and development, and, until recently, its upward trajectory of economic growth and prosperity seemed set to continue.

The United States (US) and China are competing for dominance in technology. America has long been at the forefront in developing the technologies (bio, nano, information) that are central to economic growth in the 21st century. Moreover, US research universities dominate higher education globally. In Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s annual Academic Ranking of World Universities, 16 of the top 20 institutions are in the US; none is in China.

It is one of the most remarkable success stories of the pandemic: the unproven technology that delivered the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines in record time, helping to turn the tide on COVID-19. The vaccines are based on mRNA, the molecule that instructs our cells to make specific proteins.

Winter is coming to the northern hemisphere, and with it the flu season – however advances spurred by the fight against COVID-19 are boosting hopes of finding a more reliable vaccine.Flu jabs have long been available to fight off the seasonal virus, but their rate of effectiveness can vary from between 40 and 70 percent.They work by injecting an inactivated virus strain into humans to trigger immunity.

According to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, we will overshoot the 1.5 degree Celsius (C) Paris Agreement threshold from the most to least optimistic scenario unless deep reductions in carbon dioxide occur now. As time is ticking towards mid-century, carbon sequestration could be the fundamental option to reduce emissions rapidly and decelerate global warming. Several countries have started investing in Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology.

The Airbnb of luxury luggage, Uber for home massage, and blockchain for pets are just a few recent examples of start-up ideas that make you wonder if the world has run out of bigger dreams to pursue.

United States (US) President Joe Biden on Wednesday revoked executive orders from his predecessor Donald Trump seeking to ban Chinese-owned mobile apps TikTok and WeChat over national security concerns, the White House said.A statement said that instead of banning the popular apps, the Biden administration would carry out a "criteria-based decision framework and rigorous, evidence-based analysis to address the risks" from internet applications controlled by foreign entities.Trump ha

It has now been a year and a half since we started living with – and too often dying from – COVID-19. Although the pandemic is by no means over, it is not too soon to take a step back and draw some preliminary conclusions from the experience.One conclusion that has turned out to be especially tentative concerns the source of the pandemic.