China's indigenous Beidou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) on Thursday began providing services to users in the Asian-Pacific region, according to a spokesman of the system. The services include positioning, navigation, timing and short messages for China and surrounding areas, said spokesman Ran Chengqi, also director of the China Satellite Navigation Office.
The battle of the bulge can be frustrating, with small victories overshadowed by major losses. But research may bring some comfort. Bacteria, and not just gluttony or laziness, may be to blame. The bacteria can actually make genes generate fat. Scientists have believed that microscopic organisms in the gut, microbiota, might play a crucial role in gaining weight but were never able to prove it.
China's space probe Chang'e-2 has successfully conducted a maneuver in which it flew by the asteroid Toutatis, about seven million km away from the Earth. Travelling in deep space, Chang'e-2 made the flyby on Dec. 13 at 16:30:09 Beijing Time (08:30"09 GMT).
Premier Wen Jiabao on Thursday called for more efforts to motivate scientific and technological personnel and give full play to their creativity, saying it is "an important task in the country's sci-tech system reforms." Liberating the people and allowing them to be free to create are a fundamental part of innovation, Wen said during an inspection tour of Zhongguancun, a Beijing-based technology hub.
Chinese astronauts may get fresh vegetables and oxygen supplies by gardening in extraterrestrial bases in the future, an official said after a just-concluded lab experiment in Beijing. Deng Yibing, deputy director of the Beijing-based Chinese Astronaut Research and Training Center, said that the experiment focused on a dynamic balanced mechanism of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water between people and plants in a closed system.
China successfully sent a communication satellite into space on Tuesday evening. Conditions of Chinasat 12 are normal after it was launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Southwest China's Sichuan province at 6:13 pm. It has reached a preset orbit, according to a monitoring center based in Xi'an.
86-10-68597521 (day)
86-10-68597289 (night)
86-10-68511095 (day)
86-10-68512458 (night)
cas_en@cas.cn
52 Sanlihe Rd., Xicheng District,
Beijing, China (100864)
Copyright © 2002 - Chinese Academy of Sciences
