
National Natural Science Foundation of China to select researchers under 35 for 15-year backing based solely on lab presence.
Dou Xiankang, director of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, announced a new initiative to provide researchers under 35 with long-term financial backing assessed solely by their physical presence in the lab over a 15-year period.
AI-generated summary
The National Natural Science Foundation of China is the country's top funder of basic research.
Dou Xiankang, director of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), the country’s top funder of basic research, told a recent academic forum that the agency was selecting a group of the brightest researchers under 35 for long-term financial backing.
Once this group of exceptionally brilliant young people was identified, their sole performance metric over a 15-year period would be “whether they are in the laboratory”, Dou said on September 19.
He said there would be no short-term performance reviews during this period. Those selected would be assessed on only one criterion: physical presence in the lab.

The China Meteorological Administration held a press conference in October and announced that the current El Niño is continuing to develop and is expected to form the strongest super El Niño event in the history of monitoring records, which will have a significant impact on my country's autumn and winter climate and next spring and summer climate.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences launched the Science Frontier Limit Breakthrough Program in Beijing on September 29, focusing on the "four poles" directions of extreme macro, extreme micro, extreme conditions and extreme comprehensiveness. It announced the first batch of 10 projects and issued an initiative to the world to face the "extreme questions", build an "open bridge" and embrace the "trend of change".

Research from Tohoku University in Japan found that during the rapid eye movement (REM) period of dreaming in mice, brain blood flow surges, but the concentration of available energy ATP in nerve cells plummets abnormally, indicating that the brain is undergoing intensive internal calculations and memory organization.
An exhibition and briefing on new achievements in Oracle research was held in Anyang, Henan on the 29th. The latest achievements in Oracle's monographs, papers and digitization in the past four years were announced, demonstrating the combination of traditional academics and modern technology.
A press conference on the progress of the restoration of portraits at the Jiahu site and the transformation of research results was held in Zhengzhou on the 29th. For the first time, a restored portrait of a male ancestor aged 25 to 30 years old from the Jiahu site was unveiled. The site dates back to about 9,000 to 7,500 years ago, and the world's earliest playable musical instrument, a bone flute, was unearthed.

China's 30-day expedition tested the operational capabilities of the world's most powerful deep-ocean drilling ship, conducting drilling and sampling at two sites and obtaining a large number of precious core samples and data, according to Science and Technology Daily.