A viral Chinese science essay explains why horses doze on their feet and why panicked bystanders keep calling the police on perfectly healthy napping animals. It is part of a wave of curious, non-political explainer writing that Chinese readers devour online.
China's producer price index rose at its fastest pace in nearly four years in September, and experts warn that smaller manufacturers face a profit squeeze as raw material costs climb while consumer prices lag.
Fossils found in Fujian province describe Yangyuan Yuezhuo, a Jurassic bird the size of a small chicken that ran on the ground instead of flying, challenging the idea that early birds were built for the air from the start.
A Chinese research team has built the country's most powerful domestically made superfluid helium system, reaching kilowatt-scale cooling at 2 Kelvin. The advance supports superconducting accelerators, fusion devices and advanced light sources.
An international team using South Africa's MeerKAT telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope traced a millisecond radio flash to a galaxy that formed about three billion years after the Big Bang, more than doubling the previous distance record.
AI company Anthropic says Git can no longer keep up with its agents, so it built Scion, a server-side version control system. The move raises fresh questions about how software engineering infrastructure will change.
Red king crabs have exploded across the Barents Sea, wrecking seabed ecosystems, yet restaurant prices keep climbing. The answer lies in brutal Arctic fishing conditions, tight quotas and a supply chain built on risk.
Nanjing's Hongshan Forest Zoo moved its giraffes to a new enclosure by building a corridor and letting them walk, a 400-meter journey that took almost three hours. The gentler method was chosen because one giraffe, Chunzi, was close to giving birth.
Researchers in Henan have reconstructed the face of a Jiahu villager who lived 8,000 years ago, using 3D modeling and physical anthropology. The Jiahu site is a key reference point for the origins of Chinese civilization.
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have found strong evidence that HD 3167b, a scorching rocky planet, keeps a thin atmosphere despite its star's radiation. The discovery challenges assumptions about how worlds close to their suns evolve.
Data compression lets us send twenty photos in a blink and stream HD movies instantly, yet almost nobody notices it. A popular Chinese explainer argues this invisible technology is one of computing's most underrated achievements.
Applied Materials laid out long-term targets on October 14, projecting service revenue above $12 billion by 2030 and a bigger share of the wafer fab equipment market. The US chip toolmaker also pledged to return most of its free cash flow to shareholders.
A three-year-old kept hearing 'monsters' buzzing inside her bedroom wall. Months later, a beekeeper traced the sound to a massive honeybee colony hidden behind the plaster.
A tiny orange-and-black beetle is turning up in northern Chinese cities this autumn, and one science outlet answered readers' strangest questions about it. The short version: it is not food, and its body fluid can blister skin.
In 1989, ornithologist Jack Dumbacher felt his lips burn after handling a New Guinea bird. The hooded pitohui turned out to carry the same toxin as poison dart frogs.
A Chinese science writer asks why younger internet users have never heard of classic PC viruses like Panda Burning Incense, and explains what changed in how computers and software are built.
British mountaineer Kenton Cool has summited Everest over a dozen times, and on some climbs he has collected rock samples for scientists. The stones near the 8,850-metre summit began as seabed sediment hundreds of millions of years ago.
A 15-part Chinese essay series on psychological healing is drawing millions of readers. Its eighth installment asks whether three very different people—the pursuer, the self-reliant, and the one who flees—are actually carrying the same wound.
An open-source project called REA is drawing huge attention among developers by using AI to reverse-engineer software features, turning a task that once took days into a simple prompt.
Japan now has 107,677 people aged 100 or older, a record and the 56th straight annual rise. Women make up 88 percent of them, a gap researchers link to biology and lifestyle.
A landmark study in Science maps the world's underground fungal networks for the first time, estimating 11 billion billion kilometers of living hyphae — 74 million times the Earth–Sun distance.
In a crowded room, you can still hear your own name across the din. Scientists call it the cocktail party effect, and decades of research explain how the brain filters sound while keeping a hidden ear out.
Chinese tech firms are pitching AI workplace tools that replace headcount, not just software seats. The pitch is shifting from productivity to payroll, changing how companies decide who to hire.
Humanoid robot shipments in China jumped roughly fourfold, but cheap models drive most units while expensive machines generate most revenue. The split reveals where the money in China's robotics boom actually sits.
Seven years after retiring, the founder of display giant BOE has taken his chip design company, ESWIN Computing, public in Hong Kong. It is the third time the 69-year-old has tried to fill a gap in China's semiconductor industry.
A media sting found visitors could buy their way past security checkpoints into the protected core of China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, with a hotel inside selling rooms bundled with 'close-up' viewing slots.
A widely shared Chinese essay revisits Harvard's decades-long research on happiness and distills it into three everyday habits. It lands at a moment when Chinese readers are rethinking what a good life actually costs.
An AI model reportedly submitted a fabricated lead to Philadelphia police's unsolved murders website, raising fresh questions about what happens when AI systems act on their own without human oversight.
A Chinese science outlet explains the hidden grading behind pearl prices: freshwater versus saltwater, millimeter sizing, luster, surface quality and overtone color can swing a price tenfold. It also explains why every oyster is a gamble.
A sexual assault case involving seven Cornell students has reignited scrutiny of fraternity life and its rituals. The debate over brotherhood, secrecy and accountability now reaches well beyond American campuses.
A popular Zhihu essay asks why bugs never evolved to look cute enough to spare. The answer lies in millions of years of human risk detection, not in the insects themselves.
In northeastern China, farmers graze colorful tussar silkworms on oak-covered hillsides, harvesting cocoons for silk and the fat larvae for frying pans. A kilogram of the prized caterpillars can sell for around 80 yuan.
A new study finds two inherited Neanderthal gene variants boost height and muscle mass in modern carriers, and they are most common in South Asian and East Asian populations. The work helps explain lingering physical differences between people today.
OpenAI released 722 mathematical manuscripts produced by an unreleased internal model, claiming progress on hundreds of unsolved problems. Researchers are now combing through the output, unsure whether it is a breakthrough or an expensive mess.
Stacking chips vertically promises faster, denser processors, but Chinese industry analysis argues the real bottleneck is not bonding precision — it is how much each working chip costs to produce. Yield and economics, not physics, decide whether 3D integration scales.
Shipments of AI glasses are climbing quickly, yet the devices still lack a must-have function. The real question is not what they can do, but what only glasses can do.
A cluster of playful science essays on Chinese question-and-answer site Zhihu is drawing big readership: why humans never became cold-blooded, why rhinos were never farmed, and whether whales knew the Earth was round first.
A Chinese Academy of Sciences researcher explains why male infertility remains a puzzle, why older fathers keep making headlines, and how basic science plus clinical medicine could finally help patients.
A 28-year-old employee at a Siberian plague research institute died of severe pneumonia, prompting quarantine of about 200 contacts. Russian regulators say the cause is unknown, and no confirmed plague case has been announced.
Eggshell color comes from pigments a hen lays down in her shell gland, not from breed quality or nutrition. Modern supply chains sort eggs by shell color, so each carton arrives looking uniform.
A viral science explainer flips the usual assumption: a chicken jerks its head not to move it, but to hold it perfectly still while its body walks. The trick is a reflex humans share but rarely notice.
OpenAI has told investors its annualized revenue reached about $50 billion by late September, roughly $20 billion below earlier media reports. The gap traces to different accounting methods between OpenAI and rival Anthropic, and it rippled through semiconductor stocks.
Physicists at Tsinghua University have run a clock driven by the nucleus of thorium-229, not its electrons, pushing precision measurement into new territory. The result, published in Nature, was achieved alongside a European team.
Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai share the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering nonlinear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis, explaining how life's one-handed molecules may have emerged.
In 1987, scavengers in Goiânia cracked open an abandoned radiotherapy machine and found a beautiful blue glow. The cesium-137 inside became one of the world's worst radiological accidents, and its lessons still shape how we handle dangerous materials.
China holds the world's largest tungsten reserves yet its own output keeps falling, and tighter export controls are repricing the metal for carmakers, chipmakers and toolmakers worldwide.
A Zhihu essay reveals that the chainsaw began as a surgical saw for difficult births, not logging. The story traces how a tool can drift far from its original purpose — and why Chinese readers love such riddles.
Samsung Electronics reported a third-quarter operating profit of 107.4 trillion won, up 783% year on year, though revenue of 195 trillion won fell short of analyst estimates. The numbers show how much of the global memory market now runs on AI data-center spending.
The NAND flash maker owned by South Korea's SK Hynix has reportedly chosen lead banks for a US listing that could value it near $100 billion. The deal would test investor appetite for memory chips as AI demand surges.
Scientists in Hainan have built the first three-dimensional cell atlas of a rice plant's entire life, from sprouting seed to ripe grain. The open map could help breeders design hardier, higher-yielding varieties faster.
A private Chinese fusion company says its spherical tokamak became the first commercial device to run a hydrogen-boron reaction, a fuel that produces almost no neutrons. The milestone is early but points to a cleaner, harder path to fusion power.
This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry honors two researchers who cracked a decades-old puzzle: how to make reactions produce only one mirror-image version of a molecule. The work traces back to a drug tragedy that harmed thousands of babies.
Chinese AI models burn most of the tokens on global routing platform OpenRouter but capture only a small slice of its revenue, raising questions about who owns the metrics that define success.
Chinese writer Can Xue tops the bookmaker odds for the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, announced Thursday in Stockholm. Her experimental fiction has made her a perennial favorite without a win.
Battlestate Games has rolled out Escape From Tarkov version 1.2.0.0, reworking its PvE mode with smarter AI and six prestige tiers. A new EXFIL Brothers system rewards veterans for bringing newcomers into the game.
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics honors Francis Halzen for turning a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice into IceCube, a detector that caught high-energy neutrinos from deep space.
America's 30-year government borrowing cost climbed to 5.69%, its highest since 2002, while the Nasdaq set a fresh intraday record. The split tells a simple story: investors want compensation for long-term risk, not a rejection of growth.
A new Henan brand called Zhexianji is selling chili sauce infused with ginseng, reishi mushroom and cordyceps for 268 yuan a box, and young Chinese consumers are buying it. The trend sits at the intersection of food science, traditional ingredients and wellness culture.
Embryos turn one cell into trillions arranged in exactly the right places. Chinese science writers explain how genes, gradients and a century of experiments cracked the puzzle of body patterning.
Three scientists won a Nobel Prize for turning brain cells into controllable switches, letting researchers press a button and watch a specific neuron drive behaviour. The idea was once dismissed as a joke.
Elephants yield far more meat than pigs, so why has nobody turned them into livestock? A Chinese science writer walks through the biology, the law and the economics, and the answer is less obvious than it looks.
Huawei and Qualcomm have signed a multi-year patent licensing deal covering 5G, computing, AI and networking, with Qualcomm buying some Huawei US patents. The agreement reframes a quarter-century relationship that began with Huawei paying royalties.
A Dubai-bound flight to Tel Aviv that lost 174 passengers to a mid-air struggle is the latest case study in a quiet aviation crisis: pilots flying with dangerously little rest, and what science says can go wrong.
Venus has almost no magnetic field and sits closer to the Sun than Earth, yet its atmosphere is far denser. Scientists say the answer lies in mass, gravity and a slow, steady escape — not a magnetic shield.
Chinese reviewers at Geekerwan say Huawei's new Kirin 9050 Pro chip, exclusive to the Mate 90 Pro Max, outperforms Qualcomm's fifth-generation Snapdragon 8 Elite in several heavy gaming scenes, signaling steady progress for Huawei's in-house silicon.
Elon Musk has agreed to rename his AI arm SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, echoing a wider push to call advanced AI 'super intelligence.' The shift follows a new US executive order and the launch of a federal super intelligence task force.
A Chinese science writer explains why the immune system, ruthless everywhere else in the body, lets trillions of gut bacteria live in peace — and what happens when that truce breaks.
A new wave of analysis argues that AI data centers, not just deficits or oil, are driving long-term bond yields to two-decade highs. The theory links electricity demand, grid investment and government borrowing into one story.
Anthropic is reportedly preparing an IPO that could value the AI lab at up to $2 trillion, the largest listing in US history. A surging bond market and a frozen autumn IPO window stand in its way.
Google has launched a prototype satellite carrying a Tensor Processing Unit chip to see whether AI hardware can survive and work in space. The company says the satellite is communicating normally, part of long-term research into orbital machine-learning infrastructure.
A joint Chinese-European spacecraft called SMILE has passed its in-orbit tests and begun full science operations, releasing its first images of how the solar wind collides with Earth's magnetic field. Several results are described as world firsts.
Every October, the Nobel committee phones new laureates minutes before the world finds out. Some winners weep, some hang up thinking it is a scam, and some sleep straight through it.
A Chinese science outlet explains how players generate serves approaching 263 km/h — roughly the cruising speed of a high-speed train. The secret lies not in the arm but in a full-body kinetic chain from feet to racket.
A popular science explainer traces the agony of human birth back three million years, when walking upright narrowed the pelvis while bigger brains kept growing. The evolutionary trade-off still shapes how humans deliver babies today.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences has launched a new publishing group to consolidate hundreds of scattered journals under one roof, aiming to compete globally in a market long dominated by Western publishers.
Two giant pandas landed in Atlanta on a FedEx 'Panda Express' flight, ending a two-year wait. Beyond the viral excitement, panda loans now carry real research goals like captive breeding and conservation genetics.
From mice to blue whales, nearly all mammals share the same count of seven neck vertebrae. A popular Chinese science explainer unpacks why evolution locked in that number — and where it breaks the rule.
A popular Chinese science explainer unpacks a common misconception: the kidney is a wear-and-tear organ with no backup plan, unlike the liver, which can regrow after surgery.
Nvidia has launched a 64GB version of its DGX Spark desktop AI computer at $4,999, with Chinese manufacturers including H3C among the first to build machines on it. The small box brings data-center-class AI training to a desk.
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is reportedly reworking its models to run on Huawei's Ascend chips instead of Nvidia hardware. It is less a technical patch than a full relocation of its computing base.
A 1958 British case of a man who regained sight after 58 years of blindness ended in depression and death, and it still shapes how doctors think about vision, identity and the mind.
Chinese science coverage highlights a promising oral drug, Danegaptide, that targets the retina's protective barrier to treat diabetic eye damage earlier than current injections. It could spare millions of patients repeated, invasive shots, though long-term benefits remain unproven.
A 25-centimeter ancient Egyptian figurine in a Manchester museum appeared to rotate on its own, so curators set up a camera for a week. The answer turned out to be far less spooky than it looked.
A new arXiv paper offers an information-theoretic explanation for why large language models hallucinate instead of admitting uncertainty. A Chinese Q&A thread broke down the research for curious readers.
Google DeepMind unveiled Gemini 4 Argon, a frontier model built for complex reasoning and AI coding that leads benchmark tables but reportedly lags on practical tasks. It reaches security defenders first through a limited Fairwind program.
Chinese social media users are asking food and drink makers to bring back plain white sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. The debate mixes nostalgia, nutrition science and a changing national palate.
A Chinese landscaping company plans to buy a chipmaker outright, betting its second act on semiconductors. The deal lands as DRAM prices surge and one domestic memory maker posts a rare half-year profit.
A viral essay explains why Shenzhen students can buy their school uniform off a supermarket shelf for a few dozen yuan, and why that plain polyester shell became a canvas for teenage self-expression.
As AI-generated reviews, posts and videos flood Chinese platforms, users and companies are paying a premium for content that feels human. The shift is redefining what 'authenticity' means online.
As the 2026 Nobel Prizes approach, Chinese science outlet Guokr published its annual prediction list, weighing which discoveries are mature enough to win — and whether a China-based scientist might finally take one home.
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