The University of Hong Kong (HKU) announced the inauguration of the Hong Kong Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (HKIAA) with a plaque-unveiling ceremony on 3 November. The event gathered world leading scientists and government dignitaries to herald a new era of astronomical research in the region.

Pairing cutting-edge chemistry with artificial intelligence, a multidisciplinary team of scientists today published fresh chemical evidence of Earth’s earliest life – concealed in 3.3-billion-year-old rocks – and molecular evidence that oxygen-producing photosynthesis was occurring over 800 million years earlier than previously documented.

The structure of gas and dust resembles a glowing diamond ring / Computer simulations and observations made on board the 'flying observatory' SOFIA are now able to explain the special shape

Published on 17 November in the Journal of Applied Ecology, the research introduces a novel metric called “overlap intensity” which for the first time, measures not just the extent of shared space between penguins and fishing vessels, but how many penguins are actually affected by this overlap. 

Researchers have successfully simulated the 100 billions stars of the Milky Way. This feat was accomplished by combining artificial intelligence (AI) with numerical simulations. This is 100 times better than previous attempts and took 100 times less time to produce. The same process can be used to model other phenomenon such as climate change and weather patterns. the study was led by Keiya Hirashima at the RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS) in Japan.

With the advancement of Internet applications, the global demand for broadband satellite communication services is incessantly escalating. Furthermore, there exists an exponential surge in the requisition for the capacity of satellite communication systems. In response to this evolving demand, the domain of satellite communication technology is progressively evolving toward the realm of high-throughput satellite (HTS) communication systems. The typical technical characteristics of HTS are: (a) the satellite adopts multibeam technology for beam overlapping coverage of the service area, which improves the quality of the wireless link while realizing the spatial dimension segmentation; (b) based on this, the system adopts multiple frequency multiplexing to improve the communication capacity of a single satellite; (c) gateway stations are tightly coupled with user beam clusters to complete two-hop communication, which makes multiple gateway stations share the communication resources of the same satellite, forming a spatial isolation of the gateway stations, and once again realizing the frequency multiplexing of the gateway station links. A key requirement for future multibeam broadband satellite communication systems is the ability to flexibly adjust beam capacity according to changes in business distribution, in order to meet time-varying business requirements. Beam hopping technology provides an efficient solution to achieve the efficient use of frequency resources and power resources. At the same time, the use of beam hopping makes the beam hopping of satellite payload need to match the business signals of ground signal stations, bringing about the need for synchronization of beam hopping between satellite and ground.

A joint research team from the Institute of Geochemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGCAS) and Shandong University has for the first time identified crystalline hematite (α-Fe₂O₃) and maghemite (γ-Fe₂O₃) formed by a major impact event in lunar soil samples retrieved by China's Chang'e-6 mission from the South Pole–Aitken (SPA) Basin.