BEIJING, Feb. 29 (Xinhua) — The following is a summary of published science and technology news of China.

ROBOTAXI

A Robotaxi crossed two bridges over the Yangtze River Tuesday morning in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province, making the city China’s first to operate commercial autonomous ride-hailing services spanning the river.

The driverless taxi service is developed and operated by Baidu’s autonomous driving platform Apollo Go.

ARTIFICIAL LEAF

Chinese scientists, along with their international counterparts, have developed a brand-new type of “artificial leaf,” a liquid metal-embraced photoactive film. It harnesses solar energy to produce hydrogen through direct water splitting, paving the way for scalable production.

The research team led by Prof. Liu Gang from the Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, recently published their research in Nature Communications, an international academic journal.

NEW SPECIES

A new orchid species was discovered during a recent plant resource survey in the Tongbiguan Provincial-level Nature Reserve in southwest China’s Yunnan Province.

The discovery, made by a team consisting of researchers from the reserve and the Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, has been published in the journal Phytotaxa.