China science, technology news summary — Sept. 19

BEIJING, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) — The following is a summary of published science and technology news of China.

“DIGITAL MUSEUM” DNA

The DNA, a natural structure that has evolved to encode biological information, can be artificially modified into a durable, minuscule “digital museum.”

A team of Chinese scientists enciphered 10 digital pictures of Dunhuang murals into 210,000 DNA strands through the nucleotide sequences in a 6.8 MB zipped file, and they can be precisely recovered from a severely corrupted sample that has been treated at 70 degrees Celsius for 70 days.

MARS EXPLORATION

China’s first Mars exploration mission has achieved rich scientific results, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said Sunday.

As of Thursday, the Tianwen-1 orbiter has been operating normally for over 780 days, and the rover Zhurong has traveled 1,921 meters on the surface of Mars, the CNSA said.

The orbiter and rover of China’s Tianwen-1 probe have completed the targeted scientific exploration missions and have acquired 1,480 gigabytes of raw scientific data.

CARBON NEUTRALITY

Chinese researchers recently published an assessment of the mitigation of China’s carbon neutrality to global warming, noting that the country’s efforts can mitigate global warming by 0.48 and 0.40 degrees Celsius under intermediate and very high greenhouse gas emission scenarios.

According to the study published in the journal Nature Communications, compared with the period from 1850 to 1900, the global mean surface temperature from 2081 to 2100 is estimated to increase by 1.7 degrees Celsius under the low greenhouse gas emission scenario.