Issue #22 | Lenovo's new robot dog, the world's most powerful wind turbine, WeChat Pay to accept Visa, and mussel-inspired fatigue-resistant materials
Welcome to Serica’s weekly tech brief, where we bring you the latest news and insights from one of the world's most dynamic and rapidly evolving tech scenes.
?? Lenovo introduces four-legged patrol robot
Chinese PC maker Lenovo unveiled a four-legged patrol robot named Morningstar Q1 at the Mobile World Congress Shanghai event this week. Using mixed reality vision, the Q1 robot supports autonomous navigation and comes with an automatic obstacle avoidance function, which Lenovo claims makes it ideal for monitoring industrial parks, malls, campuses, and many other indoor or outdoor sites.
Lenovo also unveiled its latest lightweight AR glasses, the Morningstar G2 light AR, at the event. The device can be used for industrial applications including visual management, remote collaboration, and workflow inspection. The AI-recognition feature of the AR glasses also enables their use in museum tours, security, education, and other scenarios, the company added.?
Source: Technode
?? Scientists explore fatigue-resistant materials inspired by mussels
Chinese scientists have discovered the mechanism behind a mussel's remarkable resistance to fatigue during the countless repetitions of opening and closing its shells throughout its lifespan. Through a 10-year-long research on Cristaria plicata, a freshwater mussel, the scientists unveiled the mechanism responsible for the bivalve hinge's resistance to fatigue, and have proposed a new principle for designing fatigue-resistant materials with deformability, according to a research paper recently published in the journal Science.
Artificial structures containing brittle materials also experience such failure. As a result, there is a pressing need to explore and develop deformable materials with high fatigue resistance. The team of researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) drew inspiration from mussels, whose hinge connects two shells and bears repeated deformation in their opening and closing motions while maintaining stable function without failure.
SOURCE: People's Daily
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?? WeChat Pay to accept Visa cards to help foreigners survive in cashless China
Tencent and Ant Group said that they would allow users to link international credit cards to their platforms, an issue that has long plagued foreign visitors as the country’s payment system has kept credit cards out for years. Tencent, the operator of the popular chat app WeChat and payment network WeChat Pay, said on Wednesday that WeChat users overseas can link credit cards issued by Visa from next month. This comes after Mastercard announced last week that cardholders can link credit or debit cards to the Alipay digital wallet where they can finally “pay like a local”. This is welcome news for foreign business people and tourists alike as the country seeks to build better relations with the rest of the world.?
SOURCE: Reuters
?? China installs the world's most powerful offshore wind turbine
State-run power giant China Three Gorges (CTG) has successfully completed the world’s most powerful offshore wind turbine in Pingtan, Fujian Province. With a capacity of 16 megawatts, the turbine boasts a 252-metre rotor diameter and a 50,000-metre swept area that can deliver enough annual power for 36,000 homes.
This comes a week after the successful completion of the largest and highest-altitude hydro-solar power station and the successful test of the first large-scale hydrogen pipeline (see last week's newsletter). China is likely to increase the speed and scale of such green projects to reach its ambitious carbon peak and carbon-neutral commitments with the former expected to be reached in 2025, five years ahead of schedule.
SOURCE: ReCharge
?? China’s internet firms rebound with profits up by nearly 50% as broader economic recovery lags
Profit for China’s internet industry surged 43% in the first five months of the year in a show of vitality as tech giants emerged from a two-year crackdown despite a slower-than-expected post-Covid economic recovery. Profits for internet firms reached ￥57.6B ($7.9B) from January to May, according to a report released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on Saturday. With many in the industry restructuring, downsizing, and divesting to increase efficiency this trend of higher profitability is likely to continue for the next couple of years.?
SOURCE: SCMP