Frontier fields such as life sciences, artificial intelligence, quantum science, astronomy and energy were celebrated Thursday when the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) released the country's top 10 science advances in 2023. The NSFC announced new measures to extend funding for outstanding undergraduates to conduct pilot project basic research, and to offer long-term funding for excellent researchers with a maximum of nearly 30 million yuan (4.17 million U.S. dollars) over a 15-year period.

A team of international scientists has broken through the technological bottleneck caused by the poor fatigue properties of 3D-printed materials, and proposed an innovative strategy to fabricate an anti-fatigue titanium alloy via near void-free 3D printing.

China's strides in space technology are now enriching the preservation of cultural relics, as spacecraft engineers have repurposed a robot originally designed for orbital missions to protect tomb artifacts. The China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) recently announced the development of such a robot. Combined with electron beam irradiation technology, it can be used as an intelligent mobile system to eradicate bacteria that thrive on ancient murals in small tombs.

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.

China's cosmic ray observatory has discovered a giant ultra-high-energy gamma-ray bubble structure, about ten million times larger than our solar system, in the Cygnus star-forming region, around 5,000 light years from Earth. Based on the observations made by China's Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO), scientists identified that star-forming region as one source of the cosmic rays in the Milky Way with an energy level higher than 10 peta-electron volts (quadrillion electron volts or PeV), about 1,000 times more than the record high achieved by any manmade accelerator on Earth.

A three-dimensional nanoscale optical disk memory with petabit capacity has been developed at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics of CAS. The researchers managed to increase the capacity of optical data storage to the petabit level by extending the planar recording architecture to three dimensions with hundreds of layers, while also breaking the optical diffraction limit barrier of the recorded spots.

A new millisecond pulsar has been found through the collaboration of the National Supercomputing Center in Jinan, and the "Chinese sky-eye," the 500-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), which marks a new trial success for Chinese supercomputing in this field and will help expand research in modern physics theory.

A new study provides evidence suggesting that the evolution of modern birds commenced much earlier than previously believed, predating the extinction of dinosaurs. Published earlier this month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study was led by scientists from China and the United States who analyzed the genomes of 124 living bird species and created an evolutionary tree for Neoaves, which include 95 percent of all modern birds.

Chinese researchers have synthesized two new nucleus isotopes that contain 84 neutrons and 82 neutrons, according to a recent research article published in the journal Physical Review Letters. The nucleus is composed of protons and neutrons. Different numbers of protons and neutrons make up nuclei with different properties which were called nucleus isotopes by scientists.

Chinese scientists have turned to the earth science satellite SDGSAT-1 as a tool to manage the impact of modern illumination sources on the urban environment. The study, conducted by scientists from the Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), was published recently in the International Journal of Digital Earth.

Chinese researchers have recently revealed that a school garden with abundant natural components can be used to cultivate the interest of primary school children in nature while helping to alleviate their study-related stress.

During a botanical expedition to a local nature reserve in Yunnan Province, researchers from the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden collected a previously unknown Rubiaceae species. After extensive examination and comparison with other known species, the researchers confirmed that it was a new species.