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Major discovery! my country discovers another billion-ton oil field

On March 18, CNOOC announced that another billion-ton discovery was made in the central and northern Bohai Sea area - Qinhuangdao 27-3 Oilfield, with proven geological reserves of 104 million tons. This is the first major oil and gas discovery in the area in 10 years.

Qinhuangdao 27-3 Oilfield is located in the north-central Bohai Sea, about 200 kilometers west of Tianjin, with an average water depth of about 25 meters. The discovery well Qinhuangdao 27-3-3 encountered an oil layer of 48.9 meters and was completed at a depth of 1,570 meters. According to tests, the oilfield produces about 110 tons of crude oil per day per well, showing good exploration prospects.

"Under normal mining, Qinhuangdao 27-3 Oilfield can produce nearly 20 million tons of crude oil. After being refined into gasoline, it can meet the daily transportation needs of urban residents with a population of one million for more than 10 years. The refined asphalt can be used to pave more than 100,000 kilometers of four-lane highways, which is equivalent to more than three times around the earth." Zhou Jiaxiong, deputy general manager of CNOOC Tianjin Branch, introduced.

Xu Changgui, deputy chief engineer of exploration at CNOOC, said that the Qinhuangdao 27-3 oilfield is the sixth billion-ton oilfield discovered in Bohai Oilfield since 2019. The successful discovery of the oilfield further confirms the broad oil and gas exploration prospects in the complex strike-slip fault zone of Bohai Sea, which is of great significance to my country's energy security and economic development.

Drilling operation site of Qinhuangdao 27-3 oilfield. Image source: CNOOC

Chinese Space Station

The first batch of extravehicular exposure experiment material samples were successfully retrieved

According to the Space Application Engineering and Technology Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with the close coordination of ground scientific and technological personnel, at around 21:00 on March 14, the Chinese space station's material cabin extracabin exposure experiment device and sample assembly were successfully transferred by the space station's robotic arm to the space station's airlock.

The China Space Station Material Extravehicular Exposure Experiment Device has been in orbit for a year since it was unloaded from the cabin on March 8, 2023. On the 14th, the device and the first batch of more than 400 material samples installed in the device successfully completed the extravehicular exposure experiment and returned to the space station successfully.

On the 15th, the astronauts transferred the retrieved assembly from the airlock to the Mengtian laboratory cabin, and with the remote cooperation of ground technical personnel, they disassembled and stored the scientific experimental samples inside the device. Subsequent experimental samples will be returned to the ground with the Shenzhou spacecraft and handed over to scientists for further ground research.

The first batch of materials for extravehicular exposure experiments included non-metallic and metallic materials, totaling 407. Among them, non-metallic materials include memory polymer materials, lunar soil reinforcement materials, solid lubrication and gel composite lubrication materials, etc. Metallic materials include magnesium alloys and porous copper materials.

Related research can promote the space application of advanced materials such as large-scale space deployable structure materials such as flexible solar wings, space structure lubrication materials, lunar base construction materials, and neutron shielding materials for precision electronic equipment.

The game is paused. What did you just say?

The virtual world created by video games brings people a full sense of accomplishment and pleasure. However, there has always been a discussion about the impact of games on health. People have always been most concerned about the damage that electronic screens cause to vision. In fact, video games may also be stealing your hearing!

The sounds in video games are often very loud, and some even exceed safety standards. Players who play games for a long time and frequently are likely to exceed the safety limit of sound exposure and are at risk of permanent hearing loss or tinnitus. Action games such as shooting and racing games often have more shocking sound effects and pose a greater challenge to people's hearing.

The International Telecommunication Union and the World Health Organization have defined a concept called "exchange rate" that describes the relationship between noise intensity and acceptable exposure time. For example, we can only withstand 98 decibels of noise for 12 minutes. Therefore, the damage to hearing caused by high-decibel noise is cumulative.

Hearing loss not only causes hearing and balance impairment, but also has a significant negative impact on an individual's cognitive ability. While enjoying the fun of the game, you should also pay attention to protecting your hearing!

Scientists made a "small" movie,

Broke the Guinness World Record!

On April 30, 2013, IBM scientists created the world's smallest movie in the physical sense, "A Boy and His Atom" - and it was certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as "the smallest stop-motion animation film in history."

The reason why this movie is called the world's shortest movie in the physical sense is not because its length is only 1 minute and 33 seconds, but because all the "actors" in the movie are atoms, and the movie was shot using a scanning tunneling microscope.

During the entire production process of this atomic movie, scientists used two scanning tunneling microscopes to magnify the samples 100 million times at a low temperature of -268°C, and saw the atoms on the surface of the samples. They then remotely controlled a needle of only 1 nm to move the atoms and arrange them into the required pictures, finally forming a stop-motion animation frame by frame.

A total of 5,000 atoms were moved during the production, and the film ended up with 65 atomic "actors" and 242 frames. Although this "movie" achieved the manipulation of atoms, it only kept the atoms still in an extremely low temperature environment and did not record the movement of the atoms themselves.

Most important citrus species in the world

Originated from China

More than 2,000 years ago, Qu Yuan wrote "Ode to the Orange", praising the orange tree as the most beautiful tree in the world. At that time, citrus was the spiritual totem of the Chinese people. Later, it was introduced to Israel, Portugal and other places, and began to be planted along the Mediterranean coast. Because of humans, the citrus family has become stronger and has become the world's most sold fruit.

The content is compiled from China Science Popularization Expo Weibo, Science and Technology Daily, Guangming Online, Digital Beijing Science Center, Science Academy, CCTV Records

This article was first published in China Science Expo (kepubolan)