https://archive.ph/6Iiag

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11178911

Archive link: https://archive.ph/6Iiag

Chinese researchers have unveiled a new rare earth alloy so cold and efficient it could upend decades of reliance on helium-3 and send shock waves through the global race for quantum computers or ultra-sensitive detectors.

A mini-fridge built with the alloy has achieved temperatures extremely close to absolute zero using no moving parts. And it comes at a time when the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is actively hunting for exactly such a technology.

On January 27, DARPA issued an urgent call for proposals: develop a modular, helium-3-free cooling system for next-generation quantum and defence technologies.

Less than two weeks later, the Chinese scientists answered – with a paper published in Nature.

The alloy “has the potential for mass production. The joint team has recently successfully developed a pure metal refrigeration module based on this alloy material,” the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said on its website on February 13.

“This highly efficient cooling module could offer a stable, portable cooling source for quantum chips and support major space exploration projects with a self-reliant refrigeration system,” CAS added.

“It marks a ‘China solution’ that ends dependence on helium-3.”

In physics, the lowest possible temperature is 0 Kelvin, or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius (minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit), a state known as “absolute zero”.

As materials approach this temperature, they exhibit radically different properties: liquid helium loses friction, mercury becomes superconductive and much cutting-edge quantum research becomes possible.

Currently, achieving such extreme low temperature primarily relies on a technique called dilution refrigeration, which requires helium-3. This stable isotope of helium is an essential resource that China largely imports. Its main sources are linked to nuclear weapons programmes in the United States and Russia, as well as civilian nuclear power plants in Canada.

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According to a research paper published in the journal Nature on February 11, the team employed an entirely different solid-state cooling technique known as adiabatic demagnetisation refrigeration (ADR).

In simple terms, the process involves a magnetic alloy being first placed in an existing low-temperature environment. Applying a magnetic field forces the countless internal microscopic magnets to align uniformly, releasing heat that is carried away.

When the alloy is then isolated from the environment and the magnetic field is removed, the internal magnets return to a disordered state, a process that absorbs heat and further lowers the material’s own temperature.

A major hurdle in this process has been the poor thermal conductivity of traditional materials. While they could get cold themselves, they struggled to effectively cool the surrounding components.

The collaborative team from the Institute of Theoretical Physics and the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science under CAS, together with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, has discovered a new material, a rare earth compound called EuCo2Al9 (ECA). It possesses thermal conductivity similar to metal, allowing it to efficiently channel the cold outward.

“ADR using ECA has achieved a minimum temperature of 106 millikelvin, setting a new record for metallic materials. Also, at such extreme temperatures, its thermal conductivity is one to two orders of magnitude higher than traditional magnetic refrigeration materials, overcoming the key bottleneck of inefficiently extracting the cooling power,” according to the academy.

The ADR method, which eliminates the need for helium-3, is gaining traction in the academic world.

In 2024, Peking University built two “refrigerators” using this principle for quantum computing research, which have been operating stably for several months.

Lightweight portability is poised to be a key advantage of the ECA refrigeration module. This year’s Chinese government work report mentions the goal of “cultivating and developing the quantum technology industry”.

Currently, superconducting quantum computers require massive dilution refrigerators to cool their chips to sub-kelvin temperatures. In the future, a more portable refrigeration module like this could be instrumental in building smaller, more compact quantum computers.

https://archive.ph/PUJTy

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11141812

A report by official Chinese media on Wednesday unveiled two new types of anti-drone laser weapons. A developer said such laser weapon systems, supported by intelligent targeting and multi-sensor integration, demonstrate strong responsiveness and adaptability, while enabling coordinated operations within an integrated combat network.

Footage released in the CCTV News report showed how the systems countered low-altitude, slow-flying small drones simulating covert penetration on the battlefield, flying at an altitude of 50 to 80 meters, which is within the blind spot of conventional radar systems.

More advanced threats such as fiber-optic drones, capable of transmitting real-time data and video through physical links and thus resistant to electronic interference, pose additional challenges and often require physical destruction, according to the CCTV News report.

In response to such threats, multiple counter-drone systems were featured. A container-like platform identified as the “Guangjian-11E,” or Light Arrow-11E, multi-mode terminal jamming system can rapidly lock onto targets and disrupt their onboard sensing and targeting functions, the report said.

The “Guangjian-21A”, or Light Arrow-21A, system, meanwhile, operates in a “shoot-on-the-move” mode, allowing it to maintain sustained firepower while reducing exposure to counterattacks, reported CCTV News.

In terms of engagement methods, the “Guangjian-21A” specializes in “hard-kill” capabilities, generating high-density energy beams over several kilometers to penetrate drone structures and destroy internal circuits or propulsion systems within seconds. By contrast, the “Guangjian-11E” employs a soft-kill approach, using pulsed laser energy to precisely disable key components, effectively blinding drones and disrupting their reconnaissance and data transmission functions, reported CCTV News.

These complementary “soft” and “hard” kill methods address targets at different ranges and threat levels, filling gaps in each other’s operational coverage, CCTV News said.

Both systems are equipped with phased-array radar and infrared detection systems, and can interconnect via both wired and wireless links to enable real-time data sharing and precise target identification and engagement, according to the CCTV News report.

The laser systems, as next-generation equipment, feature multi-source detection and intelligent identification, enabling rapid response and adaptive targeting. Integrated into a broader combat system, the platforms can coordinate “soft” and “hard” kill methods and link with radar and electro-optical sensors to form a rapid “detect-to-destroy” chain, Zhou Shuiliang from the Aviation Industry Corporation of China was quoted by the CCTV as saying.

Previously, multiple types of anti-drone equipment were reviewed in formations at China's V-Day military parade on September 3, 2025 to mark the 80th anniversary of the victory in the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War, addressing the importance of anti-drone warfare on the modern battlefield.

Anti-drone missile and artillery systems, high-energy laser weapons, and high-power microwave weapons reviewed at the parade are a powerful "iron triangle" that can both "soft kill" and "hard destroy" unmanned aerial vehicles.

Given the widespread deployment of drones on the battlefield, countries are now prioritizing the development of efficient counter-drone systems and platforms, Wang Yunfei, a Chinese military affairs expert, told the Global Times.

The inclusion of high-energy laser and high-power microwave counter-drone systems in the parade indicates that both have demonstrated strong performance in realistic training, and suggests that China’s laser- and microwave-based counter-drone technologies are at the forefront globally.

Zhang Xuefeng, another Chinese military affairs expert, told the Global Times that high-energy laser weapons can quickly and accurately detect, aim, and track targets. Using high-energy lasers, it only takes a few seconds to shoot a drone down.

"This genre of anti-drone systems has high accuracy, minimal collateral damage, the advantage of unlimited ammunition, and very low operating costs, making it the lowest cost anti-drone equipment in a single deployment," Zhang said.

TurboQuant looks like a pretty massive deal for running local models efficiently. The core issue they are tackling is the memory bottleneck caused by the key value cache during generation. When you are doing long context inference storing all those high dimensional vectors eats up VRAM extremely fast. Traditional vector quantization helps but usually introduces memory overhead because you have to store scaling factors or constants in full precision for every small block of data. That overhead can easily add an extra bit or two per parameter which ruins the compression targets people are aiming for.

TurboQuant solves the problem by combining two clever mathematical tricks to eliminate that overhead entirely and get the cache down to 3 bits without losing accuracy. The first part is an algorithm called PolarQuant. Instead of looking at the vectors in standard cartesian coordinates it converts them into polar coordinates. This basically separates the magnitude from the direction. Because the angles map onto a fixed predictable circular grid the model no longer needs to store those dynamic bounding boxes or normalization constants that traditional methods require. That step handles the bulk of the compression to capture the main signal of the vector.

The second piece of the puzzle is where they use something called Quantized Johnson Lindenstrauss or QJL to clean up the residual error left over from the first step. QJL uses a mathematical transform to shrink that leftover error down to just a single sign bit of positive or negative one while preserving the relative distances between the data points. This acts as a mathematical error checker that fixes any bias in the attention scores. Because it only uses one bit and preserves the geometry of the space the attention mechanism can still calculate accurate logits without needing full precision data.

They tested this on open weights models like Gemma and Mistral across heavy needle in a haystack and LongBench tasks. They managed to compress the KV cache down to 3 bits with literally zero drop in accuracy and they did not even need to do any fine tuning or calibration. On top of saving a massive amount of VRAM the 4 bit version actually speeds up attention logit computation by up to 8x on H100 GPUs compared to standard 32 bit floats. This seems like a massive leap forward for anyone trying to run long context models on constrained hardware or scale up huge vector search databases.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/44890650

Does the old man think we can't tell this is AI-juiced? Whatever gets the Amazon book bux Powell 😭 Nonetheless, this is extremely cool. Cutting edge iridium semiconductors and other newfangled shit keeps falling off my radar because I mainly care about the energy+obligation web binding humanity together.

In the second week of February 2026, a quiet revolution landed in the pages of Science Advances. A team from Peking University’s School of Electronics, led by researcher Qiu Chenguang in collaboration with academician Peng Lianmao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, unveiled the world’s smallest ferroelectric field-effect transistor (FeFET). Its physical gate length: just 1 nanometer. Its operating voltage: a mere 0.6 volts. Its memory performance: an on/off current ratio of up to 2 × 10⁶, programming speeds as fast as 1.6 nanoseconds, and switching energy around 0.45 fJ/μm - roughly one-tenth the best previously reported figures.

For the first time, ferroelectric memory has achieved voltage compatibility with state-of-the-art logic transistors (typically ~0.7 V). Data can now flow between memory and compute units at the same low voltage, without charge pumps, voltage converters, or the energy penalties that have plagued attempts to integrate non-volatile memory with logic at scale. The device uses metallic single-walled carbon nanotubes (m-SWCNTs) as the gate electrode, a 2D molybdenum disulphide (MoS₂) channel, a ferroelectric layer of CuInP₂S₆ (CIPS), multilayer graphene, and hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) in a van der Waals heterostructure. The magic lies in the “nanogate” effect: the ultra-sharp 1 nm tip concentrates the electric field, creating localised intensities high enough to switch the ferroelectric polarisation well below its nominal coercive voltage, while dramatically improving capacitance coupling. Short-channel effects - the bane of conventional scaling - are rendered irrelevant.

This is not another headline-grabbing lab curiosity. It is a material foundation for the next era of computing: ultra-low-power, in-memory, edge-native intelligence that can operate at the scale of angstrom nodes without the voracious energy appetite of today’s hyperscale silicon. And when placed within the broader Chinese technology stack - 2D semiconductors, graphene-enhanced structures, triboelectric and piezoelectric nanogenerators, flexible energy storage - it becomes something far more consequential. It becomes the energetic substrate for what I have called Digital Westphalia: a global digital order grounded in nation-state sovereignty, energetic realism, and systemic abundance rather than rentier extraction and entropic financialisation. Understanding the Breakthrough in Plain Terms

Ferroelectric transistors have long promised non-volatile memory that retains data without power, switches at high speed, and consumes almost no standby energy. Their polarisation states act like tiny, permanent magnets for electrons. The problem has always been scaling and voltage. Traditional FeFETs required gate voltages above 1.5 V to flip the ferroelectric layer reliably, while logic transistors had dropped below 0.7 V. Integrating them meant wasteful voltage step-up circuits and heat. Shrinking the gate below 5 nm triggered short-channel leakage and loss of control.

The Peking team solved both with a radical redesign. By replacing a planar gate with a 1 nm-diameter carbon nanotube, they turned the gate into a nanotip lightning rod for electric fields. Simulations and measurements show field strengths inside the CIPS layer reaching 2.7 × 10⁶ V/cm at just 0.6 V applied - more than five times the material’s coercive field in a conventional geometry. Capacitance coupling efficiency soars because the tiny gate concentrates voltage drop across the ferroelectric rather than wasting it elsewhere. The result is a device that not only scales but thrives at the 1 nm limit, immune to the physics that doom conventional designs.

Reviewers noted the achievement’s elegance: voltage efficiency exceeding 125 % (operating voltage below coercive voltage), retention and endurance suitable for real-world use, and compatibility with existing CMOS processes via 3D heterogeneous integration. The implications for large-model inference, edge intelligence, wearables, and IoT are immediate. A single edge node can now perform sophisticated inference with energy budgets measured in femtojoules rather than picojoules or worse, opening the door to truly battery-free or energy-harvesting devices.

Situating the Advance in a Thermoeconomic Framework

To grasp why this matters beyond the semiconductor roadmap, we need a different lens: Systemic Exchange Value (SEV), or what I shorthand as thermoeconomics. Traditional economics treats value as subjective preference revealed in prices, with GDP as the aggregate scorecard. It abstracts away the energetic and entropic realities that actually sustain life and production. SEV starts from the opposite premise: economies are first and foremost systems of energy transformation. All use-value is ultimately embodied energy - direct and indirect - embedded in material configurations that deliver services over time. Exchange-value is the monetary claim on that embedded energy, modulated by the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) of production and use.

Three interlocking circuits define the system:

The thermodynamic circuit: real transformation of energy into ordered structures (infrastructure, devices, knowledge), inevitably producing entropy (waste heat, disorder);

The exchange-value circuit: endogenous money and financial claims that allocate claims on future available energy in potential (AEP - available energy in potential); and

The information circuit: data, algorithms, and coordination mechanisms that reduce uncertainty and thereby improve EROEI by minimising wasteful friction.

Productive systems expand systemic abundance when they increase net AEP faster than entropy degrades it. Maladaptive systems - those that channel liquidity into low-EROEI activities (speculative finance, planned obsolescence and rent extraction, for instance) - accelerate entropy, erode adaptive capacity, and eventually face collapse or forced reorganisation.

In information technologies, the dominant metric has been “performance per watt,” but SEV demands a deeper accounting: the total energetic cost of the entire lifecycle, including the embodied energy of fabrication, the operational exergy destruction (waste heat), the systemic coordination overhead, and the long-term adaptive value created. Hyperscale cloud architectures score poorly here. They concentrate enormous computational capacity in a few geographic nodes, requiring massive cooling, redundant power generation, and transcontinental data transmission. Every query to a large language model can consume energy equivalent to a household’s daily use. The EROEIu (use-phase return) looks impressive in narrow benchmarks but collapses when externalities - grid strain, water consumption, geopolitical chokepoints on undersea cables - are internalised.

The nanogate FeFET flips this script. By slashing operating voltage and enabling seamless memory-logic integration, it dramatically reduces exergy destruction at the device level. When scaled into arrays for in-memory computing, it collapses the von Neumann bottleneck, cutting data movement energy by orders of magnitude. Paired with 2D materials that can be fabricated at lower thermal budgets and with graphene or MXene-enhanced nanogenerators that harvest ambient mechanical or thermal energy, entire nodes become energetically autonomous. The information circuit now operates with far higher informational EROEI: more useful computation per joule invested, less entropy exported as heat, and greater resilience because intelligence is distributed rather than centralised.

China’s systematic investment in the full stack - from wafer-scale 2D growth to open-source AI frameworks like DeepSeek, to self-powered IoT ecosystems - is building precisely the high-EROEI infrastructure that SEV identifies as adaptive. It is creating durable use-value that compounds over decades rather than depreciating in quarters. In thermoeconomic terms, it is expanding the envelope of available energy in potential for the entire digital sphere. Digital Westphalia as the Political Expression of Thermoeconomic Realism

Digital Westphalia names the possible emerging global digital order that aligns political-information sovereignty with these energetic realities. Just as the 1648 Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War by enshrining territorial sovereignty and non-interference, today’s digital analogue reasserts nation-state primacy over data regimes, technical standards and infrastructure governance - while preserving interoperability through open protocols.

The old model was a de facto American imperium: hardware, software, standards and data flows routed through U.S.-controlled chokepoints (Northern Virginia data centers handling ~70 % of global traffic, SWIFT, undersea cables). This delivered rents to a handful of platforms and intelligence leverage to one state, but at the cost of universal vulnerability and entropic inefficiency. Sanctions, extraterritorial export controls, and deplatforming demonstrated the fragility. Check out Newman and Farrell’s Underground Empire for a detailed discussion of these realities.

Digital Westphalia offers an alternative: sovereign digital territories that can choose their own data localisation, governance, and ecosystem providers, yet interconnect via open-source standards (RISC-V, Linux contributions from Huawei, HarmonyOS adaptability). The nanogate breakthrough, embedded in a Chinese stack that emphasises modularity, open architectures, and energy autonomy, supplies the material base. Nations or regions can now deploy federated networks of edge intelligence without building hyperscale data centers or begging for foreign chips under export-control threat. A developing country can equip rural health posts with self-powered wearable monitors and localised diagnostic models that run inference on-device. A mid-sized power can maintain sovereign AI capabilities for agriculture, disaster response, or industrial optimisation without ceding data sovereignty or energy security.

The savings are thermoeconomic as much as fiscal. Less need for continent-spanning transmission infrastructure. Lower grid pressure. Reduced geopolitical risk premiums on energy imports for compute. Higher systemic EROEI because intelligence is co-located with the phenomena it observes and acts upon. In SEV terms, this is liquidity allocated to high-adaptive-capacity uses rather than siphoned into fictitious capital or low-EROEI consumption.

Strategic Implications in a Multipolar World

For much of the world, the choice is sharpening. The world can double down on a U.S.-centric stack that promises cutting-edge performance but delivers vendor lock-in, energy intensity, and exposure to export-control volatility. Or we can engage the emerging open, sovereign-capable ecosystem that lowers the barrier for genuine digital autonomy. The latter does not require “choosing sides”; it requires recognising that energetic and informational realism now favours distributed, interoperable sovereignty over centralised techno-feudalism.

The Peking University nanogate is one device. But it exemplifies a broader pattern: China’s willingness to invest in the thermodynamic foundations of the information age while others financialise their way toward entropy. The full stack - 2D materials scaling, nanogenerators, open-source models, distributed ledger coordination - is creating the possibility of Digital Westphalia at planetary scale. Nations that seize it will expand their adaptive capacity; those that cling to the old imperium risk locking themselves into maladaptive rigidity.

This is the real significance of the 1 nm breakthrough. It is not merely smaller and lower-power. It is a material refutation of the assumption that computational abundance must come at the price of energetic profligacy and political subordination. In thermoeconomic terms, it augments available energy in potential. In geopolitical terms, it makes Digital Westphalia not utopian but all but inevitable.

The question for policymakers, strategists and citizens is no longer whether a new digital order is coming. It is whether we will shape its emergence in alignment with energetic realism and sovereign dignity or allow entropic forces to dictate the terms.

Hello Lemmians,

I've recently moved over to Linux Mint for Windows and I'm very happy with the decision. There are only like 2 things I can't do on Mint but I'm confident I could do them if I invested some more time. Anyway, my system is on dual boot so I could start Windows if I wanted to / needed it.

Now, I'd love to do the same on my phone, basically eliminating techbrofash stuff and replacing it with something FOSSy. It's a Samsung from 2018, do I have any chances? Specifically, having to use a Google account all the time bugs me.

I'm not a heavy phone user since I prefer computers, but as you all understand I'm not keen on having Netanyahu & friends know at what time of night I pee.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11110223

Archive link: https://archive.ph/3uUVa

Israel’s Elbit Systems has revealed that it has been contracted to develop aircraft-mountable versions of its XCalibur high-power laser systems. Primarily intended for use on jets and helicopters, the idea is to provide low-cost per-shot solutions for threats such as drones and missiles.

This will overcome the main challenge of firing expensive missile interceptors to knock out these threats; the economics don’t add up. Add a few cents per shot, if a laser beam can be used instead of a $40,000 and $100,000 Tamir missile (those used in Israel’s Iron Dome), then interception becomes far less costly.

Especially when the incoming targets cost a fraction of this. If interception costs can be dramatically reduced (perhaps even cheaper than the target), then the economics of such an engagement could be flipped on its head, i.e., drones become the expensive element, not the interceptors.

This news came to light when Elbit’s President and CEO, Bezhalel Machlis, disclosed the deal during the company’s end-of-year results to shareholders. He announced that the deal was agreed in late 2025, which will aim to deliver a pod-type setup for jets and a helicopter variant called “Sting.”

"Israel"’s new “Sting” in the tail

“The advantage of the aerial laser is that it is less affected by humidity, rain, dust, and atmospheric conditions the higher you go,” Machlis told shareholders. This means that these systems will be able to operate above the clouds, for instance.

It should also mean that the system should be able to strike threats before they arrive because it can see them from the air. ” This would also be a game-changer as conventional air defense systems, like the Iron Dome, can suffer due to bad weather, line-of-sight blocking from terrain, and shorter engagement range due to ground location.

Having lasers on aircraft means you can operate above cloud level, identify and track targets earlier, and engage them sooner.

However, there are still many technical challenges to overcome before such a system can become viable for aircraft mounting; namely, cooling and size. “You need to miniaturize the elements,” Machlis added. “While moving, you need to lock yourself on a target and in a very precise way,” he explained. High-energy lasers also generate a lot of heat, which needs to be managed for obvious reasons. This typically requires a lot of cooling gear, and space is at a premium on aircraft.

Many challenges to overcome

To this end, any aircraft variant will need to have some form of compact generators and cooling systems. Having such a system on aircraft also introduces other issues, like tracking and stabilization, when the target is small and both the target and interceptor are moving.

Any solution will need ultra-precise tracking systems and adaptive optics to correct beam distortion.

But, Machlis is confident that Elbit can “overcome all these challenges,” and after “advancing with large investment, they will be operational with the air force, and I think there is a big market for this worldwide,” he added.

“I also want to add that [the] high-power laser is not just a defensive weapon. As you can understand, it has more applications,” Machlis said. As Breaking Defense points out, it is not entirely clear what he meant by this comment.

Archive broken: https://archive.ph/wip/rDQM4

China is a resource-rich country. The vast land contains many rare resources that many countries in the world desire. However, China is a helium-poor country. More than 95% of helium depends on imports, which is too large.

Moreover, most of the helium comes from the United States, which has been in constant friction with China. In the face of increasing demand for helium, this has become another "stuck neck" problem in China.

But why is the mere helium gas stuck by the United States? How does China solve the problem of scarcity of helium resources? How to solve the stuck neck problem in other fields?

What is helium?

Helium is a colorless and odorless inert gas. It ranks first among the rare gases in the periodic table. Most of it was formed during the Big Bang period. In the entire universe, helium accounts for 23% of its mass, ranking it in the entire universe. The second element.

Under normal conditions, helium does not react with other substances, and even if it is put together with water, it is difficult to dissolve in it. At 20°C, only 8.61 milliliters of helium can be dissolved per liter of water.

It is precisely because of its inactive chemical properties that helium is often used as an anti-corrosion material. Among all the elements, helium has the lowest boiling point, only 4.22K, so it often exists as a gas.

To make helium liquid or solid, not only need to change its temperature, but also pressurize it. The most amazing thing is that when the temperature of liquid helium is lower than -271°C, its properties will change and become a superfluid.

The thermal conductivity of helium in superfluid is extremely high, 800 times that of copper, and it can penetrate many common materials, such as glass and rubber.

Moreover, the density of helium is very small, the mass is far lighter than air, and it is not flammable. Therefore, helium has become one of the necessities of many high-tech industries.

Uses of helium

Helium is present in many common items, such as hydrogen balloons, thermometers, light bulbs, neon lights and other items. Someone asked if the hydrogen balloon was not lifted off by hydrogen? What is helium?

In fact, because hydrogen is flammable and explosive, there is a great safety hazard. Therefore, China has banned hydrogen filling balloons from a long time ago and replaced it with non-flammable helium.

But because everyone is accustomed to calling it a hydrogen balloon, it is not changed to a helium balloon. Helium is also well known by many diving enthusiasts. Because helium will be mixed with oxygen and then injected into the cylinder for divers to use when breathing underwater.

This can reduce the diver's breathing resistance, eliminate nitrogen anesthesia, extend the diver's time under water, and prevent the diver from suffering from decompression sickness.

Helium in gas form is also widely used in the medical industry, often used to treat asthma and wheezing, and argon helium knife can also be used to treat cancer. Helium in its liquid form has more industrial uses and can be used as a coolant and refrigerant.

Helium in superfluid form can be used to make superconducting materials. In addition, nuclear reactors, space accelerators, metal smelting and other industries have its presence everywhere.

Why was the neck stuck by the United States?

Helium is also called "golden gas" and is an indispensable role in the aerospace industry, semiconductor manufacturing, low-temperature superconducting industry and other fields. As the application range of helium becomes wider and wider, the demand is also very large.

Although the content of helium in the universe ranks second, the amount of helium stored on land is not that much. In addition, helium has a very wide range of uses, but its natural generation rate is very slow, and it is easy to escape. Scattered in the air, so helium resources are increasingly scarce.

At present, there are about 51.9 billion cubic meters of helium resources on the earth. The United States' helium reserves account for 40% of the global helium reserves, ranking first in the world. Russia's helium reserves account for 8% of the global helium reserves, but China's helium reserves only account for 2%.

China consumes more than 22 million cubic meters of helium per year, so the vast majority of helium is imported. Although the United States has a lot of helium reserves, they began to formulate laws related to helium resources as early as 1917, and set up a federal helium project.

At the same time, the relevant systems are constantly revised and improved to ensure the effective control of helium resources. Although the United States has become the world's largest exporter of helium, their control of helium is still very strict, and even included helium in one of the crisis mines in 2018.

In 2020, the import price of helium is US$82,200 per ton, an annual increase of 44%. China is a major helium-consuming country and a major helium-poor country, with an annual demand of 22 million cubic meters.

However, because the helium reserves are too low, 95% of the helium comes from imports. What is even more worrying is that with the continuous increase in demand, the amount of helium imports is also increasing year by year.

Some people say that although the United States has the largest helium reserves in the world, other countries also have helium, and we can import it from other countries. The United States has a large amount of helium gas is entirely a geographical advantage. They are in a more stable regional plate, so a large amount of helium gas is sealed.

Coupled with their development and storage capabilities, they have become the largest exporter of helium. At present, only the United States, Qatar, Russia and other countries are exporting helium.

Qatar, a country originally located in the Middle East region, has been high hopes by many people, but although Qatar has a certain amount of helium reserves, the key gas production technology is still controlled by the United States.

Moreover, the price is affected by factors such as war and technical conditions. The price of helium in Qatar is also higher than that of the United States. As a result, China's helium imports are still mainly dependent on the United States.

As a scarce resource, once the import of helium is completely stopped, it will have a shocking impact on all walks of life in China. Therefore, it is urgent to solve the problem of shortage of helium resources. How can China solve this problem?

How to deal with the problem of excessive dependence on helium?

13% are from Australia, 26% are from the United States, and 61% are from Qatar. However, Qatar's import price is higher than that of the United States, and Qatar's technology relies on the United States, so the situation of China's helium imports remains severe.

Helium is also present in China, most of which are in China's central and western basins, the eastern part of the basin, and some hot springs. However, the helium content in China's helium gas fields is very low, so the annual helium output is far from enough for use.

In order to achieve "helium freedom", China is also trying to produce helium from multiple sources. Some people say that helium will escape into the air? It's better to "pull" it out of the air. But extracting helium is not that simple.

The content of helium in the air is pitiful. It may capture half of the city's air and not extract the amount of a brick, so this idea is obviously unrealistic. But helium is also present in natural gas, so China uses a variety of methods to extract helium.

For example, methods such as "air separation method", "helium liquid method", and "low temperature liquefaction split", although the purity of helium extracted by the first two extraction methods is as high as 99.99%, the process is cumbersome and the cost is extremely high, so the most commonly used method is "Low-temperature liquefaction split flow method".

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Extract helium from natural gas. The premise of using this method to extract natural gas is that the helium content of natural gas must be above 0.5%. Secondly, various processes are required to repeat liquefaction and splitting to "filter" the helium from the natural gas little by little. Of pure helium.

In 2020, a Chinese company used an innovative "flash steam extraction method" to extract helium from natural gas waste, and it was a great success. More importantly, the helium extraction device is also independently developed and produced in China.

The “BOG (Flash Gas) Helium Extraction Device Demonstration” launched by China in Ningxia earlier can produce 40 liters of liquid helium per hour. Although the annual output is only 20 tons, which is far less than China's demand, its emergence proves that we can Do not rely absolutely on imports to avoid being constrained by others.

At present, there are about 30 factories in China that have the basic conditions for helium extraction. If this technology is promoted and implemented, China's annual production of helium can reach 3 million cubic meters, and the degree of dependence on helium imports will be reduced. China is stuck. The problem will also be effectively solved.

There is a story circulating on the Internet: If a hundred years later, if scientists knew that helium gas was used by us to inflate the ball, they would not know what it would be like to feel distressed. As one of the increasingly scarce resources, saving the use of helium is also an issue that we need to pay attention to.

Such as reducing unnecessary waste, or replacing helium with other elements. In terms of industry, increase the recovery and utilization of helium to ensure the maximum use value of helium resources.

In terms of medical treatment, Philips has recently developed a nuclear magnetic resonance instrument without liquid helium to optimize the use of liquid helium and effectively reduce the waste caused by escape during use. In addition to imported helium gas, China still has problems with choking in many fields. How to solve these problems?

How does China tackle the "stuck neck problem"?

We selected the remaining 3146 intermediate goods and capital goods that are highly related to the manufacturing industry for category research in the trade product categories with the international 6-digit code. Based on the estimation of China's dependence on each imported product (estimated by the value of each product's trade imports and the product's market share in the major exporting countries), a total of 88 imported products that China is highly dependent on (median dependent Degree level is 78.9%). These 88 products are distributed in the mid-to-high-end value chain.

In order to break the deadlock, China has solved the problem in a variety of ways. On the one hand, increase financial support to provide financial guarantee for the card neck technology. Efforts are made from financial allocations, financial institutions and social organizations to ensure long-term stability of project research.

On the other hand, optimize the layout of scientific research, "listen" the card neck technology, and make the card neck problem the top priority of research and development to ensure that there are no dead ends in scientific research. The other is to cultivate a good scientific research ecological environment, establish a good incentive mechanism, and encourage scientific researchers to do their research work.

China itself has the world's largest data circle, huge human capital, and market advantages. Although it still fails to break the monopoly barriers in some high-end and sophisticated industries, it is believed that in the near future, we will continue to overcome various stuck neck problems.

In conclusion

The importance of helium resources is self-evident, and the shortage of helium resources is still a major problem for China. How not to be "stuck" by the United States to find ways to adjust the import ratio structure, how to save helium and other methods are only superficial methods.

At its root, we must have a way to completely eliminate helium resources in order not to be controlled by others. As early as a few years ago, the country put forward the problem of tackling the neck, which shows that we have paid attention to the problem of the neck.

After several years of rapid development, the problem has been gradually solved. I believe that in the near future, we will show the true Chinese technology with firm determination and tenacious will, and use the "Chinese intelligent manufacturing" to deliver the best to the world. Beautiful answer sheet.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/44708544

Archive link: https://archive.ph/J8x11

As the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran continues, we look at how the Pentagon is using artificial intelligence in its operations. The system, known as Project Maven, relies on technology by Palantir and also incorporates the AI model Claude built by Anthropic. Israel has used similar AI targeting programs in Iran, as well as in Gaza and Lebanon.

Craig Jones, an expert on modern warfare, says AI technology is helping militaries speed up the “kill chain,” the process of identifying, approving and striking targets. “You’re reducing a massive human workload of tens of thousands of hours into seconds and minutes. You’re reducing workflows, and you’re automating human-made targeting decisions in ways which open up all kinds of problematic legal, ethical and political questions,” says Jones.