For four consecutive years, Tencent launched the annual "Youth Science Highlights List" selection activity. We use a variety of forms such as exquisite H5 and fun popular science videos to make the cutting-edge scientific knowledge of the brain-burning become fun and beautiful, helping children to experience the beauty of science more easily and immersively.
The number of young people participating in the selection increased from 100,000 in 2019 to 1.2 million in 2020 and then to 1.58 million in 2021. We are pleased to see that this list has become the most concerned annual science list for Chinese teenagers. We hope that through such voting and popular science activities, a seed of closeness to science and yearning for science will be sown in the hearts of children, so that the beautiful fire of science can be passed on from generation to generation.
Become a "Science Recommendation Officer" and vote to help you get on the list
This year's "Youth Science Highlights List" voting activity was officially launched today! A total of 20 annual frontier scientific breakthroughs were shortlisted for this selection activity, recommended by international authoritative academic journals, covering four major fields of astronomy and geosciences, mathematical physics, life sciences, and new chemical materials, which are both professional and interesting. We invite teenagers across the country to become "Science Referrers" and cast a precious vote for your favorite scientific breakthrough. According to the voting results of teenagers, the final annual "Youth Science Highlights List" will be officially announced at the 4th Tencent Youth Science Conference next year.
Scan the QR code above to recommend the scientific discovery that you think is the best to watch. Students can also vote through the official website of the Youth Science Watch List, QQ Browser, Tencent Watch and other platforms.
In this list collection, together with the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, a science popularization partner, we also invited Wang Pinxian, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a professor at the School of Ocean and Earth Sciences of Tongji University, to communicate face-to-face with the youth representatives. What is the annual scientific breakthrough that Academician Wang is most concerned about? What are some thrilling and magical stories of deep-sea exploration? Click on the video below to take a look at it
In addition, the event will collect "Youth Science Recommendation Officers" for children across the country through china youth daily, news morning news, Shenzhen business daily and other science cooperation media. The 50 outstanding Chinese science teenagers who have been selected will become "Youth Science Recommendation Officers", appear on the annual "Youth Science Highlights List", and recommend the top ten cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs in 2021 to teenagers across the country.
In addition to participating in the voting, students will also have the opportunity to participate in interesting science popularization activities under the Weibo topic #Scientific Breakthroughs Worthy of Youth Attention in 2021. "Weibo Pan-Knowledge" will serve as the social media cooperation platform of "List", and we will jointly invite more than 20 popular science bloggers who are children's favorites to explain the scientific breakthroughs in the shortlist for children in a good and fun way.
What are the best to see in the annual scientific discovery?
This year's shortlisted cutting-edge scientific discoveries have brought us many surprises, but also left us with puzzles for future in-depth exploration. To name a few chestnuts:
astronomy
Geoscience
Ancient Earth
Maybe it's a completely water world
Our current blue earth is 70% oceanic. However, according to the latest study of the mantle by planetary scientists at Harvard University, billions of years ago, Earth could have been a vast world of water, completely covered by oceans and barely visible on land. If this is true, then where exactly did life on Earth come from? The discovery challenges previous speculations about the origin of life, while also affecting our understanding of other "water planets" in the universe.
chemistry
Materials
For the first time
Water turned to metal
Who would have thought that water could also bloom like metal? An international team of 15 scientists from 11 research institutions actually did. Through a clever experimental design, they let the electrons of alkali metal sodium and potassium migrate into the thin layer of water, so that the water molecules are converted into a metallic state, showing a golden luster. Scientists had predicted that it would take extremely high pressure for water to turn into metal, and in solar system planets, only the pressure inside Jupiter would be enough to metalize water. Now, without the need for high pressure, the team has achieved this feat in a laboratory on Earth. People's traditional perception of water has changed.
life
science
Unlike humans
The squid still has "good memory" in old age
Do you remember what you ate last Tuesday night? Memories of experiences at a certain time and place are called episodic memories, and humans gradually lose this memory ability as they age, while squid is different from humans. Researchers from the United Kingdom, the United States and France have conducted memory tests on some common squid and found that whether it is a juvenile squid or an elderly squid equivalent to a human in their 90s, they can clearly remember the type, time and location of eating, and even many old squid have better episodic memory ability. This "good memory" function can not only facilitate foraging, but may also help squid remember objects they have mated, allow them to avoid "eating turning heads" and promote wider spread of genes.
mathematics
physics
Chinese robotic fish
Successfully "punched" the world's deepest trench
The mariana trench is nearly 11,000 meters deepest in the ocean, and the pressure is as great as an elephant standing on the tip of a thumb. Traditional underwater robots must wear "armor" and use a large and thick high-strength metal shell to carry it. The researchers at Zhejiang University's Hejiang Laboratory, inspired by the distribution of the gel body and bones of the deep-sea lionfish, successfully developed a bionic soft robotic fish without a pressure-resistant shell, and achieved a 45-minute flapping wing movement at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Collect samples of marine life, conduct marine monitoring, clean up marine pollution... For the foreseeable future, these soft robotic fish will play a role in ocean exploration.
In order to let young people enter these beautiful sciences from multiple angles, the event also invited the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Global Science, intellectuals, local climate survey groups, principles and other WeChat public accounts to form a "Science Recommendation Alliance" to jointly recommend the 20 cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs in 2021 to young people across the country.