Month: May 2024

https://english.cas.cn/head/202405/t20240529_664558.shtml https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202405/29/WS6656ed69a31082fc043c9d9e.html Consumption-based carbon emissions were generally higher than production-based carbon emissions for major developed countries between 1990 and 2019, according to a report released by the Chinese Academy of Sciences on Wednesday. By comparing the difference between consumption- and production-based carbon emissions, major developed countries transferred 1.47 billion tons of carbon emissions to other countries and regions through international trade in 2019 alone, according to the Research Report on Consumption-based Carbon Emissions (2024). However, major developing countries bore 3.39 billion tons of embodied carbon emissions in the same year. “International trade has had a great impact on carbon emissions of developing countries. The export of carbon-intensive products to developed countries boosted their economic growth and employment, but it also led to production-based carbon emissions generally higher than those on the consumption side,” said Wei Wei, one of the leading researchers conducting the report and vice-president of the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, CAS. China’s consumption-based carbon emissions were always lower than those at the production side between 1990 and 2019, according to the report, and the gap calculated by the two methods increased from 700 million tons in 1990 to 1.8 billion tons in 2019. The embodied carbon intensity of export trade from China was reduced by 83.3 percent due to factors, including industrial upgrades and technological innovation. It means that the country has been providing more green and low-carbon products to the world, according to the report. The research team said that production-based carbon emissions take the territory of production activities as the boundary, which fails to fully reflect the interconnection of economic activities, and ignores the embodied carbon emissions transferred by the trade of goods and services. Instead, consumption-based carbon emissions can take the greenhouse gas emissions of different regions or industries throughout the entire process into consideration, they said. Experts called for the use of consumption-based carbon emissions into the global carbon emissions accounting to help make allocating responsibility for reducing emissions just and fair.

This is a machine translation of the original article 中国科学报】凭“空”造淀粉，他们如何把梦想变为现实？ 2024-05-22 来源： 中国科学报 刘如楠 [China Science News] Create starch out of thin air. How do they turn their dreams into reality? 2024-05-22 Source: China Science Journal Liu Runan Starting from Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (hereinafter referred to as Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology), walk 4,000 meters southeast and you will come to a place full of “magic”. This is an engineering test platform, with various instruments placed compactly and the test equipment rumbling. Soon after, the methanol synthesized from carbon dioxide in the fermentation tank will react with specific biocatalysts – enzymes one by one, and eventually turn into tubes of snow-white starch. Synthetic starch sample. On September 24, 2021, Tianjin Institute of Engineering and Studies achieved a major breakthrough in the de novo synthesis of carbon dioxide to starch for the first time in the world. The relevant results were published online in “Science”. At the end of 2022, it took another key step from the laboratory to the production line, building a ton-level pilot device and currently testing it. First “from 0 to 1”, and then “from 1 to 10”, Tianjin Institute of Engineering and Engineering is unswervingly determined and making steady and long-term progress in solving the food problems faced by human development. 1 Is it possible to create starch from “empty space”? As an important type of polymer carbohydrate, starch is the core product of agricultural civilization, providing humans with the calories needed for survival. For more than 10,000 years, agricultural cultivation was the only way to produce starch. However, plant photosynthesis has low energy efficiency and long growth cycle, which may cause food security issues. To this end, scientists have explored methods such as hybrid breeding, modular breeding, and molecular breeding, and have also established artificial photosynthetic systems. “None of this breaks away from the carbon sequestration model of plants. No matter how fast you run, you still rely on your feet. Can you break out of this model and directly build a ‘car’ to put food production on the fast track?” One day in 2014, while on the high-speed train from Beijing back to Tianjin, Ma Yanhe, founding director of Tianjin Institute of Engineering and Biotechnology and chief scientist of the carbon dioxide synthetic starch project, thought this way. As a scientific research institution dedicated to the development of industrial organisms, Tianjin Institute of Engineering and Biotechnology has always pursued an important goal – to cultivate organisms in industrial workshops and use them to produce agricultural substances, that is, to achieve “agricultural industrialization.” At a discussion held by the Tianjin Institute of Engineering and Student Affairs, Ma Yanhe continued to think wildly: “We simply imitate plants, synthesize a cell, and let it use carbon dioxide in the air to synthesize the required substances. That is the real ‘out of thin air’ Make whatever you want’! After careful discussion, everyone agreed that it was too difficult to synthesize cells, but it might be possible to use carbon dioxide to synthesize starch outside the cells. Ma Yanhe said that the world today is facing a series of major challenges such as climate change, food security, energy resource shortages, and ecological environment pollution, and scientific and technological workers have important responsibilities on their shoulders. The conversion and utilization of carbon dioxide and the industrial synthesis of grain starch are one of the major scientific and technological issues facing challenges. In January 2015, Cai Tao, an associate researcher at the Tianjin Institute of Engineering and Biotechnology, who was visiting and exchanging at the University of Minnesota in the United States, received a call from Ma Yanhe: “The institute is planning a project to create starch out of thin air.” “Made out of thin air? Is this possible?” Cai Tao was surprised and excited. At that time, he had joined Tianjin Institute of Technology for more than two years. With the idea of “doing application-oriented basic research”, he switched from traditional biology to synthetic biology research, and went on a study tour in May 2014. Cai Tao deeply feels that this project is of great significance, but he has been wondering how to do it and whether it can be completed. Preliminary research results are not optimistic. Even renowned experts in the field shook their heads when they heard about the idea. “Plant photosynthesis has existed for more than a billion years, and the system mechanism has not been fully understood yet. Can you synthesize it from scratch?” Everyone’s doubts are justified. This is something that has never been done by anyone. After searching through all the literature at home and abroad, I can’t find any clues about the synthesis path and research methods. “But think about it, why can’t we do what plants can do?” Ma Yanhe said. At that time, the Tianjin Institute of Engineering and Biotechnology had already produced a batch of effective components of medicinal and economic plants such as ginseng, Gastrodia elata, and Rhodiola rosea. Heterologous cell synthesis has designed new biosynthetic routes for sugar, meat, oil, protein, etc., and has accumulated a lot in transforming traditional farming models.   Cai Tao (left) discusses with technical staff. Innovate the organizational model and institutionalize scientific research On January 1, 2016, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ key deployment project “Artificial Biological Conversion of Carbon Dioxide” was officially launched. This project is led by the Tianjin Institute of Engineering and Student Affairs. It aims to convert carbon dioxide into complex organic matter through the efficient use of chemical energy, light energy, electrical energy and other energy forms. It also allocates part of the funds for the early exploration of “carbon dioxide synthesis of starch” . Unlike many scientific research organization models that rely on the responsibility system of the project leader, the carbon dioxide synthetic starch project was launched in an institutional manner from the beginning, adopting a three-dimensional scientific research organization model of “overall research department-characteristic research group-platform laboratory”. The General Research