China unveils top 10 sci-tech news events of 2012

BEIJING - Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering, or the country's elite think-tank duo, unveiled on Saturday top 10 news events of domestic science and technology progress for the year 2012.

Selected via a vote by academicians from both organizations, the 10 news events are as follows:

-- Three Chinese astronauts on June 24 successfully completed a manual docking between the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft and the orbiting Tiangong-1 lab module, the first such attempt in China's history of space exploration.

-- China's manned submersible, the Jiaolong, set a new national dive record after reaching more than 7,000 meters below sea level during its dive tests in the Pacific Ocean in June.

-- The world's first high-speed railway in areas with extremely low temperatures, the Harbin-Dalian rail, which runs through three provinces in northeast China, started operation on December 1.

-- China on February 6 published a set of full coverage of moon map and moon images with a resolution of seven meters captured by the country's second moon orbiter, the Chang'e-2.

-- The Chinese Sunway BlueLight supercomputer, which was built with domestically produced microprocessors and is capable of performing around one-thousand-trillion calculations per second, on September 11 passed the examination of the experts panel organized by the Ministry of Science and Technology.

-- China on July 29 successfully conducted tests on its new 120-tonne-thrust liquid oxygen and kerosene engine for its new generation carrier rocket, the Long March-5.

-- Research led by Chinese professor Jian-Wei Pan on the experimental demonstration of topological error correction with an eight-photon cluster state marked a breakthrough in quantum information processing research. It was published by the Nature journal in February.

-- Chinese and foreign physicists during the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment have confirmed and measured a third type of neutrino oscillation. That was announced on March 8.

-- The Ministry of Science and Technology announced on January 11 that the country has approved a hepatitis E vaccine developed by researchers from Xiamen University and Xiamen Innovax Biotech Co. Ltd. in east China's Fujian Province.

-- China on October 28 unveiled Asia's biggest radio telescope in Shanghai, which is used to track and collect data from satellites and space probes.