Last Friday (April 5) is the Qingming Festival in China. This is a traditional Chinese holiday with a history of more than 2500 years. Chinese people traditionally visit ancestral tombs and clean the gravesites on this day. Another Qingming ritual is to eat Qingtuan, which is made of glutinous rice mixed with Chinese mugwort or barley grass.Owing to the color of the plant, traditional Qingtuan is green. Now more varieties are available at ZJU cafeterias to satisfy diverse tastes. ...

The Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) has opened new frontier.Researchers from Zhejiang University and the University of Sydney have proposed a novel global-local attentive and semantic-preserving text-to-image-to-text framework. This framework, called MirrorGAN, exploits the idea of learning text-to-image generation by redescription. It has improved semantic consistency between the text description and visual content and achieved the best results in the COCO and CUB datasets.MirrorGAN is exp...

Last week, ZJU's School of Medicine held a graduation ceremony for the Medical Bachelor & Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) Class of 2019. Altogether 65 international students celebrate their graduation in the company of friends, family, and faculty and staff from the University.During the ceremony, Vice President HE Lianzhen congratulated the students on their achievements. “There is still a long way to become a real doctor,” she emphasized the importance of learning, and asked the...

Prof. ZHOU Lijun, deputy dean of the College of Education and director of World Leisure Center of Excellence at Zhejiang University (WLCE-ZJU) was elected to the World Leisure Organization (WLO) Executive Committee on April 1.The WLO Executive Committee is composed of 5 members elected by and from the Board, with a balanced diversity of backgrounds and skills representing the business, financial, academic, government and the non-profit communities. Members of the Executive Committ...

A graduation ceremony was held on the Zijingang Campus yesterday for the first graduating cohort of the Sino-French double degree Master’s Program in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The Presidents of ZJU, École Polytechnique, ENSTA ParisTech and Télécom ParisTech joined together in Hangzhou to celebrate this important milestone of the program and this outstanding achievement for the 10 graduating students.During the ceremony, ZJU President WU Zhaohui and President of École Polytech...

A graduation ceremony was held on Zijingang Campus for the Class of 2019 postgraduates on March 30. More than 2,200 graduating students gathered at the campus stadium to celebrate their big day.Prof. WU Zhaohui, president of ZJU gave the farewell speech. He inspired the graduates to be life-long learners who adapt to the digitalized learning network, future leaders who cross the disciplinary boundaries, innovators who venture into the unknown frontiers, active doers who address the nat...

Cotton is the most widely-used natural fiber and raw material for the textile industry in the world. As a fabric, cotton is very popular among people due to its remarkable breathability, comfort and warmth. At present, there are two cultivated allotetraploidspecies: G. Hirsutum(a.k.a upland cotton) and G. Barbadense(a.k.a extra-long staple cotton). Upland cottonproduces a higher fiber yield and is better able to survive harsh environments. Globally, about 90% of all cotton production is of culti...

Global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions has become a topic of global concern. The Paris Agreement has opened up a crucial avenue for the concerted efforts to reduce emissions. China has announced its Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) aimed at reducing its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 60–65% from the 2005 level by 2030. Against this backdrop, it is of supreme importance to formulate an appropriate scheme for the allocation of CEA at provincial levels.The res...

[Editor’s Note: This is third part of our “two sessions” special. What were ZJUers concerned about? What proposals did they submit?]More than 2000 political advisors attended the meeting during the “two sessions”. Among them, there were a special group of people who carry the baton of Qiushi Spirit regardless of the fact that they work in different fields in different places. They are labeled as ZJUers.YANG Wei, former president of the National Natural Science Foundation of China and chairm...

It is receptors in taste buds that are responsible for the detection of taste in the mouth. A typical taste bud is comprised of 50-100 cells, each cell being for one taste. Recently, HUANG Liquan’s Laboratory at the College of Life Sciences conducted research into intestinal tuft cells whose structure is similar to that of taste buds. They found out that the bitter-taste receptors (Tas2rs) expressed in tuft cells and their signaling pathway play a crucial role in detecting infections by th...