The New Cornerstone Investigator Program, an independent non-profit funding initiative guided by scientists, funded by Tencent and supervised by the China Association for Science and Technology, unveiled its first batch of new cornerstone investigators on January 13. The Program adopts a forward-thinking approach to encouraging basic research spearheaded by leading scientists. Tencent pledges to provide 10 billion RMB in 10 years for a select few scientists. Those working in the program’s exper...

The transient receptor potential vanilloid (TRPV1) ion channel is a polymodal nociceptor broadly expressed in sensory neurons involved in pain sensation, thereby playing an essential role in analgesia. The outer pore domain of TRPV1 is essential for regulation of this channel by temperature, protons and other toxin peptides, so rationally engineering modulators targeting the outer pore of TRPV1 is a potential strategy for regulating pain responses.On January 3, YANG Fan at the Zhejiang Univ...

[Editor’s Note: Do you what to curl up with a good book as the winter holiday begins? Are you looking for new insight for the new year? It’s a moment to take a breath and consider the past, present and future after the exam week. Here are recommendations from Class of 2022.]Cognitive Awakening by ZHOU LingIt can answer many of my doubts during my freshman and sophomore years. High school lives and college lives are very different.At college, we need to manage our time more actively compar...

[Editor’s Note: Dr. SHI Ye, Assistant Professor at ZJUI, obtained his BS and MS degrees in Polymer Science and Engineering from Zhejiang University under the supervision of Prof. CHEN Hongzheng. He then received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin under the supervision of Prof. YU Guihua. Before joining ZJUI, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and UCLA. Dr. Shi is interested in soft materials, particularly new dielectric elastomer...

For patients suffering from sudden illnesses such as myocardial infarction and severe hypoglycemia, prompt administration of emergency medications is imperative, otherwise they may be at great risk of death. Actually, a large number of deaths still occur due to untimely emergency care caused by the lack of emergency equipment and therapeutics around the patients, or the inability of the patient to call for help, or traffic congestion.To this end, the team of Prof. GU Zhen and Prof. YU Jiche...

The Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE) Platform (Deep-time.org 1.0 Alpha), led by Prof. DU Zhenhong at the Zhejiang University School of Earth Sciences, was officially launched on November 8, 2022. Prof. Jennifer McKinley, president of the DDE’s Governing Council, announced this exciting news in the presence of nearly 50 participants attending the meetings of the Governing Council (GC) and the Scientific Committee (SC) of the DDE at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris.Prof. Jennifer McKinley anno...

Substance metabolism and energy metabolism are two basic characteristics of life activities. Autophagy is also regulated by substance and energy metabolismand in turn participates in regulating them. So far, the molecular mechanism of substance metabolism regulating autophagy is relatively clear. Autophagy can be induced by amino acid starvation, nitrogen source starvation, growth factor deprivation, or rapamycin treatment, and a series of signal molecules and degradation substrates have be...

[Editor’s note: Set up in 1986, Chu Kochen Scholarship is the highest honor for ZJU students. TANG Mengxia, among 12 undergraduate students and 12 graduate students, is a recipient of Chu Kochen Scholarship for academic year 2021-2022. An undergraduate as she is, Tang has become a rather experienced researcher, who holds the ambition to trace back by thousands of years to discover the origin of China. In this dialogue, we will learn more about the field she deems so fascinating, as well as the ...

Spinach has left deep childhood memories for many post-70s and post-80s generations because of the cartoon image of Popeye. Apart from appearing on our table as usual, it is truly endowed with the expectation of great power by scientists. The team of Dr. LIN Xianfeng and Prof. FAN Shunwu, from the orthopedics of Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital (SRRSH), Zhejiang University School of Medicine, and the team of Prof. TANG Ruikang from the Zhejiang University Department of Chemistry, successfully...

Acid-base dissociation constant (pKa), a key physicochemical parameter describing the ionization ability of molecules, plays a vital role in chemical, environmental, agricultural, and medical sciences. In drug discovery, pKa determines the ionization states of drug-like molecules in the physiological environment, thus affecting a wide range of biopharmaceutical properties.Graph Neural Networks (GNN) are a set of deep learning (DL) algorithms that can learn representation automatically from ...