March 2021The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all the member states of the United Nations in 2015, depicted a shared blueprint for people, planet and prosperity. In the face of various challenges – ranging from poverty and pollution to climate change and Covid-19 – the concerted efforts of all members of society are urgently needed in order to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. In response to the UN Secretary-General’s global call for a decade of actio...

Recently, the founding meeting of the Molecular Imaging Branch of Chinese Society for Cognitive Science was held at Zhejiang University. Prof. TIAN Mei at Zhejiang University was elected as director of the Molecular Imaging Branch. Vice directors included Prof. SUN Yujie from Peking University, Prof. ZHANG Hong from Zhejiang University, Prof. TENG Gaojun from Southeast University and Prof. DAI Zhifei from Peking University.The Chinese Society of Cognitive Science is committed to research in...

Cell types are the basic building units of multicellular life with extensive diversities. As the number and total class of cell types change with the species evolution, they have been proposed as “evolutionary units” with the potential for quasi-independent evolutionary change. The evolution of cell types is a crucial layer of comparative cell biology but is thus far not comprehensively studied. The research team led by Prof. GUO Guoji from the Zhejiang University School of Medi...

Urbanization has often been considered a threat to food security since it is likely to reduce the availability of croplands. In 2021, researchers from Zhejiang University, City University of Hong Kong, the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and the University of Exeter Medical School published a paper named “Urbanization can benefit agricultural production with large-scale farming in China” in Nature Food.Changes in urban, rur...

We live in a highly socialized world with immense mental pressure. Prosocial behavior accounts for a large amount of our daily life and is fundamental to our physical and mental health. However, social disorder is a commonly symptom observed in various neurodegenerative, neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders, while placing a heavy burden on the families and society of patients. Therefore, it is urgent to decipher the neural mechanisms underlying prosocial behavior in terms of both .T...

The Mariana Trench is the deepest part of the Earth. Without a pressure-resilient “armor”, a man-made machine would be destroyed by the overwhelmingly hydrostatic pressure if it were to venture into this uninhabitable territory. However, deep-sea creatures can thrive at extreme depths thanks to their unique anatomies. If we can draw inspiration from deep-sea creatures, converting the “secret of life” into the “power of machinery”, we will be able to develop intelligent machines that can ad...

As one of the most common chronic diseases, there are nearly 400 million asthma patients worldwide, and more than 60 million asthma patients in China. In this concern, prevention and treatment of asthma is in the spotlight of public health and medical care issues. More than half of asthma patients are caused by type 2 immune response dominated by allergic-induced TH2 cells. Many immune cell components including eosinophils play important roles in allergic inflammation. The main pathological feat...

HSV-1 is an infectious pathogen that widely infects humans. Normally, it exists in the human body in a latent state., When it becomes active, it may cause many diseases such as cold sores, herpetic keratitis, neonatal herpes and encephalitis. An important feature of HSV-1 is that after infection of peripheral tissues, it enters neurons to undergo latent infection, thereby evading host immunity. When the host is immunocompromised or under stress, the latent virus reactivates to undergo recurrent ...

Tuberculosis (TB) is a pulmonary infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium (Mtb). According to the latest WHO report, there were more than 10 million new cases and 1.2 million deaths worldwide in 2019. China is a country with a high burden of TB. Effective prevention and control of TB in early stage is of great importance. However, current TB diagnosis methods and efficiency of medicine effects are far from satisfactoryThe research team led by LI Jicheng from the Zhejiang University School...

Gold has long been known for its chemical inertness. However, when gold nanoparticles are combined with titanium dioxide (TiO2), they will have their attributes altered and promote a variety of catalytic reactions. It is widely accepted that the interface between gold (Au) and a TiO2 plays a critical role in heterogeneous catalysis. Little is known about the dynamic change of the Au-TiO2 interface in real time, thereby rendering it challenging to tune its intrinsic microstructure with atomi...