2025-11-24

Recently, the "Atoms, Elements and Us" science enlightenment dual picture book, which I participated in compiling, won the first prize of the 36th Excellent Science and Technology Books of the Ten Northern Provinces (Autonomous Regions and Municipalities). 

This set of educational picture books, published by Beijing Science and Technology Press, is specially designed for children aged 3 to 8. It consists of two volumes: "Atomic Transformation: The Power of Nuclear Energy" and "Where Are the Elements: I Come from the Stars". In terms of design, it features hardcover binding, large illustrations, and matte coated paper, ensuring both comfort and durability during reading, while also stimulating children's curiosity through visually striking images. In terms of content, the books adopt an innovative "microscopic-macroscopic" dual perspective narrative structure, transforming abstract scientific concepts into concrete expressions that children can understand. 

The awarding of this book is an important recognition of popular science creation and science communication work. We look forward to sowing the seeds of scientific exploration in children's hearts through this entertaining and educational approach, laying a foundation for their future interdisciplinary learning and improvement of scientific literacy. 

To purchase books, please scan the mini program on the left.

2025-11-17

The update of the Essential Science Indicators (ESI) database in November 2025 shows that in the internationally renowned Journal IEEE Internet of Things Journal (ranked in the 1st zone of the Chinese Academy of Sciences), The paper "Geometrized task scheduling and adaptive resource allocation for large-scale edge computing in smart cities" published in IF=8.9 cities has been selected as an ESI highly cited paper.

Edge computing is vital in developing smart cities by providing on-site computational resources to support the surging Internet of Things demands. However, the distributed nature of edge nodes and large scale of tasks distributed in expansive urban spaces challenge task scheduling and resource allocation. In this article, a novel framework is developed to achieve efficient task scheduling (assignment and offloading) and resource allocation for large-scale edge computing in both wired and wireless smart-city applications. To overcome overparameterization in existing optimization-based heuristic algorithms, the geometrized task scheduling problem is addressed by transforming the assignment of clustered tasks into a regional partition problem in a 2-D graph and applying a Tetris-like task offloading strategy for edge-cloud cooperation. These approaches avoid combinatorial explosion and NP-hardness, and the regional partition problem is solved by multiplicative weighted Voronoi diagrams with polynomial computational complexity. Furthermore, an adaptive resource allocation algorithm is proposed to overcome the dynamic, uncertain, and highly concurrent task requests. An online learning algorithm is adopted to adjust the sliding window length according to the evolving conditions. Comparison results show that the proposed framework significantly reduces the average task deadline violation rate, i.e., up to 4.72% of (more than 20 times better than) those using the other schemes, especially when handling large-scale workloads.

Note: ESI highly cited papers refer to academic papers published in the past ten years and ranked in the top 1% of global citations in the same discipline. They can provide references for cutting-edge research in the discipline and can be used in the scientific research evaluation system.

2025-11-14

On the afternoon of November 14th, Professor Mao Liang, the dean of the School of Environmental and Biological Engineering at Nanjing University of Science and Technology and a recipient of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, was invited by me to give an academic report titled "Ecological Risks, Mechanisms of Effects and Pollution Control of Typical Radionuclides in the Ocean" in our college. 

With the global application of nuclear energy and the influence of historical nuclear activities, the discharge of radionuclides into the sea and their ecological risks have increasingly drawn attention. The incident of Japan's discharge of nuclear wastewater from Fukushima has made this issue a global focus. Professor Mao Liang systematically introduced the tracking of the distribution, migration, and transformation of radionuclides in multi-phase environments such as seawater and sediments based on a radionuclide analysis platform. He also delved into the kinetics of radionuclide absorption, enrichment, distribution, and excretion in marine organisms (from primary producers to top consumers), revealing the toxic effects at the cellular and molecular levels. Additionally, he combined his team's research achievements in enzyme catalysis (such as lignin peroxidase and laccase) for degrading organic pollutants and the transformation of nanomaterials through Fenton reactions to explore new pathways for controlling and remediating marine radionuclide pollution based on biocatalysis and advanced oxidation technologies, providing scientific basis and forward-looking ideas for the management of marine radioactive risks. 

Note: Professor Mao Liang has long been engaged in research in the field of environmental chemistry. He has published over a hundred papers in journals such as Nature Sustainability, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, National Science Review, National Science Open, ACS Nano, and Environmental Science & Technology. He has received numerous awards including the First Prize of Natural Science of Jiangsu Province and the Second Prize of Natural Science of the Ministry of Education. He also serves as an expert reviewer for multiple national research projects and as an editorial board member for several academic journals.

2025-11-03

The paper "Three-dimensional spatiotemporal simulation of tritium discharge from Fukushima" has been published in the journal Ocean Modelling. 

The ALPS treated water has been discharged into the Pacific Ocean since August 2023.  This study investigates this discharge using a newly developed three-dimensional dispersion model that incorporates migration, diffusion, and decay processes of radionuclides.  A simulation over ten years is conducted using reanalyzed oceanographic data.  The results indicate that tritium released from Fukushima primarily disperses eastward along the 35°N latitude line.  In later stages, local concentration peaks emerge in the northeastern Pacific, exceeding those in the northwest Pacific.  For the vertical distribution, the tritium is generally reduced greatly with depth, but displays maximum values at subsurface layer (∼50m) in some regions.  The concentration reaches a steady state over time, defined as the characteristic concentration, whose spatial distribution and attainment time are detailed.  For major fishing grounds in the Pacific Ocean, the Hokkaido area shows the highest tritium levels, followed by Hawaii, California, Zhoushan, the Korean Peninsula, Mexico, the Philippines, Alaska, and Peru in descending order.  Critically, simulated tritium concentrations in most North Pacific regions (∼0.01 Bq/m3) remain orders of magnitude below natural background levels (∼50 Bq/m3).  This research elucidates three-dimensional radionuclide dispersion mechanisms in global oceans, providing a quantitative methodology for future marine emergency response and contributing to long-term marine conservation efforts.

Note: Ocean Modelling is a Q1 journal in the field of geosciences with an impact factor of 2.9. The first author of the paper is doctoral student Liu Yi, and I and Professor Chen Shengli are the corresponding authors. The research was funded by the Guangdong Provincial Foundation for Basic and Applied Basic Research and the Laoshan Laboratory.

2025-11-01

On November 1st, the 4th China Ocean Engineering Science and Technology Innovation Forum and the Inauguration Ceremony of the Journal "Ocean" were grandly held at Tsinghua SIGS, co-organized by Tsinghua SIGS and the Institute of Ocean Engineering of Tsinghua University, which was hosted by the Chinese Society of Oceanography. Academicians Zhang Jianmin and Ou Jinping of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Liu Bilu, the vice dean of Tsinghua SIGS, relevant officials from the Shenzhen Marine Development Bureau, and nearly 400 experts and scholars from more than 30 domestic universities, enterprises and institutions attended this forum together.

This forum, with the theme of "Empowering with Digital Intelligence, Advancing into the Deep Sea", focuses on the key "pain points" in the field of Marine engineering. It conducts in-depth discussions on the sustainable development path of deep-sea exploration and the construction of a maritime power, aiming to promote the coordinated development of the innovation chain and the industrial chain, facilitate the deep integration of industry, academia, research and application, and lead Marine engineering towards intelligence, greenness and unmanned operation. During the forum, the launch ceremony of the journal "Ocean" was held simultaneously. This journal is hosted by Tsinghua University and published by Tsinghua University Press. Institute for Ocean Engineering provides academic support. It is fully independently built and operated based on the SciOpen platform. In the future, it will be committed to building a high-level international academic exchange platform in the field of Marine engineering. At the end of the forum, I made a concluding speech.

The successful holding of this forum not only consolidated the consensus of multiple parties including industry, academia and research, but also provided an important platform for global scholars to share innovative achievements, and will become a bridge to promote the development of disciplines and the transformation of achievements.