The following announcement by a Chinese Communist Party-run association for scientists names 28 questions as China’s outstanding S&T issues and challenges of 2023. The questions span a wide range of topics, including microchips, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, rail transit, coal mining, manned Mars exploration, and many more.

An archived version of the Chinese source text is available online at:    https://perma.cc/BR7S-X3XT

CAST Announces its Major Scientific Questions, Engineering Technology Challenges, and Industrial Technology Questions for 2023 | CAST 25th Annual Conference

On October 22 [2023], at the main forum of the 25th Annual Conference of the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST), CAST unveiled the major scientific questions, engineering technology challenges, and industrial technology questions of 2023. Major questions in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), new energy, high-performance materials, and life sciences received attention.

Cutting-edge scientific questions include:

How can low-energy AI be achieved?

How can flight vehicle maneuvering in the upper atmosphere be achieved?

Can novel coincidence counting techniques be used to search for the existence of magnetic monopoles and axion dark matter?

Do nonlinear effects vary with scale?

What are the fundamental scientific issues affecting the development of high-performance fibers?

How are crops adapting to the soil environment in the context of global climate change?

How did modern terrestrial ecosystems originate?

What are the triggering and delaying mechanisms of reproductive aging?

How can steady-state combustion in controlled nuclear fusion be achieved?

How can the coupling mechanisms and energy field distribution characteristics of higher-speed wheel-rail systems be explored and verified?

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