CAS Space's Kinetica 1 had successful launch today w/ 9 sats including 谛听01组A/B/C for the Jilin-1 constellation. In order to fully build out all the constellations, the private launchers need to continue to ramp up their launch cadence

Volunteers for the Changchun 2027 Winter Universiade send greetings in different languages. Take a test and find out what they're saying! The Games will be held in Changchun, northeast China’s Jilin, from Jan 15 to 25, 2027, presenting a spectacular feast of winter sports to audiences.

NEW ROBOT HAND: This one is maxing out the degrees of freedom! Yuequan Bionic Technology (北京大器月泉仿生) is a Chinese firm building bionic humanoid robots and their core components Founded by a father-son academic team: Ren Luquan (Chinese Academy of Sciences academician, Jilin University) and Ren Lei (tenured University of Manchester professor, 25 years in bionic robotics). Its flagship is the Ying Shou Y-Hand M1, a dexterous hand it claims has 38 degrees of freedom (breaking the current global record), a 28.7 kg grip, 0.2 s finger closure, and 0.04 mm positioning accuracy, able to thread needles, twist playing cards, unscrew bottle caps and turn pages. The hand is built on the founders' Bionic Tensile-Compressive Body Robot Theory, a rigid-flexible design mimicking human skeletal-muscular anatomy driven by magnetic collector-driven artificial muscles. Around it sit a lower-DoF X-Hand M1 (11 DoF, 530 tactile units), a bipedal X-Bot, and a wheeled W-Bot billed as the world's smallest, with a roadmap to a ~70-DoF Y-Hand M3. I wonder why go for the DoF-maxxing route when other manufacturers seem to converge on ~23 ? 38 now, ~70 next, exceeding the human hand, but a human hand is only ~21–27 DoF, and Sharpa's 22-DoF hand (arguably one of the best in the market) still fails force tasks (screw-bulb 36% on Gemini Robotics 2). Joint count is being marketed as capability, but the binding constraint is force-controlled contact and control, not more joints. More DoF just means more tiny actuators to coordinate. Their approach to actuation is genuinely new however: tensile-compressive rigid-flexible coupling with muscle-like antagonistic drive, not tendon-cables or rigid rotary joints. Most dexterous hands are tendon-driven (Mimic's 16-DoF cable hand) or rigid-jointed. Yuequan claims an anatomy-mimicking rigid-flexible body driven by magnetic collector-driven artificial muscles. If real, that antagonistic muscle approach is what would buy the 28.7kg grip and 0.2s closure with compliance —> a genuinely different mechanical philosophy.

As the Perseid meteor shower reached its peak over northeastern China, streaks of light shimmered across the mirrors of Jilin's first solar thermal power station. What an amazing sight!

One tiny cat. One raging river. One city that wouldn’t quit. Stranded on a branch for two days, this little survivor was finally rescued by a drone in Jilin. Sometimes, saving a life takes a whole city.️