Vaccine administered

More than 24 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in China, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said on Sunday.

Preliminary tests showed that the incidence of severe abnormal reactions caused by the COVID-19 vaccines currently used in China is no higher than that of the influenza vaccine, Xu Wenbo, head of the National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention under the center, said at a press conference held by the State Council joint prevention and control mechanism against COVID-19.

3D-printed soft robot

A white piece of equipment was “climbing” along a round tube. With its body stretching and contracting like an inchworm, it moved forward smoothly and even passed a 90-degree angle.

The equipment is a one-piece 3D-printed pipe-climbing robot composed of sequenced novel soft bending mechanisms, which was recently developed by professor Zuo Siyang and Dr. Liu Jianbin’s research team at Tianjin University in North China’s Tianjin Municipality.

Though pipe-climbing robots have been used in real-time monitoring, leak inspection and other tasks, no single device boasted the ability to climb on both the inner and outer walls of a pipe.

Anti-bullying campaign

The Education Ministry has launched an anti-bullying campaign for primary and middle schools across the country based on a recent guideline.

The guideline urged thorough investigations to find evidence of bullying and called for necessary measures to defuse potential bullying behaviors in schools.

Depending on the seriousness of the offense, students perpetrating bullying should be subjected to disciplinary actions, reprimanded, warned, or transferred to special schools, the guideline noted.

Moated cities found

Ruins of two moated cities dating back about 4,000 years have been found in a relics site in Central China’s Henan Province, local authorities said last week.

Archaeologists discovered two juxtaposed square-shaped cities, each surrounded by a moat, at the Yusi site in the city of Mengzhou. The one located on the east covers an area of about 60,000 square meters while the one on the west measures around 20,000 square meters, according to the Institute of Cultural Heritage and Archaeology of Henan.(SD-Agencies)