Off The Charts.

The Human Cell Atlas project.

News Items is “the most valuable newsletter out there.” — Peggy Noonan.

“If I could only open one thing each morning it would be John Ellis’s News Items newsletter.” — Larry Summers, President Emeritus of Harvard University and former Secretary of the Treasury of the United States.

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1. Many of the patterns evident in the data for this year’s Nature Index Science Cities supplement will be familiar to watchers of global science trends over the past decade. China’s research output in the journals tracked by the Nature Index continues to grow strongly, demonstrated by Beijing extending its lead at the summit of the science cities ranking to almost double the Share of the second-placed city. The fact that this second place is now taken by Shanghai, pushing New York into third, only reinforces this trajectory. (Source: nature.com)

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2. As Chinese research goes from strength to strength, it is natural that the country’s biggest and most economically developed urban areas, such as Beijing and Shanghai, would become superstar science cities; as China gets richer, more educated and more technologically sophisticated, the megacities drive further progress. What might be more surprising is that some of China’s smaller provincial capitals are becoming globally significant, also ranking among the Nature Index top 20. Nanjing (5th), Wuhan (9th), Hangzhou (13th), Hefei (15th) and Xi’an (20th) are all examples, inhabiting ranking territory similar to major global cities, such as Tokyo (10th), Paris (11th), Seoul (12th), London (14th) and Chicago (17th). Furthermore, the data indicate that these provincial cities — each anchoring regions as large and as wealthy, in relative terms, as a European country — are among those seeing the fastest-rising research output in the Nature Index. These trends reveal that as China’s government places science and innovation at the core of its economic strategy, such cities and regions are playing a key role in cultivating excellence and, as a result, a bid for sustainable, technologically driven growth. (Source: nature.com)

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