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China Moves To Convert Underused Airspace Into A New Industrial Growth Engine
Beijing, China (SPX) May 01, 2026
For decades, China's economic growth has largely unfolded on land - across factory floors, highways and ports. Now the country is turning its gaze upward.
What was once empty airspace below commercial flight paths is the next frontier of industrial expansion.
The so-called 'low-altitude economy' - encompassing drones, electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOLs), airborne
For decades, China's economic growth has largely unfolded on land - across factory floors, highways and ports. Now the country is turning its gaze upward.
What was once empty airspace below commercial flight paths is the next frontier of industrial expansion.
The so-called 'low-altitude economy' - encompassing drones, electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOLs), airborne 
Researchers from Ocean University of China and Huzhou University have developed a phase-change photothermal foam that continues to produce freshwater after sunlight fades, addressing one of the core limitations of solar-driven desalination technology.
The material, designated PPy-CS/PF@DDA, is constructed by confining dodecylamine inside a polypyrrole-coated chitosan/phenolic resin foam. P 
A new study published in the journal Biochar demonstrates that combining biochar with advanced polyzwitterionic hydrogels can sharply improve the performance of solar-driven water evaporation systems, offering a practical pathway toward low-energy desalination and water purification.
Freshwater scarcity continues to intensify globally, with the vast majority of Earth's water locked in ocea 
A team at Japan's National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS) and the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI, has published new magnetohydrodynamic simulation results demonstrating that a dipole magnetic field in a spherical-shell dynamo - the same geometry as the Earth's outer core - exists as two stable states of opposite polarity, a result the authors say provides a major clue to 
Researchers at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) have developed a composite shielding material that simultaneously blocks both electromagnetic waves and neutron radiation within a single ultra-thin film thinner than a human hair. The material, created by combining carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs) within a polymer matrix, addresses a longstanding chal 
Scientists at Texas A and M University have officially opened the world's largest academic controlled-explosions laboratory, the Detonation Research Test Facility (DRTF), on the Texas A and M-RELLIS innovation and technology campus. The facility stretches nearly two football fields in length and is constructed of steel and concrete, giving researchers an unprecedented platform to observe, measur 
Researchers at the Korea Institute of Materials Science (KIMS) and Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) have developed a next-generation electrochemical system capable of simultaneously producing hydrogen and value-added chemicals from waste glycerol, a byproduct of biodiesel manufacturing. The findings have been published in the energy journal Joule.
The system emplo 
Ambient air pollution in the first year of life is associated with a greater burden of respiratory infections, according to preliminary findings from the Immune Development in Early Life (IDEaL) Rome Cohort, to be presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) 2026 Meeting in Boston.
The research draws on clinical assessments conducted at 2, 5, 9, and 12 months of age, supplemented by 
Researchers at Kyushu University have reported a simple way to generate hydrogen gas by mixing methanol, sodium hydroxide, and iron ions, then exposing the solution to ultraviolet light. The team said the system reached catalytic activity comparable to some previously reported methods based on organometallic and heterogeneous catalysts.
The study, published in Communications Chemistry, als 
The National Reactor Innovation Center at Idaho National Laboratory has declared the Demonstration of Microreactor Experiments test bed, known as DOME, open for business, marking a milestone for the U.S. advanced nuclear sector.
DOME is described as the world's first test bed purpose-built to host and demonstrate microreactors developed by private companies, giving industry partners access 
Perovskite solar cells have emerged as one of the most promising next-generation photovoltaic technologies, but their development still depends heavily on time-consuming trial-and-error synthesis and labor-intensive device fabrication. Researchers from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and collaborating institutions have now reported an agentic robotics system that carries out the full cycle 
The underground Principal Underground Laboratory for Subcritical Experimentation, or PULSE, at the Nevada National Security Site contains numerous mapped faults whose seismic behavior remains poorly constrained.
Members of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board told the 2026 Seismological Society of America Annual Meeting that extensive faulting and associated rock displacement have b 
Inverted perovskite solar cells are widely considered the future of next-generation photovoltaics due to their high efficiency, low cost, and ease of manufacturing. A collaborative research team from the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) has proposed a new approach to stabilizing the delicate interfaces inside these devices, 
Using three-dimensional electron diffraction (3D ED), researchers at Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat (FAU) Erlangen-Nurnberg have demonstrated that electrons can provide the averaged structural information previously accessible only with X-rays. For the first time, this allows a comprehensive structural characterization of organic solar cells within a single instrument - a transmission electron 
Researchers have developed a feature selection-based solar irradiance forecasting method to improve the operation of stand-alone photovoltaic systems. The approach uses a bidirectional long short-term memory hybrid network to forecast solar irradiance and then applies the forecasted data to estimate the optimum tilt angle of photovoltaic panels, helping increase PV output power.
Solar irra 