The National Science and Technology Award Conference was held in Beijing on the morning of January 10. A total of 27 scientific and technological achievements made in Zhejiang province won the award, of which Zhejiang took charge of 11 award-winning projects and participated in 16. Among the 11 projects are two second-class prizes of the State Technological Invention Award and nine second-class prizes of the State Science and Technology Progress Award.

Science and technology benefits people's livelihood and innovative achievements should be shared by more people. Nearly half of the award-winning projects in our province are directly related to the livelihood. These scientific and technological achievements will greatly benefit the common people.

Many of these projects are related to food safety. Lu Lizhi, a researcher at the provincial Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and his team applied traditional breeding techniques and molecular breeding techniques to breed a new variety of laying duck called "Guoshao I" which has excellent yield. This kind of laying duck can lay more than 320 eggs a year, which means it can lay an egg almost every day. And these eggs are basically green-shell eggs, which are not fragile and suitable for subsequent processing. The team also invented and promoted cage rearing and net rearing technologies for laying ducks, thus achieving a leap-forward improvement in environmental friendliness, bio-safety and product quality in laying ducks industry.

The majority of the award-winning projects are industry-university-research projects, which demonstrates that the innovation ability of enterprises is continuously improving and the main role of innovation has been fully highlighted.

Zhejiang province proposes a total expenditure plan of over 247.9 billion yuan for research and development (R&D) of the whole society by 2022.

Executive Editor: Ye Ke

Translation: Ye Ke, Chen Wenjing