Taiwan to build Asia's first LHC
Academia Sinica, Taiwan's top research institute, will cooperate with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to build a Large Hadron Collider (LHC) computing-grid maintenance center in Taiwan that will be the first of its kind in Asia.
Academia Sinica President Lee Yuan-tse (李遠哲) and CERN deputy director Jos Engelen jointly signed a memorandum yesterday on the establishment of a Tier-1 LHC computing-grid maintenance center to be located in Academia Sinica's Institute of Physics.
CERN is the world's largest particle-physics laboratory, and the LHC Computing Grid Project is CERN's flagship project.
The mission of the LHC Computing Grid Project (LCG) is to build and maintain a data storage and analysis infrastructure for the entire high-energy physics community that will use the LHC. The LHC is a particle accelerator which will probe deeper into matter than ever before.
R&D spending rose 8.3 percent
Spending on research and development totaled NT$260.9 billion (US$7.78 billion) last year, up 8.3 percent over the previous year, according to statistics released yesterday by the National Science Council.
The council's statistics also show that R&D spending last year accounted for 2.5 percent of the nation's GDP and represented a growth of NT$20.1 billion over 2003.
The number of researchers reached 91,490 last year, up 7.4 percent year-on-year, it said.
Tatung investing in Vietnam
Tatung Co (大同), Taiwan's leading home-appliance maker, is building the company's global production center in Vietnam, a Tatung spokeswoman said yesterday.
"The Vietnam manufacturing center is scheduled to begin operations in mid-2006. Tatung will relocate its production resources to the plant step by step with an aim to make it the company's global home-appliance production base," the spokeswoman said.
Construction of the facilities, located in Binh Duong, southern Vietnam, started early this year in a US$46 million project.
The Binh Duong unit is expected to generate annual revenue of NT$500 million to NT$600 million (US$14.9 million to US$17.9 million) next year, NT$10 billion in five years and NT$34 billion in seven years, she said.
Kaohsiung Harbor slipping
The Kaohsiung Harbor will lose its ranking as the world's sixth busiest container port to Rotterdam next year, Lin Chih-ming, the head of the Transportation Ministry's Navigation & Aviation Department, warned yesterday.
"In the first 11 months of this year, Kaohsiung Harbor handled 8.69 million TEUs (20-foot equivalent units), down 2.4 percent year-on-year," Lin said.
"But in the same period, Rotterdam Port's container volume rose 15 percent," he said.
Lin admitted that Kaohsiung Harbor's challenge comes mainly from China's deep-water ports -- Yangshan and Xiamen.
Kaohsiung Harbor plans to give shipping companies greater incentives to prevent them from switching to other ports.
"The biggest incentive is that starting next year, if a foreign shipping line handles more than 1 million TEUs at Kaohsiung Harbor, it will enjoy a cut of NT$2 million (US$660,000) in its port facility fees," he said.
NT dollar slides
The New Taiwan dollar traded lower yesterday, as US dollar demand from importers and oil firms outpaced inflows of foreign capital, dealers said.
The local dollar slid NT$0.016 to close at NT$33.517 on the Taipei foreign exchange market, on turnover of US$613 million.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the