The rise of Denmark’s Share in materials science over the last five years as a consequence of its role in China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Denmark has seen a steady increase in its Share in materials science across the five years of Nature Index’s latest analysis (2019 to 2023) with a rise of 15% across the period. It dropped two places from 22nd to 18th place in the ranking and might need to do more to break into the top 20 countries. India saw its output increase 70% while China saw 85% over the same period, and they both saw large increases in Share.

The country is a big spender on research and development (R&D) and has world-leading numbers of researchers relative to its population size, according to statistics from the United Nations cultural organization UNESCO. But with a birthrate that is also the lowest in the world and dwindling numbers of students going into higher education, South Korea has challenges to overcome to remain as a global leader in science.

The importance of the Singapore–China collaboration might reflect the city state’s ongoing engagement with China’s global infrastructure development strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). A previous analysis by Nature Index showed Singapore as China’s strongest BRI partner. Chinese researchers working with their Chinese counterparts in Singapore could make up for high international collaboration scores between the two countries due to country specific trends in how researchers are identifying themselves on papers.

Italy has been ranked 14th in the past three years, an improvement over the last two years. Its Share of 217.13 was lower than Singapore (263.89) and South Korea (810.22) but it was the top-ranked European country for change in Share from 2019 to 2023, with a 13.5% increase across the period

A higher figure per million people is whatDenmark punches above its weight, and it is the same for the United States, United Kingdom and Germany. Denmark has natural strengths that it uses to help it be a leader of the green transition and new technologies associated with it. In 2023, researchers from Aarhus University showed that chemical recycling approaches for thermoset epoxy resins and composites were achievable2. The new approach could lead to a reduction in the number of wind-turbine blades that are sent to landfill.

Count and Share: A Supplement to Nature Index to Track and Monitor Collaborations in Japan and Other Emerging Energy Markets (Extended Abstract)

A description of the terminology and methodology used in this supplement, and a guide to the functionality that is available free online at natureindex.com.

Count and Share are used in the Nature Index to track research output. Each piece of writing must have at least one author from that country or institution in order to get a Count of 1. This is the case regardless of the number of authors an article has, and it means that the same article can contribute to the Count of multiple countries/territories or institutions.

The total number of articles in the Nature index journals varies with the adjusted share. It is arrived at by calculating the percentage difference in the total number of articles in the Index in a given year relative to the number of articles in a base year and adjusting Share values to the base year levels.

The bilateral collaboration score (CS) between two institutions A+B is the sum of each of their Shares on the papers to which both have contributed. A bilateral collaboration can be between any two institutions or countries/territories co-authoring at least one article in the journals tracked by the Nature Index.

It is possible to find more information from the profile page of each query, which summarizes the country or institution’s recent outputs. By journal, and then by article, articles can be displayed. Research outputs are organized by subject area. The pages list the institution or country’s/territory’s top collaborators, as well as its relationship with other organizations. Users can track the performance of their institution and create their own indexes.

The tables in this supplement show the leading institutions and countries overall, ranked by Share in 2023, as well as the leading institutions in each sector based on the same metric. The institutions with the highest change in Share from 2022 to 2023 are included.

As technology matures from basic research to serious commercial prospects, economic goals can often be the underpinning of cross-border relationships. Domen said Japan is wary of China’s potential to dominate emerging green industry markets. “China is our very good collaborator and our very good competitor.”

Domen notes that photocatalytic materials research in Japan has changed over time. There were only four photocatalysis research groups in Japan when he was a graduate. There are 20 collaborating but also competing.

A next- generation system will use a higher performance catalyst that will be demonstrated on a 3,000 m2 array. Now in its second phase, the project is increasingly funded by industry collaborations.

Domen was granted 10 years of funding in 2010 to pursue his research, an unprecedented length for Japan. He says this made a huge difference compared with the usual five-year projects “because we could form long-term collaborations, including with industry, to make important progress”. At the start of the project, the team planned a 1 m2 solar green hydrogen demonstration system, but Domen and his partners demonstrated a 100 m2 array of photocatalytic water-splitting reactor for green hydrogen production.

Singapore’s National University of Sciences and Technological Enterprise (SINGAPORE): Exploring the potential for sustainable-materials research in the solar spectra

“Singapore is very special in that it concurrently collaborates with the East and the West, which is unusual with today’s geopolitics,” Liu says. We can partners with the best partners to strengthen our strengths.

The government supports collaboration with top researchers from other countries. The Campus for Research excellence and technological enterprise is a programme. We would like to work with researchers from foreign universities to co- develop our research areas and materials. Researchers from 11 overseas institutions, including the University of Cambridge, UK, the Technical University of Mainz, Germany, and the University of California, Berkeley were awarded S$ 90 million to study the topic of decarbonization.

“Singapore is very short of natural resources,” says Bin Liu, a materials-science researcher at the National University of Singapore, and director of the university’s Flagship Green Energy Programme. “If we can convert CO2 emissions into a large-scale green fuel, that will solve sustainability and also energy-import issues in Singapore,” she says. Funding support is very high for materials because the government has prioritized this area.

Liu’s own lab explores organic photocatalytic materials, which can absorb the energy in sunlight and use it to drive chemical reactions. The team has used these materials to extract the carbon atoms from CO2, and the hydrogen atoms from water molecules, before combining them to make hydrocarbons that can act as fuel sources, such as green methanol.

Harnessing light to drive the conversion of CO2 into valuable products is also a hot topic in Singapore, where the government prioritizes sustainable-materials research, although for different reasons than the region’s major manufacturing economies.

The team is developing a version of the film for sustainable biomanufacturing3. “We also want to tailor the solar spectrum for the fast growth of microalgae,” Yin says. The idea is to use microalgae to convert CO2 into valuable products because they absorb it as they grow. The team is first targeting niche, high-value superfood or cosmetics applications. “But the more we scale up, the lower production costs, and the broader the range of products we could consider,” Yin says.

By tuning the solar spectrum in this way2, the microphotonic film, which Yin first worked on with colleagues while in the United States, boosted the growth of lettuces by more than 20%. The same gains were seen for plants grown under lights. “For vertical farming or vegetable factories, the primary energy cost is lighting,” Yin says. It’s an area we could contribute to.

Source: Why Asia is leading the field in green materials

Manipulating light and heat using hierarchically structured materials: The case of cellulose acetate film in China’s Tianshan Glacier No. 1

Asian countries often do well when it comes to investing funding into research into connecting academic ideas with industry. The situation is a win–win situation since industry partners offer more financial support for research.

Zhu, who spent almost a decade studying and working in the United States — at Stanford University in California and the University of California, Berkeley — before joining Nanjing University in 2013, also points to the existing evidence that environmental challenges can be met through technology. When he returned to China the pollution in the cities was very bad. He says that it was evident how industrialization was impacting the environment. He says that a range of government measures have made a difference.

By keeping objects cool without consuming energy, such radiative cooling materials could be key to combating rising urban heat, says materials scientist Xiaobo Yin, who develops passive-cooling materials at the University of Hong Kong. Yin says that air conditioning affects the environment by moving heat from inside the house to the outside. “Buildings or roads capable of radiative cooling are the only way we can expel the excess heat out of the Earth.”

Light and heat are important forms of energy in nature. “I explore ways to manipulate light and heat using hierarchically structured materials.” The ice-cream study showed hierarchical structure in action. At the microscale, pores in the plant-derived cellulose acetate film scatter and reflect incoming sunlight, bouncing solar heat away. The atmospheric transparent window has a band ofIR light that can be seen through the film’s atomic structure. The Universe is a vast heat sink and uses it to keep objects on Earth cool.

Most of the green-materials work is centered on research on new batteries and solar cells, but many other technologies are being developed with a focus on ways they can interact with sunlight.

The experiment had an important motive. Such materials can potentially be used in a warming climate, according to the materials-science researcher who led the work. When an 80 m2 sheet of the same material was laid on the surface of China’s Tianshan Glacier No. 1 in Xinjiang, the covered section was about 70 cm higher after 20 days. Similar materials on roofs have been used to cool buildings.