National Science and Technology Award Witnesses Four Original Scientific and Technological Breakthroughs

The 2025 National Science and Technology Awards were announced on July 8. Many of the winning achievements collectively showcase China’s progress in basic research, materials science, geoscience, and other fields, and also reflect the accumulation of longterm dedication and collaborative efforts by research teams. In the field of catalysis, the Zhang Tao team at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, proposed the concept of "singleatom catalysis" and advanced it from theory to application. This achievement focuses on how to improve the utilization efficiency of precious metals and reveal catalytic reaction mechanisms, and has already been applied in chemical engineering, pharmaceuticals, and other scenarios. In basic research on water, the Wang Enge and Jiang Ying team at Peking University conducted 25 years of research on the full quantum effects in the strength of hydrogen bonds and dynamical processes. By combining theoretical calculations with experiments using selfdeveloped instruments, they advanced the understanding of the microscopic behavior of water molecules and discovered some new physical phenomena. In the study of hightemperature metallic materials, the Wei Bingbo team at Northwestern Polytechnical University worked on containerless experimental systems under extreme space conditions, developing levitation experiments and deep undercooling technologies for refractory metal materials such as tungsten, providing a new research path for materials science in aerospace and highend manufacturing. In the field of geoscience, the Wang Chengshan team at China University of Geosciences (Beijing) obtained and studied a continuous Cretaceous core through the International Continental Scientific Drilling Project in the Songliao Basin, providing important evidence for reconstructing paleoclimate and paleoenvironment and for explaining deepEarth processes.