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How can we precisely measure road roughness and the resulting drivers' comfort with science? The research team led by Dr. Chen Shih-Huang, Director of the Department of Civil Engineering at NCU, collaborated with Nichireki Co., Ltd from Japan in assembling “Fuji-Jade Summit 1,” a brand new pavement surface condition survey vehicle. It is the fruit of success nurtured by Nichireki’s more than 70 years of experience and new technology and 50 years of solid academic foundations built by the Department of Civil Engineering at NCU. In addition, it was the first time that the Taiwanese successfully applied the 3D pavement surface image system to conduct an automatic pavement survey, which made a great leap in Taiwan’s technology of pavement surface condition detection.

Professor Hwang Chorng-Yuan and Assistant Research Scholar Ekaterina Koptelova at the Graduate Institute of Astronomy discovered a BL Lacertae (BL Lac) object at a redshift of around 6.5. This newly discovered BL Lac object has currently become the most distant one among other BL Lac objects known to the world, setting a new record in the astronomy field. The research outcome was also published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, bringing new insights into the knowledge of models of active galactic nuclei and the origin and evolution of supermassive black holes.

INSPIRESat-1, a small satelite co-developed by Taiwanese, American, and Indian research teams, was successfully launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in India on Feb. 14, 2022, Taiwan time. Flight control teams at National Central University (NCU) in Taiwan, as well as at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU Boulder) in the US, and the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST) in India successfully received signals transmitted by the spacecraft in the afternoon of that day, indicating that the satellite had powered on and was functioning normally. This is the very first time that a payload developed by a Taiwanese academic organization shared the same spacecraft with a payload sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the USA. It is also the first time that a Taiwanese research team officially collaborated with the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology in India.

Professor Wang Chien-Chia and Indonesian doctoral student Titi Rindi Antika in the Department of Life Sciences at National Central University have dedicated themselves to decoding genetic information and successfully discovered key evidence for the evolution of the translation enzyme aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase (aaRS). The result was published in Nucleic Acids Research, a leading international journal with an impact factor of 16.971. This research result has not only taken the translation of the genetic code one step forward but also benefited the treatment of relevant diseases.

Assistant Professor Yen-Chen Pan at the Graduate Institute of Astronomy, National Central University (NCU), participated in the international project "Young Supernova Experiment (YSE)". Participants of the project observed the entire dying process of a red supergiant from its dying mass-loss episodes to its explosion, and the result was published in The Astrophysical Journal early this year. The Lulin One-meter Telescope (LOT) at NCU’s Lulin Observatory was also used in this joint observation mission. Its main contribution was surveying the early-stage variation of luminosity after the supernova exploded. This significant achievement was also covered by CNN.