"What is the purpose of a chip?"

"Why do we videotape the universe?"

"Will humans look different in the future?"

On May 25, 2024, a crowd of teenagers gathered around the researchers of Zhejiang Lab (ZJ Lab), as if they had countless questions. The teens' limitless curiosity was triggered by lab tours, livening up the previously "calm" lab atmosphere with endless laughter and surprise.

The Zhejiang Lab Open Day 2024Q2 falls on the same day. More than 100 technophiles and students from Hangzhou Caihe Experimental Middle School, Hangzhou Chovan Experimental School, Hangzhou Middle School, and Hangzhou No.15 Middle School Education Group, by means of early recruitment and registration, went into the Zhejiang Lab Campus. Under the leadership of the researchers, they explored the universe and shuttled through the 4.6 billion years of evolutionary history of the Earth, and watched how cutting-edge scientific achievements are changing people's production and life.

"This yellow, prickly thing, it's a telescope?" The "Phased Array Feed Ultrawide Field-of-view Radio Telescope" model was surrounded by curious adults and children. ZHANG Xiaohang, a research expert at ZJ Lab's Research Center for Novel Computing Sensing and Intelligent Processing, explained that these "thorns" represent the digital synthesis beams recording 224-channel signals of the Phased Array Feed Ultrawide Field-of-view Radio Telescope. With the help of intelligent computing, this telescope can capture signals from the universe quickly and efficiently. "Searching for aliens, for example, requires a cosmic 'video recorder' like the Phased Array Feed Ultrawide Field-of-view Radio Telescope," he quipped.

During the event, the researchers prepared a wealth of vivid cases or easy-to-understand videos especially for these teens, which turned rigorous scientific knowledge into interesting popular science stories and answered their questions.

In the science popularization report titled Mysteries of the Earth, Dr. YU Ting, a research fellow at the Research Center for Data Hub and Security, told the audience that if we compressed the 4.6 billion light years of Earth's history into one day, humans in our modern sense would have appeared only at the last second, and that our life is actually very short compared to the Earth's age. "That's why we should value our time and do what we want most in a limited life."

"A chip is actually transformed from a grain of sand." "Fabricating chips is somewhat like cooking pancakes." "Photoresists are easily destroyed when exposed to UV light in white light, so yellow light is used in labs." After the crowd walked into ZJ Lab's Micro-nano Machining Platform, ZHU Hongli, an explainer and engineering expert at the Research Center for Novel Computing Sensing and Intelligent Processing, introduced the history of chips in detail.

The charm of intelligent computing was felt everywhere at the event. As abundant achievements such as "smart masks" and smart chips were unveiled, the researchers at ZJ Lab's Research Center for New Materials Computing demonstrated the prospects for intelligent computing applications in new materials, manufacturing and other fields.

The Zhejiang Lab Open Day was held in parallel with the Third Zhejiang Young Scientists Open Day. At the end of the "Science Exploration" section, the crowd visited Beauty of Science Exhibitions, including the Charm of Technology, the Poetry of Science, and the Question of Design, to inspire future imagination in science and aesthetics.