BEIJING, July 13 (Xinhua) -- The following are the highlights of China's science news from the past week:

SEARCH FOR EXTRA-SOLAR PLANETS

As well as hunting for signals from alien life, the largest and most sensitive radio telescope ever built will search for extra-solar planets, or exoplanets, which have magnetic fields like Earth, within 100 light-years from Earth.

Astronomers from countries including China and France recently published their ambitious observation plan using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) in the academic journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

THIRD POLE ENVIRONMENT STUDY

A workshop with 40 scientists from all over the world opened in Beijing Thursday to enhance global efforts on the study of the Third Pole environmental changes.

The Third Pole is a high-altitude region covering the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and surrounding areas. It stores more snow and glaciers than anywhere in the world after the North and South poles, and it is the headwaters of Asia's 10 major rivers, including the Yangtze, Yellow, Indus and Yarlung Zangbo.

BRAIN TUMOR DATABASE

China's leading neurosurgery hospital has published a database of 2,000 gene samples from Chinese patients with glioma, a type of brain tumor. It provides massive amounts of data to enhance research and explore the precise treatment of the fatal brain disease.

The Chinese Glioma Genome Atlas database (http://cgga.org.cn) was established by researchers from the Beijing Tiantan Hospital under the Capital Medical University after a 15-year sample collection. They expect to map a complete glioma genome of the Chinese population.

CHANG'E-4 PROBE

Both the lander and the rover of the Chang'e-4 probe switched to dormant mode for the lunar night on the far side of the moon on Tuesday morning (Beijing Time).

The scientific instruments on the Chang'e-4 probe worked well during the seventh lunar day after the probe made the first-ever soft-landing on the Von Karman Crater in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the far side of the moon on Jan. 3, according to the Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center of the China National Space Administration.

ZIKA VIRUS

An international study has shown that the Zika virus may lead to delayed childhood neurodevelopment and impairment in children's vision and hearing.

Researchers tracked the development of 216 babies born to women who contracted the Zika virus in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil during the 2015-2016 Zika epidemic. The study was published in the journal Nature Medicine. Enditem

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