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You're listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing.
A Chinese woman successfully received a womb donated by her mother after Chinese doctors conducted their first uterus transplant, giving hope to more women struggling with infertility.
A hospital in northwest China's Shaanxi Province announced this is China's first human womb transplant. Currently, the donor and recipient are in good condition.
Thirty-eight surgeons took part in the operation in Xijing Hospital in Xi'an, which lasted for around 14 hours.
A robot assisted in removing the mother's uterus before doctors transplanted it into the daughter's body.
After the daughter recovers, the doctors planed to transfer frozen fertilized embryos into the new womb, allowing her to carry her own biological child. The embryos were created by the daughter and her husband using in-vitro fertilization prior to the transplant.
The 22-year-old woman was born without a uterus but has her own ovaries and can make eggs. Her mother is 43 years old.
Doctors prepared for the surgery for two years, practicing the technique on goats, which are believed to share similar wombs to humans.
Uterus transplants are not new. In the 1960s, Britain and the United States began to experiment with uterus transplants on animals.
In 2000, the world's first human womb transplant took place on a 26-year-old woman in Saudi Arabia. The transplanted uterus failed after three months and had to be removed.
In 2011, doctors successfully performed a uterus transplant on a woman in Turkey. Two years later, nine women in Sweden had successfully received transplanted wombs donated by relatives.
This is NEWS Plus Special English.
A set of three robots specializing in reconnaissance, small explosive ordnance disposal and armed attack have debuted at the just-concluded World Robot Conference in Beijing amid escalating global terror threats.
The toy-sized robots can coordinate with each other on the battlefield. That's according to an engineer at HIT Robot Group in northeast China's Harbin city, the developer of the robots.
The reconnaissance, or scout robot, is responsible for field detection through camera or sensor. When it finds something suspicious including poisonous gas, dangerous chemicals or explosives, the information is transmitted back to headquarters for further analysis.
Based on the analysis results, the explosive disposal and the attacker robots will start their missions.
The set of three robots is priced at 1.5 million yuan, roughly 230,000 U.S. Dollars.
Apart from anti-terror operations, the robots can also be used in firefighting, public security and agricultural activities.
