The year was 2015, and New York University professor Debra Laefer sat at her desk in Brooklyn reviewing yet another stack of research papers on remote sensing. As she scanned the authors’ affiliations, she paused – the same journals that once overflowed with names from American universities and Nasa labs had begun to publish discoveries from Beijing, Wuhan and Shanghai.
Over the next few years, the drips became a wave – and then a tsunami.
