China has begun building the biggest radio telescope in the world, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST). Sitting in a natural bowl-shaped depression in a remote region of Guizhou province, southwestern China, FAST is due to be completed in 2014.

China's National Astronomical Observatories will use the exquisite resolution of the 700-million-yuan (US$102-million) facility to identify distant pulsars and galaxies in the low-gigahertz range of the radio spectrum.

FAST will unseat the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico as the biggest single eye on the sky — although it will not be able to match the resolution of multiple-antenna telescopes such as the Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile (currently under construction).