Новости за 27.01.2021

Members of Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences are shining new light on an enduring mystery—one that is millions of years in the making.

The development of cost-efficient, portable microscopy units would greatly expand their use in remote field locations and in places with fewer resources, potentially leading to easier on-site analysis of contaminants such as E. coli in water sources as well as other practical applications.

A wildfire raging in the south of Argentina has consumed a vast swathe of forestland in three days, local authorities said Wednesday—an area half the size of Liechtenstein.

For centuries, humans have blamed the moon for our moods, accidents and even natural disasters. But new research indicates that our planet's celestial companion impacts something else entirely—our sleep.

In a new article published in the scientific journal Communications Chemistry, a research group at Uppsala University show, using computer simulations, that ions do not always behave as expected. In their research on molten salts, they were able to see that, in some cases, the ions in the salt mixture they were studying affect one another so much that they may even move in the "wrong" direction—that is, towards an electrode with the same charge.

Doctors are increasingly using genetic signatures to diagnose diseases and determine the best course of care, but using DNA sequencing and other techniques to detect genomic rearrangements remains costly or limited in capabilities. However, an innovative breakthrough developed by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center and the VCU Department of Physics promises to diagnose DNA rearrangement mutations at a fraction of the cost with improved accuracy.

Climate change mitigation is about more than just CO2. So-called 'short-lived climate-forcing pollutants' such as soot, methane, and tropospheric ozone all have harmful effects. Climate policy should be guided by a clearer understanding of their differentiated impacts.

RNAi-based biocontrol is a great alternative to hazardous pesticides and can contribute towards reversing the alarming decline in farmland birds and beneficial insects (especially pollinating ones).

A team of researchers from several institutions in the U.K., one in the U.S. and one in Spain has found that measures to promote social distancing of school children to reduce COVID-19 exposure reduced contacts on average by 50 to 62% in a study of students in British schools. In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the group describes conducting interviews with school staff from 33 schools across Britain regarding contact between students and staff during the current pandemic.

An international team of researchers has used modeling techniques borrowed from chemistry applications to create a new kind of city simulator. In their paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A, the group describes using their models to create simulations of of COVID-19 spread for two real-world cities: Birmingham England and Bogota Columbia.

3-D printing is a universal process in the sense that pretty much any part that can be drawn up in a CAD program can be printed, at least within a certain resolution. Machining a part on a mill or lathe, while having the advantage of greater accuracy and material options, is a slightly less universal process in that many possible designs that exist in theory could never be machined. A hollow sphere can easily be printed, but a ball could never be milled as a single part into a hollow sphere—unless... Читать дальше...

Astronomers report the finding of a new candidate redback millisecond pulsar (MSP) binary associated with a gamma-ray source known as 4FGL J0940.3–7610. The newly found object is a short-period compact binary exhibiting X-ray emission that consists of a low-mass neutron star and a companion star with a mass most likely over 0.4 solar masses. The discovery is detailed in a paper published January 21 on the arXiv pre-print server.