Новости за 08.02.2021

So you want to build a Mars base. Where to start? Like any human settlement, it would be best located near accessible water. Not only will water be crucial for life-support supplies, it will be used for everything from agriculture to producing the rocket propellant astronauts will need to return to Earth.

Astronomy enthusiasts might wonder why a camera called the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) would be used to image a single spiral galaxy. DECam has in fact already finished its main job, as the instrument was used to complete the Dark Energy Survey, which ran from 2013 to 2019. Like many people, rather than enjoying a quiet retirement, DECam is remaining occupied. Members of the astronomical community can apply for time to use it, and the data collected are processed and made publicly available, thanks... Читать дальше...

For decades, space and ground telescopes have provided us with spectacular images of galaxies. These building blocks of the universe usually contain several million to over a trillion stars and can range in size from a few thousand to several hundred thousand light-years across. What we typically see in an image of a galaxy are the stars, gas and dust that constitute these sprawling systems.

After a nearly seven-month journey to Mars, NASA's Perseverance rover is slated to land at the Red Planet's Jezero Crater Feb. 18, 2021, a rugged expanse chosen for its scientific research and sample collection possibilities.

Researchers in the labs of Christopher Bates, an assistant professor of materials at UC Santa Barbara, and Michael Chabinyc, a professor of materials and chair of the department, have teamed to develop the first 3-D-printable "bottlebrush" elastomer. The new material results in printed objects that have unusual softness and elasticity—mechanical properties that closely resemble those of human tissue.

A team of researchers led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has developed a new material, that when electricity is applied to it, can flex and bend forty times more than its competitors, opening the way to better micro machines.

A team of researchers from the Institute of Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology (IBMCP), mixed center of the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), has taken another step to facilitate the genomic editing of plants. Their breakthrough will enable the use of CRISPR systems, which opens the door to obtain new, more productive and nutritive varieties that are more resistant to plagues, pathogens and other environmental threats such as drought or extreme temperatures. Читать дальше...

Perhaps the greatest technological challenge to harvesting on Earth the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars in future tokamak fusion reactors will be controlling the extreme heat that could strike the exhaust system inside the devices. Such heat flow, or flux, could seriously damage the walls of the divertor at the heart of the exhaust system and shut down fusion reactions in the doughnut-shaped facilities.

Every spring, phytoplankton blooms flourish across the ocean. The single-celled, photosynthetic organisms pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and produce oxygen—part of a carbon sequestration system known as the biological pump.

The development of scanning probe microscopes in the early 1980s brought a breakthrough in imaging, throwing open a window into the world at the nanoscale. The key idea is to scan an extremely sharp tip over a substrate and to record at each location the strength of the interaction between tip and surface. In scanning force microscopy, this interaction is—as the name implies—the force between tip and structures on the surface. This force is typically determined by measuring how the dynamics of a... Читать дальше...

One of humanity's biggest challenges right now is reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Research groups worldwide are trying to find ways to efficiently separate carbon dioxide (CO2) from the mixture of gases emitted from industrial plants and power stations. Among the many strategies for accomplishing this, membrane separation is an attractive, inexpensive option; it involves using polymer membranes that selectively filter CO2 from a mix of gases.

The outbreak of COVID-19 raised a question about the relationship between anthropogenic emissions and air pollution, which has aroused heated discussion. Research on air-quality changes caused by the lockdowns in different areas shows similar substantial reductions in primary emissions. However, regional disparities exist in responses of secondary pollutants to emissions reduction, especially fine particulate matter and ozone (O3).

The Pauli exclusion principle is a law of quantum mechanics introduced by Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli, which offers valuable insight about the structure of matter. More specifically, the Pauli principle states that two or more identical fermions cannot simultaneously occupy the same quantum state inside a quantum system.

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Germany and Poland has demonstrated driven space-time crystals at room temperature. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes applying theories surrounding space-time crystals to magnons and how doing so allowed them to exploit electron spin in a way that could prove useful in information technology applications.

A large team of researchers working with Google Inc. and affiliated with a host of institutions in the U.S., one in Germany and one in the Netherlands has implemented a quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) on a 53-qubit noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) device. In their paper published in the journal Nature Physics,, the group describes their method of studying the performance of their QAOA on Google's Sycamore superconducting 53-qubit quantum processor and what they learned from it. Читать дальше...

The human cellular kinome contains over 500 kinases, accounting for almost 2% of all our genes. It is currently impossible to gauge the phosphorylation status, or even phosphorylation potential, of the entire proteome of any cell. Mitochondria, on the other hand, use just 25 kinases. Moreover, their entire proteome contains only 1,136 proteins, at least according to the latest version of the Mitocarta Database.

By analyzing archival radial velocity data, astronomers have detected a new warm-Neptune alien world. The newfound exoplanet, designated HD 183579b (or TOI-1055b) is about three and a half times larger and almost 20 times more massive than the Earth. The finding is detailed in a paper published January 28 on the arXiv. pre-print repository.

Wearable sensing technology is an essential link in personalized medicine, where researchers must track multiple analytes inside the body simultaneously, to obtain a complete picture of human health. In a new report on Science Advances, Yingli Wang and a team of scientists in biosystems, engineering and information science at the University of Cambridge and Zhejiang University in the U.K. and China, presented a wearable plasmonic-electronic sensor with "universal" molecular recognition capability. Читать дальше...