Новости за 16.02.2021

Researchers from the Oil and Gas Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and their Skoltech colleagues have surveyed the newest known 30-meter deep gas blowout crater on the Yamal Peninsula, which formed in the summer of 2020. The paper was published in the journal Geosciences.

A polymer that is custom designed to produce light that penetrates murky environments has shown promise in bioimaging trials, where it can detect nano-sized particles underneath the surface of realistic tissue models.

In a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a group of researchers led by Maria Hjorth and Simon Albrecht from the Stellar Astrophysics Centre, Aarhus University, have published the discovery of a special exoplanetary system in which two exoplanets are orbiting backward around their star. This surprising orbital architecture was caused by the protoplanetary disk in which the two planets formed being tilted by the second star in this system.

In shallow water, less than 30 meters, the survival of hard corals depends on photosynthetic unicellular algae (zooxanthellae) living in their tissues. But how does the coral adapt at depth when the light disappears? French researchers from the CNRS, EPHE-PSL and their international collaborators, associated with Under the Pole (Expedition III), have studied for the first time the distribution of these so-called mesophotic corals in the French Polynesian archipelago, from the surface to 120 meters deep (with a record descent of 172 meters).

Hydrogen peroxide diluted in water is used as a disinfectant to treat wounds. It is widely used across the industry as an eco-friendly oxidizing agent for removing impurities from semiconductors, for waste treatment, and other applications. Currently, it is mainly produced by the sequential hydrogenation and oxidation of anthraquinone (AQ). However, this process is not only energy intensive and requires large-scale facilities, but AQ is also toxic.

Human health and ecosystems could be affected by microbes including cyanobacteria and algae that hitch rides in clouds and enter soil, lakes, oceans and other environments when it rains, according to a Rutgers co-authored study.

Researchers at IMBA—Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences–unveil functional and mechanistic details in small RNA-mediated co-transcriptional gene silencing. The results are published in the journal Genes & Development.

Finding effective treatments for SARS-CoV-2 means identifying key pathways to target, which is made all the more difficult when facing a completely new disease. Researchers in the Korcsmaros Group at EI are therefore applying their expertise in systems biology to tackle the problem from a holistic perspective.

Delivering the benefits of agricultural biotechnology to smallholder farmers requires that resources be directed toward staple food crops. To achieve effect at scale, beneficial traits must be integrated into multiple, elite farmer-preferred varieties with relevance across geographical regions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed life as we know it all around the world. It's changed human behavior, and that has major consequences for data-gathering citizen-science projects such as eBird, run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. This worldwide database now contains more than a billion observations and is a mainstay of many scientific studies of bird populations. Newly published research in the journal Biological Conservation finds that when human behaviors change, so do the data.

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in India and one in China has found a way to improve the performance of a certain thermoelectric material by partially substituting selective atoms with certain cations. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their process and how well their material worked when tested. Yu Liu and Maria Ibáñez with the Institute of Science and Technology Austria have published a Perspectives piece in the same journal issue outlining... Читать дальше...

An international team of astronomers has performed photometric and spectroscopic observations of a binary star system known as ASASSN-18aan and have found that the object is an unusual cataclysmic variable with a relatively long orbital period. The findings were presented February 9 on the arXiv pre-print server.

More than a century after the first powered flight on Earth, NASA intends to prove it's possible to replicate the feat on another world.

After a seven-month journey, NASA's Perseverance rover prepares to touch down on Mars on Thursday after first negotiating a risky landing procedure that will mark the start of its multi-year search for signs of ancient microbial life.

As dawn breaks in central Kenya, a helicopter lifts off in a race to find roosting locusts before the sun warms their bodies and sends them on a ravenous flight through farmland.

NASA, in collaboration with other leading space agencies, aims to send its first human missions to Mars in the early 2030s, while companies like SpaceX may do so even earlier. Astronauts on Mars will need oxygen, water, food, and other consumables. These will need to be sourced from Mars, because importing them from Earth would be impractical in the long term. In Frontiers in Microbiology, scientists show for the first time that Anabaena cyanobacteria can be grown with only local gases, water, and other nutrients and at low pressure. Читать дальше...

Greek travellers faced major disruption to road and sea transport on Monday after strong winds and heavy snowfall that have made conditions even more miserable in the country's migrant camps.