Новости за 17.02.2021

Like a scene from a horror movie, tomato fruitworm caterpillars silence their food plants' cries for help as they devour their leaves. That is the finding of a multidisciplinary team of researchers, who said the results may yield insights into the abilities of crop plants—such as tomato and soybean—to withstand additional stressors, like climate change.

Paranapiacaba Treefrogs (Bokermannohyla astartea) mate and lay spawn in small pools of water inside the tanks of bromeliad plants, Leo Ramos Malagoli from the Universidade Estadual Paulista in Brazil and colleagues report in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. The 3cm-long tadpoles must then make their way to a stream to complete development. The study, publishing February 17, is the first to report this unusual reproductive strategy in frogs.

AMOLF researchers Erik Garnett, Susan Rigter, and colleagues are the first to have irrefutably demonstrated that amorphous perovskite exists. The material can significantly increase the efficiency of solar cells produced from perovskite. The research is published today in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

A new study, published in Bioscience, considers the future of ecology, where technological advancement towards a multidimensional science will continue to fundamentally shift the way we view, explore, and conceptualize the natural world.

Researchers from Trinity and Dublin City University found that Irish honey contained residues of neonicotinoid insecticides.

Shallow pools of water on lawns are ideal breeding grounds for the mosquitoes that transmit West Nile virus, the most common mosquito-borne disease in the United States.

Plastic in the ocean can be deadly for marine wildlife and seabirds around the globe, but our latest study shows single-use plastics are a bigger threat to endangered albatrosses in the southern hemisphere than we previously thought.

An international team of researchers has found no evidence of trans-Neptunian object clustering as part of an effort to refute the idea of the existence of Planet Nine. The group has written a paper describing their findings and have uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server.

A major new research review released today paints a detailed picture of how strong principals affect students' educational and social outcomes. The report, co-authored by Professor Jason A. Grissom at Vanderbilt University, concludes that school leaders are even more important than previously believed and that investing in their success has a very large payoff.

The social media world is awash with people hawking products, services and, of course, themselves. But how much influence do the "influencer marketers" really have?

Tim Briggs has built a career at Sandia National Laboratories tearing and breaking things apart with his team of collaborators. Now, he's developed a fracture-testing tool that could help make everything from aircraft structural frames to cellphones stronger.

Astronomers report the discovery of a new sub-Neptune exoplanet as part of the TESS Hunt for Young and Maturing Exoplanets (THYME) program. The newly found alien world, designated HD 110082 b, is about three times larger than the Earth and orbits a relatively young star. The finding is reported in a paper published February 11 on arXiv.org.

EPFL scientists have developed a method for boosting the sensitivity of rapid-detection tests like those used for the new coronavirus. The results of their feasibility study have just been published in Nano Letters.

Videos allowing us to see for the first time how small circles of DNA adopt dance-like movements inside a cell have been developed by researchers at universities in Yorkshire.

Photos of Canada often show the Great Lakes, expanses of wetlands and scenic rivers. The country is described as a water-rich nation, and it is, with seven percent of the world's renewable freshwater supply. However, freshwater sources are far from endless.

The World Health Organisation is convinced that one of the greatest threats to humanity is the rapidly growing resistance of bacteria to antibiotics due to their uncontrolled use. One Russian scientific project, the physical part carried out by specialists at MEPhI, offers a possible solution to this problem.

According to a new commentary in Disability and Health Journal, people with disabilities who rely on service dogs often are prohibited from bringing their working dogs into teaching and research laboratories. This one barrier can stop them from pursuing careers in science, says Joey Ramp, a researcher in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and lead author of the commentary. Ramp spoke about the issue with News Bureau life sciences editor Diana Yates.

When one of the Russian Progress resupply ships undocks from the International Space Station, timing is everything. The Progress needs to fire its engines at just the right time to instigate the deorbit burn in order for the ship to enter the atmosphere at just the right place so that its destructive re-entry occurs over the Pacific Ocean. That way, any potential surviving bits and pieces that might reach Earth will hit far away from any land masses—which are home to people, buildings, and other things we don't want to get bonked.

A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, has found that mice that have been living a commensal life with humans for the longest amount of time are the best at problem-solving. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group describes experiments they conducted with mice from different regions.

Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines to prevent COVID-19 have made headlines around the world recently, but scientists have also been working on mRNA vaccines to treat or prevent other diseases, including some forms of cancer. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Nano Letters have developed a hydrogel that, when injected into mice with melanoma, slowly released RNA nanovaccines that shrank tumors and kept them from metastasizing.

Swimming in indoor or outdoor pools is a healthy form of exercise and recreation for many people. However, studies have linked compounds that arise from chlorine disinfection of the pools to respiratory problems, including asthma, in avid swimmers. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology have found that using a complementary form of disinfection, known as copper-silver ionization (CSI), can decrease disinfection byproducts and cell toxicity of chlorinated swimming pool water.

Life as we know it has never been found anywhere in our solar system or universe, other than on Earth. But that does not necessarily mean it is not out there.

Published in the Harvard Business Review, the research explored differences in the developmental feedback received by men and women.

Many electrochemical reactions go through several steps. Each should be optimized on a catalyst surface if possible, but different requirements apply to each step. "Since previous catalysts usually had only one optimized functionality, one could only make the best compromise possible, and energy losses could not be avoided," explains Professor Wolfgang Schuhmann from the Center for Electrochemistry at RUB.

A novel study of bone and tooth fragments from koalas and rodents has given scientists a new way to understand how the Adelaide region has been settled.