Новости за 18.02.2021

Acres of asphalt parking lots, unshaded roads, dense apartment complexes and neighborhoods with few parks have taken their toll on the poor. As climate change accelerates, low-income districts in the Southwestern United States are 4 to 7 degrees hotter in Fahrenheit—on average—than wealthy neighborhoods in the same metro regions, University of California, Davis, researchers have found in a new analysis.

University of Central Florida researchers are homing in on the cause of a major disease of sea turtles, with some of their latest findings implicating saltwater leeches as a possible factor.

The pandemic knocked the U.S. back on track to meet its targets in the Paris climate accord, and renewable energy saw a record-setting level of deployment in 2020 as coal consumption dwindled, figures from an independent report released Thursday show, while transportation emissions are expected to jump as the country gets the virus under control.

Scientists uncover for the first time how the body's energy makers are made using Cryo-Electron Microscopy (cryo-EM) at eBIC within Diamond which is based in Oxfordshire.

Israeli officials said Thursday that a dead whale has washed up on a beach south of Tel Aviv.

The distribution of vegetation is routinely used to classify climate regions worldwide, yet whether these regions are relevant to other organisms is unknown. Umeå researchers have established climate regions based on vertebrate species' distributions in a new study published in eLife. They found that while high-energy climate regions are similar across vertebrate and plant groups, there are large differences in temperate and cold climates.

Workers with science, technology, engineering and math backgrounds are typically in high demand—but the demand isn't so overwhelming that a 'skills gap' exists in the labor market for information technology help desk workers, one of the largest computer occupations in the U.S., says new research from a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign expert who studies labor economics and work issues.

Scientists from the Andalusian Research Institute in Data Science and Computational Intelligence, or DaSCI (University of Granada), together with the private company Ferrovial and the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering (RAI), have conducted a study to analyze how engineering and technological solutions strongly linked to artificial intelligence (AI) can positively contribute to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations (UN).

When the invasive spotted lanternfly arrived in the United States in 2014, it was immediately recognized for the threat it posed to native plants and crops. A community of researchers and experts in science, agriculture, and government sprang into action to respond, improving our chances for containing the pest and curbing its potential for damage.

As investors set their sights on the mineral resources of the deep seabed, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) is developing regulations that will govern their future exploration and possible exploitation. A new IASS Policy Brief, published in cooperation with the Federal Environment Agency (UBA), presents three recommendations to ensure that future deep seabed mining would be to the common benefit all humankind, as required by international law.

When there is a choice, wolves in Mongolia prefer to feed on wild animals rather than grazing livestock. This is the discovery by a research team from the University of Göttingen and the Senckenberg Museum Görlitz. Previous studies had shown that the diet of wolves in inland Central Asia consists mainly of grazing livestock, which could lead to increasing conflict between nomadic livestock herders and wild predatory animals like wolves. The study has been published in the journal Mammalian Biology.

Creation of matter in an interaction of two photons belongs to a class of very rare phenomena. From the data of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, collected with the new AFP proton detectors at the highest energies available to-date, a more accurate—and more interesting—picture of the phenomena occurring during photon collisions is emerging.

An international study in which the University of Granada participated—recently published in the journal Scientific Reports—has identified a new fossil record of giant predatory worms in the northeast of Taiwan (China), in marine sediments from the Miocene Age (between 23 and 5.3 million years ago)

IBM and 19 other companies have joined Amazon's Climate Pledge, committing to neutralize their carbon emissions, Amazon announced Wednesday. The new signatories include Seattle-based companies MiiR, the upscale thermos manufacturer, and consulting group Slalom.

A team of researchers has devised a method using smartphones in order to measure food consumption—an approach that also offers new ways to predict physical well-being.

A new study published in Scientific Reports has revealed that dogs understand the relationship between their body and the environment in a problem solving task. The researchers of the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary) found that dogs can recognize their body as an obstacle, which ability is one of the basic manifestations of self-representation in humans.

A deadly winter weather system that brought record-busting cold to the southern and central United States, knocking out power for millions in oil-rich Texas, pushed up the East Coast Thursday as heavy snowfall and icy buildups disrupted coronavirus vaccinations.

The ruddy duck, originally from North America, was introduced to Britain as an ornamental wildfowl in the 1940s and soon spread throughout the country. Only after a decade or more of expensive culling, has this non-native duck been largely removed.

Physicists from ITMO University have discovered an accessible method that makes it possible to use transparent materials for solar cells while preserving their efficiency. The new technology is based on the method of doping—the modification of properties of materials by way of adding impurities—but without the use of expensive special-purpose equipment. Results of this research have been published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

A team of researchers with members from China and Singapore has found that it is possible to use persistently luminescent nanocrystals to create 3-D X-rays. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes a means for creating nanocrystals that can hold onto excited charge carriers, and how they used those crystals to fashion a bendable sheet that could be used to create 3-D images using X-rays. Albano Carneiro Neto and Oscar Malta, with the University of Aveiro and the Federal University of Pernambuco... Читать дальше...

Serious pollution caused around 160,000 premature deaths in the world's five most populous cities last year, even as air quality improved in some places due to coronavirus lockdowns, an environmental group said Thursday.

Deprive a mountain range of its wolves, and soon the burgeoning deer population will strip its slopes bare. "I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer," wrote ecologist Aldo Leopold in his landmark 1949 title "A Sand County Almanac."

A new UBC Okanagan study finds children not only reap the benefits of working with therapy dogs—they enjoy it too.

When materials reach extremely small size scales, strange things begin to happen. One of those phenomena is the formation of mesocrystals.

A considerable portion of the efforts to realize a sustainable world has gone into developing hydrogen fuel cells so that a hydrogen economy can be achieved. Fuel cells have distinctive advantages: high energy-conversion efficiencies (up to 70%) and a clean by-product, water. In the past decade, anion exchange membrane fuel cells (AEMFC), which convert chemical energy to electrical energy via the transport of negatively charged ions (anions) through a membrane, have received attention due to their... Читать дальше...