Новости за 24.02.2021

NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover got its first high-definition look around its new home in Jezero Crater on Feb. 21, after rotating its mast, or "head," 360 degrees, allowing the rover's Mastcam-Z instrument to capture its first panorama after touching down on the Red Planet on Feb 18. It was the rover's second panorama ever, as the rover's Navigation Cameras, or Navcams, also located on the mast, captured a 360-degree view on Feb. 20.

The state auditor criticized California's air-pollution agency for mishandling some of its climate-change programs Tuesday, saying the state is in danger of failing to meet the Legislature's targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

The family of ENDOU enzymes is found in most organisms, yet its functions are only poorly understood. In humans, it has been connected with cancer. RNA viruses, such as SARS-CoV2, contain a gene corresponding to ENDOU, and this is important for virus replication and the suppression of the immune response. However, so far only few details of the role of these enzymes are known. The research group led by the molecular geneticist Dr. Wenjing Qi from the University of Freiburg now contributes some more... Читать дальше...

Meat alternatives are officially mainstream. To wit, Burger King added the plant-based Impossible Burger to its menu nationwide in 2019, and McDonald's plans to unveil its own McPlant in 2021. Alongside these vegetarian options, many companies are also working to culture meat outside of animals grown from cell lines. Proponents highlight a range of potential environmental and health benefits offered by this emerging industry, and several companies believe that these benefits could also play out with seafood.

A Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientist examined 11 Mars years of image data to understand the seasonal processes that create linear gullies on the slopes of the megadune in the Russell crater on Mars. In early spring images, captured by two different cameras on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, SwRI's Dr. Cynthia Dinwiddie noticed airborne plumes of dusty material associated with the linear dune gullies on the sand dune's downwind slope. These clues point to active processes involving chunks of frozen CO2... Читать дальше...

Plants and animals can rapidly respond to changes in their environment, such as a Venus flytrap snapping shut when a fly touches it. However, replicating similar actions in soft robots requires complex mechanics and sensors. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have printed liquid metal circuits onto a single piece of soft polymer, creating an intelligent material that curls under pressure or mechanical strain.

Asymmetry in the proton confounds physicists, but a new discovery may bring back old theories to explain it.

The transition from single-cell to multicellular organisms was a major step in the evolution of complex life forms. Multicellular organisms arose hundreds of millions of years ago, but the forces underlying this event remain mysterious. To investigate the origins of multicellularity, Erika Pearce's group at the MPI of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg turned to the slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum, which can exist in both a unicellular and a multicellular state, lying on the cusp of this key evolutionary step. Читать дальше...

In the last 60,000 years, humans have emerged as an ecologically dominant species and have successfully colonized every terrestrial habitat. Our evolutionary success has been facilitated by a heavy reliance on an ever-advancing technology. Understanding how human technology evolves is crucial to understanding why humans have enjoyed such unprecedented evolutionary success.

Accelerator experts from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB), the German federal metrology institute Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) and Tsinghua University in Beijing have used a laser to manipulate electron bunches at PTB's Metrology Light Source so that they emitted intense light pulses having a laser-like character. Using this method, specialized synchrotron radiation sources would potentially be able to fill a gap in the arsenal of available light sources and offer a prototype for industrial applications.

As the world fights the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic, another group of dangerous pathogens looms in the background. The threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has been growing for years and appears to be getting worse. If COVID-19 taught us one thing, it's that governments should be prepared for more global public health crises, and that includes finding new ways to combat rogue bacteria that are becoming resistant to commonly used drugs.

A new report shows that British citizens who are missing abroad were more than twice as likely to be found by UK police as police in the country of disappearance.

Voters of color in California—especially Latinx and Native American people—face disproportionate risks during the coronavirus pandemic and are far more worried than white voters about job and income loss and access to medical care, according to a new poll by UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS).

Environmental progress in Brazil looks set to be one of the casualties of COVID-19, with harmful changes to the law being pushed through while attention is diverted by the global pandemic, a study warns.

The statistics tell the story. People of color are more likely to be infected, hospitalized and killed by COVID-19 than white, non-Hispanic people. This grim reality is just one more illustration of an unacceptable truth: Science does not benefit all Americans equally.

As the climate warms and glaciers retreat, the landscape around them is transforming. With the recession of ice, areas that were formerly frozen over can now sustain plant life. A new paper published by scientists from Syracuse, New York's Le Moyne College in Ecological Processes reveals the dynamics of emerging plant growth on the foreland of a retreating glacier in southern Iceland.

Gene expression in eukaryotes was long held to be monocistronic—that is, a single gene makes messenger RNA, which encodes a single protein. Recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers has found numerous examples of polycistronic expression—in which two or more genes are encoded on a single molecule of mRNA—in two species of green algae, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and Chromochloris zofingiensis.

One theory of aging invokes the Second Law of Thermodynamics and suggests that in the long-term, the heat energy generated by metabolic changes causes damage to living systems that accumulates as repair mechanisms cannot keep pace with the damage, entropy accumulates, and this is manifest in the signs of aging that are all too familiar—graying hair, wrinkled skin, immune compromise, organ failure, cognitive decline.

Heads or tails? If we toss two coins into the air, the result of one coin toss has nothing to do with the result of the other. Coins are independent objects. In the world of quantum physics, things are different: Quantum particles can be entangled, in which case they can no longer be regarded as independent individual objects, they can only be described as one joint system.

President Joseph Biden and the Democrat-controlled Congress have started boldly with immigration. On Feb. 18, Democrats introduced the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, which would rollback many of Donald Trump's policies and bring comprehensive immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 10.5 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Researchers and community advocates are recognizing a renewed opportunity to use public health research and advocacy lenses to... Читать дальше...

Recently a pair of researchers with the University of Copenhagen published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describing their work looking into the possibility of changes to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and the circumstances that could lead to such changes. In their paper, Johannes Lohmann and Peter Ditlevsen noted that climate models show that irreversible changes to sub-systems such as the AMOC, one of Earth's global sub-systems, can occur... Читать дальше...

A team of researchers from Ca'Foscari Univerity of Venice, the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation, the University of Brescia and the Sapienza University of Rome has found that different kinds of social media platforms foster different levels of segregation in online communities. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their study of millions of online posts on several leading social media sites and what they found.

A German-Polish research team has succeeded in creating a micrometer-sized space-time crystal consisting of magnons at room temperature. With the help of the scanning transmission X-ray microscope Maxymus at Bessy II at Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin, they were able to film the recurring periodic magnetization structure in a crystal. Published in the Physical Review Letters, the research project was a collaboration between scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany... Читать дальше...

A trio of researchers with ICAEV, Universidad Austral de Chile, and the University of Liverpool, respectively, have found suppressor genes linked to longevity and less cancer in two species of whales. In their paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Daniela Tejada-Martinez, João Pedro de Magalhães and Juan C. Opazo, describe their genetic study of longevity in cetaceans and what they learned.

A new theoretical study has proposed a novel mechanism for the creation of supermassive black holes from dark matter. The international team find that rather than the conventional formation scenarios involving 'normal' matter, supermassive black holes could instead form directly from dark matter in high density regions in the centers of galaxies. The result has key implications for cosmology in the early Universe, and is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.