Новости за 09.03.2021

Florida manatees are dying at an alarming rate in the first two months of 2021, more than tripling the normal amount of fatalities seen during the same period over the last five years.

As Russia and China sign a deal for a shared lunar space station, we look at the new race to the Moon with Nokia even working with NASA to give it a 4G network.

Broad political, economic, and social factors influence disciplinary punishment. In particular, over the last half century, such considerations have shaped jurisdictions' use of the death penalty, which has declined considerably since the 1990s. A new study examined the factors associated with use of the death penalty at the county level to provide a fuller picture of what issues influence court outcomes. The study concludes that partisan politics, religious fundamentalism, and economic threat influenced local decisions about the death penalty.

If you haven't been the parent or caregiver of an infant in recent years, you'd be forgiven for missing the human milk oligosaccharide trend in infant formulas. These complex carbohydrate supplements mimic human breast milk and act like prebiotics, boosting beneficial microbes in babies' guts.

In a new study in PNAS, an international team of researchers including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology has shown that Arabidopsis thaliana plants produce beta-cyclocitral when attacked by herbivores and that this volatile signal inhibits the methylerythritol 4-phosphate (MEP) pathway. The MEP pathway is instrumental in plant growth processes, such as the production of pigments for photosynthesis. In addition to down-regulating the MEP pathway, beta-cyclocitral also increases plant defenses against herbivores. Читать дальше...

Researchers at William & Mary's Virginia Institute of Marine Science are casting a wide net in search of fish photos. Their immediate goal is to use angler snapshots to train software to identify different fish species. Their ultimate goal is to put that artificial intelligence into a "RecFish" cell-phone app, giving anglers a multi-use field guide and scientists a collaborative tool for better management of recreational species.

Farmers in the Midwest may be able to bypass the warming climate not by getting more water for their crops, but instead by adapting to climate change through soil management says a new study from Michigan State University.

Researchers have come up with a better way to test which fabrics work best for masks that are meant to slow the spread of COVID-19. By testing those fabrics under conditions that mimic the humidity of a person's breath, the researchers have obtained measurements that more accurately reflect how the fabrics perform when worn by a living, breathing person.

What would a truly progressive city look like? A city that pays more than lip service to issues that directly affect low-income residents, seniors, marginalized communities and others whom neoliberal policies have seemingly left behind?

Since the early 2010s, ultrafast probing of materials at atomic-level resolution has been enabled by terahertz scanning tunneling microscopes (THz-STM). But these devices can't detect the dissipation of energy that happens during events such as when photons are emitted via recombination process of an electron-hole pair in a light emitting diode (LED). However, a new technique allows the tracking of just such energy dynamics alongside THz-STM, opening up new avenues of investigation for nanoscale science and technology.

While many celebrate apple blossoms as classic signs of spring, they are also welcoming entry gates for pathogens. Full of nutrients to lure pollinators and promote pollen germination, flowers also attract bacteria like Erwinia amylavora, a pathogen that causes a damaging disease called fire blight. However, recent work by scientists at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station suggests that these flowery infection sites might also be perfect targets for applying microbial fire blight biocontrol measures.

Astronomers have discovered evidence for an extraordinarily long jet of particles from a supermassive black hole in the early Universe, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

For ice, so-called 'surface melting' was postulated as early as the 19th century by Michael Faraday: Already below the actual melting point, i.e. 0 °C, a thin liquid film forms on the free surface because of the interface between ice and air. Scientists led by Markus Mezger, group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (department of Hans-Jürgen Butt) and professor at the University of Vienna, have now studied this phenomenon in more detail at interfaces between ice and clay minerals.

In the largest ever study of its kind into an equine pathogen, scientists in 18 countries used the latest DNA sequencing techniques to track the bacteria responsible for a disease called 'strangles' in horses around the world.

In a major event for UK science, the meteorite that fell from the fireball that lit up the sky over the UK and Northern Europe on Sunday 28 February, has been found.

Chili peppers (Capsicum spp.) are an important spice and vegetable that supports food culture around the world, whose intensity of its pungent taste is determined by the content of capsicumoids. However, the content of capsicumoids varies depending on the variety and is known to fluctuate greatly depending on the cultivation environment. This can be a big problem in the production, processing and distribution of peppers where sweet varieties can be spicy and highly spicy varieties are just only mildly spicy. Читать дальше...

Superfluidity in liquids and gases can manifest as a reduced moment of inertia (the rotational analog of mass) under slow rotations. Non-classical rotational effects can also be considered in the elusive supersolid phases of matter where superfluidity can coexist with a lattice structure. In a new report now published in Science, L. Tanzi and a research team at the National Institute of Optics and the Department of Astronomy at the University of Florence in Italy, showed how a recently discovered... Читать дальше...

An international team of researchers has found evidence of a regional magnetic field anomaly in Southeast Asia, approximately 800 years ago. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their study of slag and other remnants left over from iron smelters who once worked in a part of Cambodia formerly known as Tonle Bak and what they found.

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in France and one in Japan has found that an achondrite found in Algeria (in the Saharan desert) last year dates back to just 2 million years after the birth of the solar system. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their study of the rock and what they learned about it.

Recent advancements in the development of experimental Bell tests have enabled the implementation of a new type of device-independent random number generator. Remarkably, this new type of random number generators can be realized with malicious quantum devices, without requiring detailed models of the quantum devices used.

Using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has detected a new super-Earth exoplanet. The newfound alien world, designated TOI-1685b, is about 70% larger than Earth and has an ultra-short orbital period of approximately 0.67 days. The finding is reported in a paper published March 1 on arXiv.org.

Masakazu Daibo has reopened his family's eel restaurant in part of Japan declared a no-go zone after the 2011 nuclear disaster, but so far he has barely a single neighbour.

Around the world each year, extreme precipitation events cause catastrophic flooding that results in tragic loss of life and costly damage to infrastructure and property. However, a variety of different weather systems can cause these extreme events, so a detailed understanding of the atmospheric processes that lead to their formation is crucial.

Neanderthal fossils from a cave in Belgium believed to belong to the last survivors of their species ever discovered in Europe are thousands of years older than once thought, a new study said Monday.

When it comes to microelectronics, there is one chemical element like no other: silicon, the workhorse of the transistor technology that drives our information society. The countless electronic devices we use in everyday life are a testament to how today very high volumes of silicon-based components can be produced at very low cost. It seems natural, then, to use silicon also in other areas where the properties of semiconductors—as silicon is one—are exploited technologically, and to explore ways to integrate different functionalities. Читать дальше...