Новости за 11.03.2021

A team led by Christoph Utschick and Prof. Rudolf Gross, physicists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has developed a coil with superconducting wires capable of transmitting power in the range of more than five kilowatts contactless and with only small losses. The wide field of conceivable applications include autonomous industrial robots, medical equipment, vehicles and even aircraft.

Catastrophic collapse of materials and structures is the inevitable consequence of a chain reaction of locally confined damage—from solid ceramics that snap after the development of a small crack to metal space trusses that give way after the warping of a single strut.

Charitable donations account for about 2% of gross domestic product in the U.S., but it's not well-understood whether an event such as a deadly storm inspires increases in charitable giving or simply reallocates a fixed supply of donation dollars that would have otherwise gone to another cause.

Fossil sites sometimes resemble a living room table on which half a dozen different jigsaw puzzles have been dumped: It is often difficult to say which bone belongs to which animal. Together with colleagues from Switzerland, researchers from the University of Bonn have now presented a method that allows a more certain answer to this question. Their results are published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica.

What do you do after solving the answer to life, the universe, and everything? If you're mathematicians Drew Sutherland and Andy Booker, you go for the harder problem.

Geologists have long thought tectonic plates move because they are pulled by the weight of their sinking portions and that an underlying, hot, softer layer called asthenosphere serves as a passive lubricant. But a team of geologists at the University of Houston has found that layer is actually flowing vigorously, moving fast enough to drive plate motions.

Plasmodium is the parasite causing malaria, one of the deadliest parasitic diseases. The parasite requires two hosts —the Anopheles mosquito and the human— to complete its life cycle and goes through different forms at each stage of its life cycle. Transitioning from one form to the next involves a massive reorganization of the cytoskeleton. Two teams from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have shed new light on the cytoskeleton organization in Plasmodium. Their research, published in PLOS Biology... Читать дальше...

An international team of researchers is proposing the creation of a system for biotic pollination flow between countries that represent the mutual dependence between them. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes their ideas for highlighting pollination flow as a way to better manage pollinator preservation.

A team of researchers at a Microsoft laboratory in the Netherlands, who published a 2018 paper in the journal Nature, has now retracted that paper, citing a lack of evidence to support their previous conclusions. The study involved trying to prove the existence of the fermion—a theorized particle that could possibly be both matter and antimatter. The retraction came after Sergey Frolov, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, found that another quantum phenomenon could mimic the results found by the original research team.

Over the past decades, physicists worldwide have been trying to gain a better understanding of non-equilibrium dynamics in quantum many-body systems. Some studies investigated what are known as quasiparticles, disturbances or entities in physical systems that exhibit behavior similar to that of particles.

An interdisciplinary research team at Lehigh University has unraveled how functional biomaterials rely upon an interfacial protein layer to transmit signals to living cells concerning their adhesion, proliferation and overall development.

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only had devastating effects on humans, it has also heavily impacted efforts to safeguard natural ecosystems and habitats around the globe, conservationists warned Thursday.

A rumbling volcano on Indonesia's Sumatra island unleashed an avalanche of searing gas clouds flowing down its slopes during eruption on Thursday. No casualties were reported.

As the coronavirus pandemic's grip on the United States stretched from weeks into months, with huge swaths of the American workforce bound to their homes, studies began trickling out revealing that the impact and burden of quarantine was not equally shared. Women—particularly mothers, and especially mothers of color—were bearing the brunt of the pandemic's toll, losing their jobs in greater numbers than men, handling the lion's share of increased housework that quarantine created, and juggling their... Читать дальше...

Stormier weather will increasingly force fishers to choose between their safety and income, researchers say.

Firefly beetles rank among the world's most charismatic creatures, with luminous courtship displays that have now turned them into a popular attraction for wildlife tourists. In the first comprehensive review of firefly tourism, published in the journal Conservation Science and Practice, an international team of biologists led by a Tufts University researcher, reveal that an estimated 1 million people now travel each year to witness bioluminescent performances starring some two dozen firefly species around the world.

Women of the ruling class may have played an important role in the governance of El Argar, a society which flourished in the southeast of the Iberian Peninsula between 2200 and 1550 BCE, and which in the last two centuries of its existence, developed into the first state organization of the western Mediterranean.

Zipping through space at close to the speed of light, Solar Energetic Particles, or SEPs, are one of the main challenges for the future of human spaceflight. Clouds of these tiny solar projectiles can make it to Earth—a 93 million mile journey—in under an hour. They can fry sensitive spacecraft electronics and pose serious risks to human astronauts. But their onset is extraordinarily hard to predict, in part because we still don't know exactly where on the Sun they come from.

As Richard Feynman famously put it, "the double slit experiment is absolutely impossible to explain in any classical way and has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery."

Gene editing with CRISPR enzymes inside living cells could become more effective and accurate after researchers at The University of Texas at Austin unveiled how inner workings can help or hinder the process.