Новости за 15.03.2021

Denver's airport was closed for a second day Monday after a powerful late winter snowstorm dumped over 3 feet of heavy, wet snow on parts of Colorado and Wyoming, shutting down roads, closing state legislatures in both states and interfering with COVID-19 vaccinations.

When Steamboat Geyser, the world's tallest, started erupting again in 2018 in Yellowstone National Park after decades of relative silence, it raised a few tantalizing scientific questions. Why is it so tall? Why is it erupting again now? And what can we learn about it before it goes quiet again?

After 20 years of continuous habitation, the International Space Station has entered its "Golden Age" and is abuzz with activity—thanks in large part to the return of US rocket launches via commercial partner SpaceX.

Ingo Burgert and his team at Empa and ETH Zurich have proven it time and again: Wood is so much more than "just" a building material. Their research aims at extending the existing characteristics of wood in such a way that it is suitable for completely new ranges of application. For instance, they have already developed high-strength, water-repellent and magnetizable wood. Now, together with the Empa research group of Francis Schwarze and Javier Ribera, the team has developed a simple, environmentally... Читать дальше...

South Florida is in for a "phenomenal" wading bird year after a record-breaking rainy season increased the amount of fish in historical nesting grounds while a dry winter has created the perfect conditions for nesting.

The U.S. criminal legal system has expanded at a rapid pace, even as crime rates have declined since the 1990s. As a result, individuals' interactions with and surveillance by law enforcement are now commonplace. But citizens experience different interactions, with people of color who live in impoverished urban communities having the most frequent encounters. A new study interviewed young Philadelphia men to determine their perceptions of and reactions to this phenomenon. Nearly all of the men of... Читать дальше...

Between 2015 and 2017, Seattle, Washington, became the first U.S. city to increase its hourly minimum wage to $15, more than double the federal minimum wage and 60 percent higher than Seattle's previous minimum wage. A new study examined the impact of this change on public safety. The study was motivated by the idea that since crime is sometimes the result of material deprivation, changes in the minimum wage might have implications for criminal activity: Boosting the minimum wage could raise workers'... Читать дальше...

Last December, the Parliament of Catalonia unanimously approved the incorporation into its legislation of second-order violence against those who give their support to victims of violence against women. A recent study compiles testimonies of victims, and analyzes this form of intimidation

Some of the best-known human pathogens—from the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis to the diarrhea pathogen Salmonella—use a tiny hypodermic needle to inject disease-causing proteins into their host's cells, thereby manipulating them. This needle is part of the so-called type III secretion system (T3SS), without which most of these pathogens cannot replicate in the body.

A study by a research team from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) and China's first digital-only bank WeBank has found that security, service quality and system quality are the most important factors for customers who use mobile banking.

The volume of wireless telecommunication traffic is expected to surge in the near future with a continual increase in data traffic and corresponding necessary increases in bandwidth. It has therefore become imperative to increase the photon frequency into the upper reaches of the millimeter (mmWave) region, which corresponds to frequencies between 30 GHz to 300 GHz.

Researchers from ITMO University and St. Petersburg Academic University developed a new technology for marking authentic goods. Manufacturers will be able to label electronics, drugs, jewelry, and other products with invisible images that can only be seen with special equipment. These labels will help protect the goods from forgery. The research is published in Advanced Materials.

As much of the world hunkered down at home over the past year, women shouldered most of the cleaning, laundry and child care—and they are not happy about it.

At first glance this captivating scene peering through wispy clouds and down onto a dune field is reminiscent of a satellite view of one of Earth's deserts, but this is in fact a beautiful landscape on Mars.

On a hot summer day in Connecticut, it's common to go to a beach-side restaurant, eat some fresh oysters and mussels, and enjoy the crashing of the waves against the sand. For a group of University of Connecticut faculty and a Florida Atlantic University professor, their plan is to skip the beach and the restaurant and use relatives of those delicious animals for another reason—filtering the harmful microplastics that end up back in our environment.

Redox reactions play an important role in our everyday life. In these reactions, one compound releases electrons and is oxidized, while another accepts electrons and is reduced. Such redox reactions are exploited by living organisms, for example, to store energy.

When biological material (cells, blood, tissues) is frozen, cryoprotectants are used to prevent the damage associated with the formation of ice during the freezing process. New polymeric cryoprotectants are emerging, alongside the established cryoprotectants, but how exactly they manage to control ice formation and growth is still largely unknown. This is especially true for PVA, a deceptively simple synthetic polymer that interacts with ice by means of mechanisms that have now been revealed at the... Читать дальше...

NPL, in collaboration with international partners, has developed an ISO/IEC standard, ISO/TS 21356-1:2021, for measuring the structural properties of graphene, typically sold as powders or in a liquid dispersion. The ISO/IEC standard allows the supply chain to answer the question 'what is my material?" and is based on methods developed with The University of Manchester in the NPL Good Practice Guide 145.

New measurements have solved a mystery in solid state physics: How is it that certain metals do not seem to adhere to the valid rules?

Researchers from Skoltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have analyzed several dozen options to pick the best one in terms of performance and costs for the 'last mile' of a future mission to the Moon—actually delivering astronauts to the lunar surface and back up to the safety of the orbiting lunar station. The paper was published in the journal Acta Astronautica.

A new concept of on-demand drug delivery system has emerged in which drugs are automatically released from in vivo medical devices simply by shining light on the skin.

Conservation scientist Trond Larsen and his team trekked through a remote forest in Liberia, recording the plants, animals, and insects that they saw. They noted whether the forest was intact or degraded. Far above their heads, NASA's Earth-observing satellites collected data about the terrain as the satellites continued their well-traveled orbits over Africa.

A new Department of Energy open-access quantum computing testbed is ready for the public. Scientists from Indiana University recently became the first team to begin using Sandia National Laboratories' Quantum Scientific Computing Open User Testbed, or QSCOUT.

An international team of researchers has found that imperial cone snails produce two compounds that mimic chemicals found in pheromones produced by Platynereis dumerilii—a type of worm preyed upon by imperial cone snails. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes their study of snail venom and what they learned about it.

Researchers at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Italy and the PICO group at Aalto University in Finland have introduced the idea of an information demon that follows a customary gambling strategy to stop non-equilibrium processes at stochastic times. The new demons they realized, which differ from the renowned Maxwell's demon, were presented in a paper published in Physical Review Letters.