Новости за 07.04.2021

Barcelona prosecutors are suing energy giant Endesa for the deaths of hundreds of birds electrocuted by its high-wire power lines, court documents show.

In an article published in the April 8 issue of Nature, the National Institutes of Health's Somatic Cell Gene Editing Consortium provided a detailed update on the progress of their nationwide effort to develop safer and more effective methods to edit the genomes of disease-relevant somatic cells and reduce the burden of disease caused by genetic changes.

Teaching people to become entrepreneurs requires more than just passing on entrepreneurial skills, according to a team of Penn State Berks-led researchers. Would-be entrepreneurs also need to understand—and negotiate—the barriers that they might face.

How many species of birds are there in the world? It depends on whose count you go by. The number could be as low as 10,000 or as high as 18,000. It's tough to standardize lists of species because the concept of a "species" itself is a little bit fuzzy.

Ants react to social isolation in a similar way as do humans and other social mammals. A study by an Israeli-German research team has revealed alterations to the social and hygienic behavior of ants that had been isolated from their group. The research team was particularly surprised by the fact that immune and stress genes were downregulated in the brains of the isolated ants. "This makes the immune system less efficient, a phenomenon that is also apparent in socially isolating humans—notably at... Читать дальше...

Long before NASA's Perseverance rover touched down on the Red Planet on Feb. 18, one of its highest-level mission goals was already established: to seek out signs of ancient life on the Martian surface. In fact, the techniques used by one of the science instruments aboard the rover could have applications on Saturn's moons Enceladus and Titan as well Jupiter's moon Europa.

The hormone auxin is of central importance for the development of plants. Scientists at the University of Bayreuth and the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen have now developed a novel sensor that makes the spatial distribution of auxin in the cells of living plants visible in real time. The sensor opens up completely new insights into the inner workings of plants for researchers. Moreover, the influences of changing environmental conditions on growth can now also be quickly detected. Читать дальше...

You might not think an animal made out of stone would have much to worry about in the way of predators, and that's largely what scientists had thought about coral. Although corallivores like parrotfish and pufferfish are well known to biologists, their impact on coral growth and survival was believed to be small compared to factors like heatwaves, ocean acidification and competition from algae.

Engineers working on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have successfully folded and packed its sunshield for its upcoming million-mile (roughly 1.5 million kilometer) journey, which begins later this year.

Scientists are testing our fundamental understanding of the universe, and there's much more to discover.

In a new paper published in the Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, the University of Maryland teamed up with local researchers to examine green infrastructure adoption and leadership in Tucson, Arizona, an interesting case study where grassroots efforts have helped to drive policy change in a growing urban area surrounded by water-constrained desert. Green infrastructure (any installation that manages water or environmental factors, such as rain gardens, stormwater basins, or urban tree... Читать дальше...

India's prime minister on Wednesday told U.S. Special Presidential Envoy on Climate John Kerry that New Delhi is committed to meeting its pledges under the 2015 Paris climate change agreement and that it is on track to meet them.

A natural brilliant blue coloring has been discovered by an international team of researchers including chemists at the University of California, Davis. The new cyan blue, obtained from red cabbage, could be an alternative to synthetic blue food colorings such as the widely used FD&C Blue No. 1. The work is published April 7 in Science Advances.

A team of researchers led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory microscopist Miaofang Chi and Vanderbilt theoretical physicist Sokrates Pantelides has used a new Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope technique to image the electron distribution in ionic compounds known as electrides— especially the electrons that float loosely within pockets and appear separate from the atomic network.

Around the world, a huge amount of research and development work is currently being done on carbon-containing, or organic, molecules that emit colored light after appropriate excitation. This research field is driven by the display industry and the development of biomedical imaging techniques. While precise color tuning in organic fluorescent dyes has so far usually been achieved by mixing different molecules, ETH researchers have now developed an approach that can generate a broad palette of colors... Читать дальше...

Using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists have identified the three fastest-spinning brown dwarfs ever found. More massive than most planets but not quite heavy enough to ignite like stars, brown dwarfs are cosmic in-betweeners. And though they aren't as well known as stars and planets to most people, they are thought to number in the billions in our galaxy.

Most materials go from being solids to liquids when they are heated. One rare counter-example is helium-3, which can solidify upon heating. This counterintuitive and exotic effect, known as the Pomeranchuk effect, may now have found its electronic analog in a material known as magic-angle graphene, says a team of researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science led by Prof. Shahal Ilani, in collaboration with Prof. Pablo Jarillo-Herrero's group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

With the help of machine-learning techniques, a team of astronomers has discovered a dozen quasars that have been warped by a naturally occurring cosmic "lens" and split into four similar images. Quasars are extremely luminous cores of distant galaxies that are powered by supermassive black holes.

The landscape of sloping vineyards on the banks of the Mosel River in Germany is a characteristic symbol of a region which cannot be understood without its wine: the Mosel wine region. Tourists from all over the world, especially from the neighboring countries of Belgium, Luxembourg, and The Netherlands visit the area in search of mountains and wine. However, the lack of new generations and the increase in temperatures and short heavy summer rainfall events caused by climate change endanger the production of wine.

In the paired fermion systems, the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluidity and Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) are two extreme limits of the ground state. In a new report in Science, Yuji Nakagawa and a team of scientists in applied physics, quantum electronics, emergent matter science and materials research in Japan, reported crossover behavior from the BCS limit to the BEC limit by varying the carrier density in a 2D superconductor electron-doped, layered material ZrNCl containing intercalated layered nitride. Читать дальше...

A trio of researchers from the University of Pisa has found that lions, like many other animals, engage in contagious yawning. In their paper published in the journal Animal Behavior, Grazia Casetta, Andrea Paolo Nolfo and Elisabetta Palagi describe their study of lions living in the wild in Africa and what they learned about their yawning practices.

An international team of researchers with assistance from citizen scientists has confirmed that the large, mysterious blobs occasionally seen in the Norwegian Sea are squid egg sacs. In their paper published in Scientific Reports, the group describes their effort to learn more about the gelatinous spheres and what they have learned so far.