Новости за 14.04.2021

One consequence of the coronavirus pandemic has been global restrictions on mobility. This, in turn, has had an effect on pollution levels in the atmosphere. Researchers from across the world are using this unique opportunity to take measurements, collect data, and publish studies. An international team led by Forschungszentrum Jülich's Institute of Climate and Energy Research—Troposphere has now published a comprehensive review providing an overview of results up to September 2020. The study also has its own dedicated website... Читать дальше...

What are scientists passionate about? What do they actually do, and why does it matter? Answering questions like these is often part of public outreach efforts that, through demystifying the world of science for non-scientists, can increase appreciation for science and boost support for important research initiatives. Outreach can also make the sciences attractive and accessible to a broader diversity of people, who, in turn, can bring new ideas and perspectives.

International scientists from around the world are warning that chemical pollutants in the environment have the potential to alter animal and human behavior.

The Early Cretaceous Jehol Biota, renowned for its exceptionally well preserved volcanic-influenced ecosystem, was buried in lacustrine and occasionally fluvial sediments in northern Hebei and western Liaoning, China. It includes large amount of evolutionarily significant taxonomy, e.g. feathered dinosaurs, early birds, mammals and flowering plants, representing one of the most diversified terrestrial biotas of the Mesozoic and providing exceptional windows into some major fundamental issues in earth and biological sciences... Читать дальше...

Common ragweed is an annual plant native to parts of the United States and southern Canada. It's an invasive species that has spread to Europe. An important agricultural weed, this plant is particularly well-adapted to living at roadsides, and there are several theories why.

Ethiopia may produce less specialty coffee and more rather bland tasting varieties in the future. This is the result of a new study by an international team of researchers that looked at the peculiar effects climate change has on Africa's largest coffee producing nation. Their results are relevant both for the country's millions of smallholder farmers, who earn more on specialty coffee than on ordinary coffee, as well as for baristas and coffee aficionados around the world.

Costing anywhere from 15 to 70 dollars per mushroom depending on the quality, matsutake mushrooms are some of the most valuable edible fungi in the world. Revered for their delicate scent, matsutake mushrooms are cooked in rice or soups as an Autumn celebration delicacy in Japan. However, there is no way to cultivate matsutake mushrooms, and naturally occurring habitats are decreasing with fewer forests conducive to their growth with the changing climate.

Tomographic reconstruction of an object's interior volume from limited angular views is a challenging problem with practical applications in biological imaging, failure analysis of integrated circuits, etc. A team at MIT presents a dynamical machine learning approach for this important problem and shows the method's performance in two problems—tomography under weak and strong scattering conditions. The wide applicability of this technique holds its promise for a number of other challenging inverse problems.

Interlayer excitons in transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures exhibit fascinating physics and hold great promise for developing excitonic devices. Scientists in China present a systematical and comprehensive overview of the interlayer exciton formation, relaxation, transport, and potential applications of TMDs vdW heterostructures, in order to provide valuable guidance for new researchers in this field as well as to present the most important issues present in the field for future deep studies.

A new method of breaking and fixing proteins could speed the development of sophisticated computer-like circuits in cells that will pave the way to new biotechnology and medical advances.

Birds have been shaped by evolution in many ways that have made them distinct from their vertebrate cousins. Over millions of years of evolution, our feathered friends have taken to the skies, accompanied by unique changes to their skeleton, musculature, respiration, and even reproductive systems. Recent genomic analyses have identified another unique aspect of the avian lineage: streamlined genomes. Although bird genomes contain roughly the same number of protein-coding genes as other vertebrates... Читать дальше...

Reconfigurable materials can do amazing things. Flat sheets transform into a face. An extruded cube transforms into dozens of different shapes. But there's one thing a reconfigurable material has yet to be able to change: its underlying topology. A reconfigurable material with 100 cells will always have 100 cells, even if those cells are stretched or squashed.

Describing the genetic diversity of human populations is essential to improving our understanding of human diseases and their geographical distribution. However, the vast majority of genetic studies have been focused on populations of European ancestry, which represent only 16% of the global population. Scientists at the Institut Pasteur, Collège de France, and CNRS have looked at understudied human populations from the South Pacific, which are severely affected by a variety of diseases, including... Читать дальше...

Little is known about azhdarchid pterosaurs, gigantic flying reptiles with impressive wingspans of up to 12 meters. Cousins of dinosaurs and the largest animals ever to fly, they first appeared in the fossil record in the Late Triassic about 225 million years ago and disappeared again at the end of the Cretaceous period about 66 million years ago. One of their most notable features for such a large flighted animal was a neck longer than that of a giraffe. Now, researchers report an unexpected discovery in the journal iScience on April 14... Читать дальше...

In the cell nucleus, histones play a crucial role packaging DNA into chromatin. Histones are however very sticky to both DNA and RNA, so to ensure they are transported to the cell nucleus after synthesis and bind to the right portion of DNA to organize the chromatin, they are guarded by complexes of histone chaperones.

In physics, things exist in phases, such as solid, liquid and gas states. When something crosses from one phase to another, we talk about a phase transition—like water boiling into steam, turning from liquid to gas.

Using abundant cobalt and a unique experimental approach to probe ways to speed a sluggish catalytic reaction to harvest hydrogen from water, researchers from Boston College and Yale University discovered a mechanistic switch in the oxygen evolution reaction, a significant step towards optimizing electrocatalysts for water splitting to produce clean energy.

Lunar exploration firm iSpace said Wednesday it will transport a United Arab Emirates unmanned rover to the Moon next year, as the Gulf state seeks to expand its space sector.

A recent study has unveiled the reason behind the exceptional catalytic performance of non-noble metal-base mixed catalysts. This is thanks to a new synthetic strategy for the production of cube-shaped catalysts that could further simplify the structure of complex catalysts.

In a new study, Dr. Lu Xiankai and his colleagues from the South China Botanical Garden (SCBG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) found that tropical forests can capture carbon dioxide (CO2) into soils and thus reduce emitted CO2. But how exactly do tropical forest soils capture atmospheric CO2?

An outbreak of vomiting among dogs has been traced back to a type of animal coronavirus by researchers.

The ocean is at the heart of our planet. It provides many resources for those who live along its coasts and to the world as whole. To ensure a prosperous ocean now and in the future, marine research must offer clear recommendations based on representative information and demonstrate practical pathways, according to new research from Oxford University, the charity Nekton and the Seychelles Environment Ministry and published in Biology Letters.

Blackcaps typically visit Britain and Ireland during the spring and summer months to breed before migrating south to wintering areas in the Mediterranean. But, a study from Oxford University, the British Trust for Ornithology and the Max Planck Institute, has found the small warblers have expanded their wintering range northward across Europe and are now frequently found in Britain and Ireland in the winter months.

For more than 100 years after California's Gold Rush, developers and city leaders filled in San Francisco Bay, shrinking it by one-third to build farms, freeways, airports and subdivisions.

United Airlines is giving customers who want to reduce the environmental impact of their travel a way to buy sustainable jet fuel that releases fewer emissions than traditional jet fuel.