Новости за 21.04.2021

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will announce stepped up efforts to reduce Canada's carbon footprint when he meets other world leaders at a virtual climate summit hosted by US President Joe Biden this week, a media report said Wednesday.

It's a common sight: pelicans gliding along the waves, right by the shore. These birds make this kind of surfing look effortless, but actually the physics involved that give them a big boost are not simple.

Female baboons may not have bills to pay or deadlines to meet, but their lives are extremely challenging. They face food and water scarcity and must be constantly attuned to predators, illnesses and parasites, all while raising infants and maintaining their social status.

Researchers at the University of Barcelona, together with researchers from the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and Brown University (United States), have analyzed more than 10,000 evaluations that were carried out to candidates who wish to hold a public teaching position in Catalonia. The objective was to study how the decision by the committee of evaluators is affected by the fact that each candidate holds a certain position in the lists of people to be assessed. The study, published in the journal Science Advances... Читать дальше...

A new analysis of air pollution data from five large Chinese cities has found statistically significant differences between data from monitoring stations run by local governments and data from stations run by U.S. embassies and consulates. Jesse Turiel of the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government and Robert Kaufmann of Boston University present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on April 21, 2021.

Water is abundant in the solar system. Even beyond Earth, scientists have detected ice on the moon, in Saturn's rings and in comets, liquid water on Mars and under the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus, and traces of water vapor in the scorching atmosphere of Venus. Studies have shown that water played an important role in the early evolution and formation of the solar system. To learn more about this role, planetary scientists have searched for evidence of liquid water in extraterrestrial materials such as meteorites... Читать дальше...

Aristotle called humans "the social animal," and people have recognized for centuries that young people need to be in communities to develop into healthy adults. The ongoing pandemic has caused concern about the effects of isolation on children and teenagers' social and psychological growth.

Scientists have discovered one of the smallest black holes on record—and the closest one to Earth found to date.

Financial leaders sounding positive when they answer journalists' questions can boost share prices and soothe investors' fears about market risk, a new study reveals.

For more sustainability on a global level, EU legislation should be changed to allow the use of gene editing in organic farming. This is what an international research team involving the Universities of Bayreuth and Göttingen demands in a paper published in the journal Trends in Plant Science.

A team of researchers from Sweden, the U.K and the U.S., has found that fish stocking in Sweden has led to a reduction in diversity in Baltic salmon. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group describes their genetic study of Atlantic salmon that live in the Baltic Sea and spawn in Swedish rivers.

Using the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fibre Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST), astronomers have discovered an unusual binary system. The newly found binary, designated LAMOST J0140355+392651 (or J0140 for short), consists of a bloated, low-mass proto-white dwarf and a massive white dwarf companion. The finding is reported in a paper published April 14 on arXiv.org.

Researchers from the Netherlands have created a new approach to envision how dinosaurs walked. By modeling a T. rex tail as a suspension bridge, the scientists formed a new idea of the animal's walking speed. Trix, the tyrannosaur from Naturalis museum in the Netherlands, probably strolled slower—but with more spring in its step—than assumed. This is a first step towards more realistic dinosaur motion.

Engineered, autonomous machines combined with artificial intelligence have long been a staple of science fiction, and often in the role of villain like the Cylons in the "Battlestar Galactica" reboot, creatures composed of biological and engineered materials. But what if these autonomous soft machines were ... helpful?

Researchers have developed new X-ray optics that can be used to harness extremely fast pulses in a package that is significantly smaller and lighter than conventional devices used to modulate X-rays. The new optics are based on microscopic chip-based devices known as microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).