Новости за 14.05.2021

Inspired by nature, researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), along with collaborators from Washington State University, created a novel material capable of capturing light energy. This material provides a highly efficient artificial light-harvesting system with potential applications in photovoltaics and bioimaging.

Three billion years ago, light first zipped through chlorophyll within tiny reaction centers, the first step plants and photosynthetic bacteria take to convert light into food.

Developing self-healing materials is nothing new for Nancy Sottos, lead of the Autonomous Materials Systems Group at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Would you drink carbonated beverages made with carbon dioxide captured from the smokestack of a factory or power plant?

When you think of micro- or nanotechnology, you likely think of small electronics like your phone, a tiny robot or a microchip. But COVID-19 tests—which have proven to be central to controlling the pandemic—are also a form of miniaturized technology. Many COVID-19 tests can give results within hours without the need to send a sample to a lab, and most of these tests use an approach called microfluidics.

Rodents and pigs share with certain aquatic organisms the ability to use their intestines for respiration, finds a study publishing May 14th in the journal Med. The researchers demonstrated that the delivery of oxygen gas or oxygenated liquid through the rectum provided vital rescue to two mammalian models of respiratory failure.

Kazakhstan said Friday that around 350 critically endangered Saiga antelopes had been killed, probably by lightning, after villagers found their bodies in steppe land in the west of the country.

Japanese researchers successfully tested reflectionless, highly refractive index metasurface that may eventually be used in practical applications to send, receive, and manipulate light and radio waves in the terahertz waveband (THz). THz is measured in millionths of a meter, known as micrometers. The metasurface, an artificial two-dimensional flat material, was made of micro-sized cut metal wires of silver paste ink placed on both the front and back of a polyimide film. The team, led by Takehito Suzuki... Читать дальше...

The ability to visualize transparent objects such as biological cells is of fundamental importance in biology and medical diagnostics. Conventional approaches to achieve this include phase-contrast microscopy and techniques that rely on chemical staining of biological cells. These techniques, however, rely on expensive and bulky optical components or require changing, and in some cases damaging, the cell by introducing chemical contrast agents. Significant recent advances in nanofabrication technology... Читать дальше...

A new paper co-written by a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researcher who studies labor issues affecting low-wage workers finds that almost 40% of working mothers in the state of Illinois lost jobs or were working fewer hours due to the ripple effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Researcher Davinia Moreno, a geochronologist at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), is the lead author of a study published recently in the journal Quaternary Geochronology, which combined four independent dating methods to pin down the ages of deposits associated to certain faults in the Iberian Chain, in the provinces of Zaragoza and Teruel (Aragón, Spain), and shows that they are less active than was believed.

A new snake species has been described from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The new species, now known as Joseph's racer, was first collected in the mid-19th Century, but the confusion around this snake goes back over two centuries as it has been mixed up with another similar species found across the rest of India.

The sex of sea turtle hatchlings is determined by the temperature when the eggs incubate. A higher temperature produces more females, with males produced by lower temperatures.

A team of researchers at Universidade de São Paulo has found that bird species that have a central position in frugivory networks tend to belong to more stable lineages over macroevolutionary time scales. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their analysis of hundreds of bird species and their dispersal networks and what they found. Carolina Bello and Elisa Barreto with the Federal Research Institute WSL have published a Perspectives piece in the same journal issue... Читать дальше...

A team of researchers from Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, the University of Washington and the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute has found that reaction kinetics are the factors that drive chiral nanocrystal formation in tellurium atoms. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes preparing Te crystals in different ways and then watched what happened to them under a microscope. Читать дальше...