Новости за 10.06.2021

A combined team of researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and the California Institute of Technology in the U.S. has calculated the weight of all the SARS-CoV-2 viruses infecting people around the world at any given time. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes how they made their calculations and explain how their work can help to better understand what happens in the human body during viral infections.

Astronomers from the Andrés Bello National University, Chile, and elsewhere, have discovered a new nearby globular cluster (GC) with extreme kinematics. The newly found cluster, designated VVV-CL160, has an unusually large proper motion when compared to other galactic GCs. The finding is reported in a paper published on arXiv.org.

Scientists from the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford University have developed a method that allows them to see, with far greater accuracy, how DNA forms large scale structures within a cell nucleus.

Many people have developed stronger relationships with urban nature during the pandemic. Some have enjoyed views of nearby trees and gardens during periods of isolation, taken walks after Zoom-filled days or socialized at a distance with friends in local parks. As housing has become increasingly unaffordable, some people have taken refuge in parks as places to live.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus pop up, and some lead to increasing infections. The main new variants—named Alpha, Beta, and Gamma and first identified in Britain, South Africa, and India, respectively—have properties that make them more successful in transmitting and replicating than the original virus.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide measured at NOAA's Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory peaked for 2021 in May at a monthly average of 419 parts per million (ppm), the highest level since accurate measurements began 63 years ago, scientists from NOAA and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego announced today.

Watershed-wide nutrient credit trading has been suggested as a mechanism for reducing pollution entering the Chesapeake Bay, but a new study by Penn State researchers suggests that the high cost of producing nitrogen credits through the establishment of riparian buffers on Pennsylvania farmland currently does not provide an incentive for buffer establishment.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people turned to social media platforms to share their feelings about the changes happening in the world around them. Essential workers—such as medical providers, retail and food service employees, and public transportation workers—tweeted less often than general users about COVID-19 but more about overall mental health issues, according to researchers at the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology.

An inter-university research group has succeeded in constructing the gene expression network behind the vascular development process in plants. They achieved this by performing bioinformatics analysis using the 'VISUAL' tissue culture platform, which generates vascular stem cells from leaf cells. In this network, they also discovered a new BES/BZR transcription factor, BEH3, which regulates vascular stem cells. In addition, they illuminated a novel vascular cell maintenance system whereby BEH3 competes... Читать дальше...

Sunlight traveling through the atmosphere becomes polarized in different ways as it is scattered by water vapor, ice, aerosols created by living organisms, dust, and other particulates.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published "DNA Mixture Interpretation: A Scientific Foundation Review." This draft report, which will be open for public comment for 60 days before being published in final form, reviews the methods that forensic laboratories use to interpret evidence containing a mixture of DNA from two or more people.

Scientists from the University of Strathclyde and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay have demonstrated a low-cost sensor that can detect fragments of the virus responsible for COVID-19 within wastewater.

There are some cancer tumors that not even surgery, chemotherapy or traditional radiation therapy can cure. These resistant tumors contribute to making the disease one of the main causes of mortality worldwide, but the scientific community is teeming with ideas to make cancer fatalities a thing of the past. Among the latest medical and technological innovations, progress in particle therapy—the process of irradiating tumors using highly energetic particle beams generated by a particle accelerator—allows... Читать дальше...

Brown dwarfs are the cosmic equivalent of tweeners. They're too massive to be planets and too small to sustain nuclear fusion in their cores, which powers stars. Many brown dwarfs are nomadic. They do not orbit stars but drift among them as loners.

An international research team led by Monash University has demonstrated that cooling temperatures and glacial cycles over the past 15 million years were essential for an explosion in terrestrial animal diversity throughout the Antarctic region.

It's estimated that half the world's population is bilingual, and two-thirds of the world's children grow up in an environment where several languages intersect. But while bilingualism is common, its definitions are varied. They are often based on people's experiences or feelings about language—what they convey and what they represent.

Professor Ángel Serrano, principal investigator at the Biomaterials and Bioengineering Laboratory of the Catholic University of Valencia (UCV), recently published an article in journal ACS Nano, from the American Chemical Society, which shows that carbon-based nanomaterials (CBNs) with low or zero toxicity for humans, are "promising treatments" against the pneumonia caused by COVID-19, as well as other viruses, bacteria and fungi, including those that are multi-resistant to medicines.

A recently released policy guide book for teachers and schools has been receiving some criticism. For instance, an article in the Daily Telegraph claimed: "Teachers are being told not to use phrases like 'girls and boys,' 'normal' and 'other' in class—but they should make students aware of 'superdiversity' and 'declare a climate change emergency' as a way of 'telling the truth' about our 'climate breakdown.'"

While every lightning flash is unique in the way the discharge travels through the atmosphere, whether cloud-to-cloud, cloud-to-ground or the more esoteric sprites, halos, jets, and elves of the upper atmosphere. There are common features in these different types of lightning and for cloud-to-ground flashes, it has been assumed that there are two main types of flash known to meteorologists and atmospheric scientists—negative ground flashes and positive ground flashes.

One in four Australians feel lonely on three or more days a week. Our longitudinal study, just published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, finds adults in neighborhoods where at least 30% of nearby land was parks, reserves and woodlands had 26% lower odds of becoming lonely compared to their peers in areas with less than 10% green space. For people living on their own, the associations were even greater—in areas with 30% or more green space the odds of becoming lonely halved.

Curtin University researchers have helped uncover the four billion year old story of a lunar sample brought from the moon to Earth, by the manned Apollo 17 mission more than 50 years ago.

Researchers from Penn's Department of Physics and Astronomy have developed a new method for better understanding the relationship between a star's chemical composition and planet formation. The study was led by recent graduate Jacob Nibauer for his senior thesis with Bhuvnesh Jain and was co-supervised by former Penn postdoc Eric Baxter. The researchers found that the majority of stars in their dataset are similar in composition to the sun, somewhat at odds with earlier work and implying that many... Читать дальше...

Secondary exposure to hate crime can influence negative perceptions of ethnic minorities and harm social relations in neighborhoods, new research from Monash University has found.

That familiar buzz and bite are signs that mosquito season in Texas is here, according to a Texas A&M AgriLife entomologist.

Biodegradable microspheres can be used to deliver heart cells generated from stem cells to repair damaged hearts after a heart attack, according to new findings by UCL researchers. This type of cell therapy could one day cure debilitating heart failure, which affects an estimated 920,000 people in the UK and continues to rise as more people are surviving a heart attack than ever before.