Новости за 25.06.2021

Damage to Sri Lanka's marine environment from a sinking chemical ship is worse than feared, officials said Friday, as more dead turtles, dolphins and whales washed up on the island's beaches.

Virgin Galactic finally has the federal government's approval to start launching customers into space from New Mexico.

Astronauts finished unfurling a new pair of solar panels outside the International Space Station on Friday, making their third spacewalk in just over a week.

It took 13 years and one billion dollars to sequence the human genome, an enormous scientific undertaking that launched a new era of medicine. With today's advances in sequencing technology, that same task would have only taken about a day at a fraction of the cost. Tomorrow's tech could whittle that down to mere seconds.

New SARS-CoV-2 variants are spreading rapidly, and there are fears that current COVID-19 vaccines won't protect against them. The latest in a series of structural studies of the SARS-CoV-2 variants' "spike" protein, led by Bing Chen, Ph.D., at Boston Children's Hospital, reveals new properties of the Alpha (formerly U.K.) and Beta (formerly South Africa) variants. Of note, it suggests that current vaccines may be less effective against the Beta variant.

Accelerometers in mobile phones, microprocessors in laptops, and gyroscopes that balance drones each rely on microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS for short. Within these small systems are even smaller devices, called actuators and sensors, that perform various physical functions.

Ever wondered how Mars rovers take a selfie? Color video from NASA's Perseverance shows how the rover captured the historic April 6, 2021, image of itself beside the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. As a bonus, the rover's entry, descent, and landing microphone captured the sound of the arm's motors whirring during the process.

Scientists from within the Antibody and Vaccine Group at the University of Southampton have gained novel insights into how an important class of immune receptors called tumor necrosis factor receptors (TNFR) are activated.

Nature is full of fascinating patterns. Plants show beautiful spiral growth, regularly arranged leaves and petals, animals impress us with their striped and dotted furs and social insects build complex nest structures. These almost perfectly arranged patterns seem to arise without a blue print, like the emergence of cellular shapes during embryonic development called morphogenesis. A team of interdisciplinary researchers led by Philippe Bastiaens, director at the Max-Planck-Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund... Читать дальше...

Optical superoscillation refers to a wave packet that can oscillate locally in a frequency exceeding its highest Fourier component. This intriguing phenomenon enables production of extremely localized waves that can break the optical diffraction barrier. Indeed, superoscillation has proven to be an effective technique for overcoming the diffraction barrier in optical superresolution imaging. The trouble is that strong side lobes accompany the main lobes of superoscillatory waves, which limits the field of view and hinders application.

A team of researchers working at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Illkirch, France, has found that the MeCP2 protein binds to DNA in a way that prevents it from being wrapped up in nucleosomes. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their study of different kinds of cytosines and adenosine repeats in DNA and how they discovered what could turn out to be a molecular clue about the origin of Rett syndrome. Jian Zhou and Huda Zoghbi with the... Читать дальше...