Новости за 01.07.2021

The global cryosphere—all of the areas with frozen water on Earth—shrank by about 87,000 square kilometers (about 33,000 square miles, an area about the size of Lake Superior) per year on average between 1979 and 2016, as a result of climate change, according to a new study. This research is the first to make a global estimate of the surface area of the Earth covered by sea ice, snow cover and frozen ground.

Greece sizzled Thursday as temperatures topped 43 degrees Celsius (109 Fahrenheit), the year's hottest, with authorities warning the public to stay indoors if possible.

People lived without plastic until the last century or so, but most of us would find it hard to imagine how.

Imaging spectroscopy can help predict water stress in wild blueberry barrens, according to a University of Maine-led study.

A key factor in America's prodigious agricultural output turns out to be something farmers can do little to control: Clean air. A new Stanford-led study estimates pollution reductions between 1999 and 2019 contributed to about 20 percent of the increase in corn and soybean yield gains during that period—an amount worth about $5 billion per year.

Many humans adjusted to wearing masks last year for the greater good. Why not cows?

Fifteen years ago, UC Santa Barbara electrical and materials professor John Bowers pioneered a method for integrating a laser onto a silicon wafer. The technology has since been widely deployed in combination with other silicon photonics devices to replace the copper-wire interconnects that formerly linked servers at data centers, dramatically increasing energy efficiency—an important endeavor at a time when data traffic is growing by roughly 25% per year.

A new technique called sci-Space, combined with data from other technologies, could lead to four-dimensional atlases of gene expression across diverse cells during embryonic development of mammals.

Quantum computers promise great advances in many fields—from cryptography to the simulation of protein folding. Yet, which physical system works best to build the underlying quantum bits is still an open question. Unlike regular bits in your computer, these so-called qubits cannot only take the values 0 and 1, but also mixtures of the two. While this potentially makes them very useful, they also become very unstable.

Hereditary information is passed from parent to offspring in the genetic code, DNA, and epigenetically through chemically induced modifications around the DNA.

Current rates of plastic emissions globally may trigger effects that we will not be able to reverse, argues a new study by researchers from Sweden, Norway and Germany published on July 2nd in Science. According to the authors, plastic pollution is a global threat, and actions to drastically reduce emissions of plastic to the environment are "the rational policy response".

Texas wildlife experts are urging people to steer clear of a dolphin with a friendly reputation, out of concern for its safety.

Mass-flowering crops such as oilseed rape or faba bean (also known as broad bean) provide valuable sources of food for bees, which, in turn, contribute to the pollination of both the crops and nearby wild plants when they visit. But not every arable crop that produces flowers is visited by the same bees. A team from the University of Göttingen and the Julius Kühn Institute (JKI) in Braunschweig has investigated how the habitat diversity of the agricultural landscape and the cultivation of different mass-flowering crops affect wild bees. Читать дальше...

Almost twenty years ago, the process of RNA silencing was discovered in plants, whereby small fragments of RNA inactivate a portion of a gene during protein synthesis. These fragments—called microRNAs (abbreviated as miRNAs)—have since been shown to be essential at nearly every stage of growth and development in plants, from the production of flowers, stems, and roots to the ways plants interact with their environment and ward off infection.

A team of researchers at the University of Colorado has found that fire ants can create 'appendages' on the rafts they make out of their own bodies when they find themselves in water. In their paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the group describes their study of the behavior of fire ants in water and what they learned.

An international team that includes researchers at TU Darmstadt has gained new insights into the protein structure and function of the ion channels that control the heartbeat. The results have now been published in the journal Molecular Cell, and could contribute to the development of cardiac drugs with fewer side effects.

An international team of researchers has found a way to isolate individual methane contributors in the Permian Basin. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes using satellite images to isolate sites that are releasing large amounts of methane into the atmosphere in the Permian Basin.