Новости за 27.08.2021

An international team has reported in Nature the first observation of ghost polaritons, which are a new form of surface waves carrying nanoscale light strongly coupled with material oscillations and featuring highly collimated propagation properties. The research team observed these phenomena over a common material—calcite—and showed how ghost polaritons can facilitate a superior control of infrared nano-light for sensing, signal processing, energy harvesting and other technologies.

Sand and gravel are the most mined materials in the world, with between 32 and 50 billion tonnes extracted globally each year. They are being extracted faster than they can be replaced. But according to a new study led by researchers at McGill University and the University of Copenhagen, the human and environmental costs of this extraction on lower and middle-income countries have been largely overlooked.

Researchers from the University of Kent, the Research Institute for Environment Treatment and Vita-Market Ltd have discovered the universal mathematical formula that can describe any bird's egg existing in nature, a feat which has been unsuccessful until now.

Tropical storms in 2020 didn't just break records in the northern Atlantic.

When an 8.2-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Chignik, Alaska, on July 29, geophysicist Geoffrey Abers did the logical—if not simple—thing.

Plump and ponderous, tardigrades earned the nickname "water bears" when scientists first observed the 0.02-inch-long animals' distinctive lumbering gaits in the 18th century. Their dumpy plod, however, raises the question of why tardigrades evolved to walk at all.

Egyptian scientists have discovered the fossil of a new species of amphibious whale that dates back 43 million years, a member of the research team said.

How to design efficient demo areas for urban carbon sequestration? In the latest policy brief research groups from the University of Helsinki and Aalto University focus on the main principles of urban demonstration areas using biochars for carbon sequestration.

Using computers to study polymers has always been a major challenge for scientific computation, especially for long and densely packed biomolecules, like DNA. New perspectives are now opening up through quantum computing. Scientists have now recast the basic models of polymer models as optimization problems that can be efficiently solved with quantum computers. This novel approach has made it possible to harness the considerable potential of these machines in a hitherto unexplored context.

About 350,000 chemicals are registered worldwide. Some of these can contribute to human exposure to substances and mixtures via products, applications or food. In order to protect people in everyday life and at work from potentially dangerous chemicals, the legislature has established a comprehensive legal framework. Notably the corresponding acts and regulations mainly cover the evaluation of individual substances and defined mixtures within their respective regulatory silos.

The LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA Collaboration, a large group of researchers at different institutes worldwide, has recently set the strongest constraints on cosmic strings to date, using the Advanced LIGO/Virgo full O3 dataset. This dataset contains the latest gravitational waves data detected by a network of three interferometers located in United States and in Italy.

As an important nitrogen-containing chemical, ammonia plays a vital role in the production of fertilizers, explosives and fine chemicals. At present, ammonia has been mainly manufactured from H2 and N2 under high temperature (300-500 oC) and high pressure (200-300 atm). This process consumes huge amounts of energy and discharges vast amounts of greenhouse gas. Thus, electrochemical ammonia synthesis (EAS) has attracted intensive attention.

Scientists from DTU have shown that a Fano laser, a new type of microscopic laser, has fundamental advantages compared to other types of lasers. The discovery can be important for many future applications, such as integrated photonics, interfacing of electronics and photonics, and optical sensors.

A team of scientists has discovered microscopic dissolution seams that dissolve about 10 percent of the carbon in ancient deep-sea limestones where most of the world's carbon is stored.

Scientists have shown how plants can protect themselves against genetic damage caused by environmental stresses.

Young trees are usually planted in plastic tubes to protect them from being eaten by animals, but these plastic guards often break down into harmful microplastics.

Endangered butterflies and desert fish would get millions of dollars in federal funding while oil companies would face new fees and a ban on most offshore drilling under a House committee proposal to fulfill key parts of President Joe Biden's economic agenda.

It was just before sunrise in July when the botanists Naomi Fraga and Maria Jesus threw on backpacks and crunched their way across a brittle alkaline flat in the hottest corner of the Mojave Desert. Their mission: to rescue a tiny plant teetering on the brink of extinction.

A team of chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, working with a group at Merck & Co. Inc. has developed a reaction that can be used to remove a single sulfur, nitrogen or oxygen atom from a six-membered ring using only a blue light. In their paper published in the journal Science the group describes their reaction and possible uses for it in various applications.

The number of vertebrate species inhabiting the different regions of the world is highly variable, as is the proportion of threatened species. Some regions, such as the tropics, have more threatened species than is expected given the total number of species. Yet the vulnerability of the ecosystems facing the ongoing loss of species does not depend only on the species number but also on their ecological role. These roles depend on the characteristics of the species; their size, weight, shape, reproductive capacity, or the food resource they use.

Progress in lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries have made all sorts of portable devices feasible and fueled the growth of electronics. However, the intrinsic disadvantages of conventional Li-ion batteries, whose cells use a liquid electrolyte solution, render them not entirely suitable for much-anticipated applications like electric vehicles. These limitations include limited durability, low capacity, safety issues, and environmental concerns about their toxicity and carbon footprint. Fortunately, scientists... Читать дальше...

The future will be colored by "bend-at-will" light sources. A successful research study by a group of South Korean material scientists has proven that this future is not far away. As shown in a recent study published in Advanced Materials, this group from Pusan University has developed a super stretchable, deformable, and durable material through the application of mechanically reinforced ionogel conductors. The research paper elaborates how this material can be applied in a "super-flexible" alternating current electroluminescent device.

ESA safeguards Europe's guaranteed access to space through its Future Launchers Preparatory Programme, FLPP.

Clustered at the center of this image are six luminous spots of light, four of them forming a circle around a central pair. Appearances can be deceiving, however, as this formation is not composed of six individual galaxies, but only three: to be precise, a pair of galaxies and one distant quasar. Hubble data also indicates that there is a seventh spot of light in the very center, which is a rare fifth image of the distant quasar. This rare phenomenon is caused by the presence of two galaxies in the foreground that act as a lens.

New Zealand may be relatively small, but its fossil record reveals a globally important ecological relationship between the number of species, their role in the ecosystem and ocean temperatures.