Новости за 08.09.2021

Nearly 60% of both oil and fossil methane gas and almost 90% of coal must remain in the ground by 2050 in order to keep global warming below 1.5° C, finds a study by UCL researchers.

While researchers have found that adding a shelter cat to the family can help lower stress and anxiety for children with autism, a new study at the University of Missouri shows that joining a family does wonders for the felines, too.

Building a new transit line or a highway almost always takes longer than initially planned. A new study suggests that the biggest contributor to such delays isn't necessarily the design, planning or even construction phases. Instead, it's the time required for local or provincial authorities to decide what exactly they want to build.

A top exercise researcher at the University of Virginia School of Medicine has revealed how our bodies ensure the proper functioning of the powerhouses of our cells. The findings could open the door to better treatments for many common diseases, including Alzheimer's and diabetes.

For centuries, the vast physical diversity of maize, the most popular cereal grain crop globally, has fascinated biologists and plant breeders alike. Early breeders selected the maize variants with good, preferrable traits and propagated them for a long time to develop "true breeding" or inbred lines that show the same favorable features, for instance, the desired kernel color or size, for generations. Because of scientific advances, it is now well known that these trait variations are linked with... Читать дальше...

Thanks to our understanding of molecular biology, we have made tremendous progress in medicine, with scientists shedding light on the molecular mechanisms of several diseases. However, despite knowing how these diseases occur and develop within cells, some remain untreatable due to the inability of currently available drugs to reach their targets. One such example of an unreachable drug target is "protein-protein interactions (PPIs)" that occur inside cells. Most drugs cannot interfere with PPIs due to their small sizes... Читать дальше...

More than half of the U.S. population lives in coastal watershed counties or parishes. Coastal communities along the Gulf of Mexico are among the most heavily populated—also a region where high concentrations of energy resources have made it a national hub for many large-scale carbon-to-capture storage facilities.

People are more likely to believe fake news in a video format compared to text and audio forms of the same story, according to a team of researchers. They added that people are also more willing to share these videos with people in their network.

New evidence suggests that protons and neutrons go through a "first-order" phase transition—a kind of stop-and-go change in temperature—when they "melt." This is similar to how ice melts: Energy first increases the temperature, and then, during the transition, the temperature stays steady while the energy transforms a solid to a liquid. Only when all the molecules are liquid can the temperature increase again. With protons and neutrons, the melted state is a soup of quarks and gluons. Scientists... Читать дальше...

Holden Forests & Gardens (HF&G) Scientist Na Wei, Ph.D., and her collaborators from the University of Pittsburgh and East Tennessee State University discovered how pollinators may contribute to the maintenance of flowering plant diversity. This study that accelerates our understanding of biodiversity conservation is now published in the journal Nature.

With the emergence of new SARS-CoV-2 variants such as beta and delta, people are not only getting a refresher course on the Greek alphabet, but also experiencing confusion and anxiety about what the variants mean for public health. A new article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, asks scientists to weigh in on the changing coronavirus landscape.

Last season, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes boasted a 66.3 pass-completion percentage.

Electrical signals commonly occur in plants in response to various environmental changes and have a dominant function in plant acclimation. Recently, a research team from Zhejiang University in China published new findings on electrical signal transduction during herbivory or wounding in tomato plants. The study can be found in the open access journal Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering (FASE), which is published by Higher Education Press.

Decision-making that overrides one's personal views and self-interests, also known as bias suppression, is often touted as an essential institutional objective. Accountability is a common strategy for discouraging stubborn biases. However, even within the most well-intentioned organizations, efforts to counteract biases tend to wane over time.

Student loan debt affected people's ability to pay their bills and meet their basic needs during the Great Recession—and the burden of that debt was disproportionately placed on Black and Latino families, a new study has found.

Metal organic frameworks (MOFs) are a promising class of materials that have many applications as catalysts, sensors and for gas storage. Widely studied over the past two decades, MOFs are typically produced using chemical processes that require high heat and high pressure.

Plants are constantly exposed to adverse environmental influences and attacks, for example from pest infestation. An international team of researchers led by Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) has now described a central part of the signal mechanism used by plants to respond to threats and thus initiate a defense response in unaffected parts of the plant. In the current edition of the journal Science Advances, they describe the role played by the protein MSL10, among others.

Engineers at the University of Illinois Chicago have created a solar-powered electrochemical reaction that not only uses wastewater to make ammonia—the second most-produced chemical in the world—but also achieves a solar-to-fuel efficiency that is 10 times better than any other comparable technology.

Earth system models are the most important tools for quantitatively describing the physical state of Earth, and—for example, in the context of climate models—predicting how it might change in the future under the influence of human activities. How the increasingly used methods of artificial intelligence (AI) can help to improve these forecasts and where the limits of the two approaches lie has now been investigated by an international team led by Christopher Irrgang from the German Research Centre... Читать дальше...

The coronavirus pandemic disrupted the U.S. economy, yet the dynamics of micro-level consumer spending among low-income populations are not well understood. A study published in PLoS ONE by Song Gao at University of Wisconsin, Madison, United States and colleagues suggests the stimulus program largely curbed the post-lockdown spending declines and stimulated spending following pandemic-related income loss by people making less than $35,977 per year.

The deforestation of the tropical rainforests is progressing unstoppably. According to scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), these forests are becoming fragmented at a higher rate than expected. By analyzing high-resolution satellite data, they were able to measure even the smallest piece of tropical forest and, for the first time, study the changes in tropical fragmentation. In a paper for Science Advances, they discuss how this previously unnoticed and underestimated... Читать дальше...

Where skeletons are rare, isolated teeth can flesh out our understanding of ancient reptile-dominated ecosystems, according to a study published September 8, 2021 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE by Ariana Paulina-Carabajal of INIBIOMA (Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Medioambiente) and CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas), Argentina, and colleagues.

The world's most influential conservation congress, meeting in Marseille, will vote starting Wednesday on motions to protect and restore nature, including several that are mired in controversy.

The James Webb Space Telescope, which astronomers hope will herald a new era of discovery, will launch on December 18, NASA said Wednesday.

In California, the impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly obvious. Turn on the news and you will hear about extreme heat waves, droughts and frequent wildfires plaguing the state.