Новости за 16.09.2021

A family of fishes called cichlids in Africa's Lake Malawi is helping researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to refine our understanding of how evolution works.

The evening of Aug. 1 felt a lot like a birthday to NASA planetary scientist Justin Simon. On that night, Simon attended a virtual watch party for researchers preparing to use NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover to conduct the first detailed study of a candidate rock target for drilling and collecting a sample. Ready to unwrap presents, Simon and his fellow researchers anxiously refreshed their inboxes to see the first downlinked and up-close images of the rock—that could help them better understand... Читать дальше...

It's the next best thing to being on Mars: Two online interactive experiences let you check out Jezero Crater—the landing site and exploration locale for NASA's Perseverance rover—without leaving our planet.

When electrons flow through a conductor—such as the copper wires in our phone chargers or the silicon chips in the circuit boards of our laptops—they collide with material impurities and with each other in a tiny atomic frenzy. Their interaction with impurities is well known.

When compounds in spent nuclear fuel break down, they can release radioactive elements and contaminate the ground and water. Scientists know that one spent fuel compound, neptunium dioxide, reacts with water, but they do not fully understand the process. A study has used advanced electron microscopy techniques to investigate how the microscopic structure of neptunium dioxide drives chemical reactions that lead it to dissolve into the environment. The results revealed that neptunium tends to dissolve where grains of the material come together... Читать дальше...

Cover crops are widely seen as one of the most promising conservation practices, improving soil health while also removing carbon from the atmosphere. But while the number of Midwestern farmers planting cover crops has increased markedly in recent years, 2017 USDA Census data show only about 5% have adopted the conservation practice. The reluctance of the other 95% may be due, in part, to a perception that cover crops require more effort and may also negatively affect summer cash crop yield.

Encountering concrete is a common—even routine—occurrence. And that's exactly what makes concrete exceptional.

Peptides could be primed to solve the knotty problem of antibiotic resistance among humans. Rice University scientists believe they can help.

Mushballs—giant, slushy hailstones made from a mixture of ammonia and water—may be responsible for an atmospheric anomaly on Neptune and Uranus that has been puzzling scientists. A study presented by Tristan Guillot at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2021 shows that mushballs could be highly effective at carrying ammonia deep into the ice giants' atmospheres, hiding the gas from detection beneath opaque clouds.

For some diseases, exposure to just a single airborne particle containing virus, bacteria or fungi can be infectious. When this happens, understanding and predicting airborne disease spread can be a whole lot easier.

A Stanford-led study reveals that rather than evolving gradually over hundreds of millions of years, land plants underwent major diversification in two dramatic bursts, 250 million years apart. The first occurred early in plant history, giving rise to the development of seeds, and the second took place during the diversification of flowering plants.

Inspired by a kind of tree leaf, scientists at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) discovered that the spreading direction of different liquids deposited on the same surface can be steered, solving a challenge that has remained for over two centuries. This breakthrough could ignite a new wave of using 3D surface structures for intelligent liquid manipulation with profound implications for various scientific and industrial applications, such as fluidics design and heat transfer enhancement.

In a Pearls article publishing September 16th in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens, Patrick Keeling and colleagues at the University of British Columbia in Canada describe investigations into an enigmatic group of coral-infecting microbes.

University promotion and tenure criteria and processes should be broadened and made more inclusive to value innovation, entrepreneurship and other forms of scholarly impact, a collaboration led by Oregon State University asserts today in a paper published in Science.

A UCLA-led team of engineers and chemists has taken a major step forward in the development of microbial fuel cells—a technology that utilizes natural bacteria to extract electrons from organic matter in wastewater to generate electrical currents. A study detailing the breakthrough was recently published in Science.

The Institute of Planetary Research at DLR (German Aerospace Center) is starting construction of a new Sample Analysis Laboratory (SAL) dedicated to the study of rock and dust samples from planetary bodies such as asteroids and the Moon. The first phase will be operational by the end of 2022, on time to welcome samples collected by the Hayabusa2 mission, and fully ready by 2023. A status report will be presented today at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2021.

A research group led by Prof. Xiao Jianping from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and their collaborators synthesized a single-atom Pb-alloyed Cu catalyst (Pb1Cu), which showed high activity for the electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) with a selectivity of 96% to formate and stability of up to 180 h at 100 mA cm-2.

A series of small earthquakes in Spain's Canary Islands has put authorities on alert for a possible volcanic eruption, with one official saying Thursday there is "intense seismic activity" in the area off northwest Africa.

Researchers have found a way to make ultrathin surface coatings robust enough to survive scratches and dings. The new material, developed by merging thin-film and self-healing technologies, has an almost endless list of potential applications, including self-cleaning, anti-icing, anti-fogging, anti-bacterial, anti-fouling and enhanced heat exchange coatings, researchers said.

Our ever-growing demand for freshwater has caused its sources to diminish rapidly and scientists have been attempting to find strategies to purify wastewater for reuse to meet future demands. At present, the most common wastewater treatment techniques involve the use of chemicals or ultraviolet radiation to kill microorganisms or remove pollutants. But these conventional techniques have several drawbacks, such as the toxic effects of chemical substances on our health or the high energy requirements to run treatment facilities. Читать дальше...

The Paris Agreement, adopted by 196 countries in 2015, has the goal of limiting average global temperature increase to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C.

Making food more affordable for ethnic minority groups is crucial to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from our diets, scientists have suggested.

Scientists have identified a chemical pathway to an innovative insulating nanomaterial that could lead to large-scale industrial production for a variety of uses – including in spacesuits and military vehicles. The nanomaterial—thousands of times thinner than a human hair, stronger than steel and noncombustible—could block radiation to astronauts and help shore up military vehicle armor, for example.

As the risk of severe climate change rises, and efforts to reduce carbon emissions ramp up, serious thought must also be given to the movement of people that climate change stands to provoke. This migration looks to be disruptive, but it may also significantly affect the long-term economic consequences of climate change—and not necessarily for the worse.

You can learn a lot about animals by simply watching them. But some secrets can only be revealed in the dark … with an ultraviolet flashlight.