Новости за 08.10.2021

A new study by UC Santa Barbara researchers speaks to the importance of public awareness programs in keeping residents—and emergency management offices—informed about rare but potentially lethal natural events in their area.

In a paper published in Advances in Food Security and Sustainability, researchers found that farmers in East Africa (Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda) were able to better adapt to the impact of COVID-19 than those in the Southern African countries of Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Since the 1970s, dams have been removed from the U.S. at an increasing rate, with the aim to improve the ecology of river ecosystems, fish migration pathways, water quality, and recreation spaces.

Since the Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater on Mars in February, the rover and its team of scientists back on Earth have been hard at work exploring the floor of the crater that once held an ancient lake. Perseverance and the Mars 2020 mission are looking for signs of ancient life on Mars and preparing a returnable cache of samples for later analyses on Earth.

New research by a City College of New York team has uncovered a novel way to combine two different states of matter. For one of the first times, topological photons—light—has been combined with lattice vibrations, also known as phonons, to manipulate their propagation in a robust and controllable way.

A Northwestern University research team has developed a versatile composite fabric that can deactivate both biological threats, such as the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, and chemical threats, such as those used in chemical warfare. A material that is effective against both classes of threats is rare.

The full magnitude of the impact of smoke from seasonal fires in Central Africa—and in particular, the potential climate warming from the absorption by the black carbon component of the aerosol—is underestimated by some climate models over the South-East Atlantic, new research has shown.

Italian Giorgio Parisi, winner of the 2021 Nobel Physics Prize, slammed Friday the lack of funding for research in Italy, saying it invested one of the lowest amounts in Europe.

The universe was created about 13.8 billion years ago in a blaze of light: the big bang. Roughly 380,000 years later, after matter (mostly hydrogen) had cooled enough for neutral atoms to form, light was able to traverse space freely. That light, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, comes to us from every direction in the sky uniformly ... or so it first seemed. In the last decades astronomers have discovered that the radiation has faint ripples and bumps in it at a level of brightness... Читать дальше...

A thorough review of the history of sage grouse hunting and populations across the Intermountain West shows that declines in the bird's numbers have prompted significant reductions in hunting opportunities in recent decades—with mixed results for grouse populations.

New analysis of ancient writings suggests that sailors from the Italian hometown of Christopher Columbus knew of America 150 years before its renowned 'discovery'.

Levitation of both large objects and of single atoms has become a widely used technique in science and engineering. In the last years, many researchers have started to explore a new horizon: the levitation of nano- and micro-particles—still smaller than the diameter of a single hair, but composed of billions of atoms—in vacuum.

A new study showing how the explosion of a stripped massive star in a supernova can lead to the formation of a heavy neutron star or a light black hole resolves one of the most challenging puzzles to emerge from the detection of neutron star mergers by the gravitational wave observatories LIGO and Virgo.

A new method improves the extraction and separation of rare earth elements—a group of 17 elements critical for technologies such as smart phones and electric car batteries—from unconventional sources. New research led by scientists at Penn State and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) demonstrates how a protein isolated from bacteria can provide a more environmentally friendly way to extract these metals and to separate them from other metals and from each other. The method could eventually... Читать дальше...

Spin torque provides convenient electric means to efficiently control magnetizations. It can usually be produced by spin-polarized current or pure spin current via spin Hall effect. The former and the latter are named as spin transfer torque (STT) and spin orbit torque (SOT), respectively. Utilizing these tools, people have developed the second generation STT-MRAM (Magnetic Random-Access Memory) with in-plane magnetic anisotropy, the third generation STT-MRAM with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy... Читать дальше...

A team of researchers from Freiburg led by Prof. Dr. Frank Stienkemeier and Dr. Lukas Bruder has succeeded in developing a new measurement method for investigating ultrafast processes in matter. These are processes at the atomic and molecular level that occur within a billionth of a second (10-12 sec). The new method, which combines different spectroscopy techniques, enables, among other things, new insights into the energy structure in matter and the probability distribution of- electrons. Fundamental... Читать дальше...

Researchers from Estonia and Italy developed an innovative method by combining neural networks and statistics. Using this newly developed method, they refined the "Out of Africa" scenario. The researchers claimed that the African dynamics around the time of the Out of Africa expansion are more complex than previously thought.

Nearly a week after a 13-inch tear in an undersea pipeline resulted in a massive oil spill off the Southern California coast, the clues keep piling up, but the mystery of what caused the rupture and who is ultimately responsible remains unsolved.

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed a method to determine the orientation of mechanical stress in the earth's crust without relying on data from earthquakes or drilling. This method is less expensive that current approaches, could have broad applicability in geophysics and provide insight into continental regions lacking historical geologic information.

A study in the journal Physica A leverages concepts from physics to model how campaign strategies influence the opinions of an electorate in a two-party system.

For many marine animals, like the Dungeness crab, seasonality and timing are components of complex life cycles, where disruptions can have serious implications for the population. Understanding how climate change will impact each life stage is no small undertaking when considering all variables and moving parts in a changing environment. Despite these challenges, this information is vital for sustainable fishery management and to inform new conservation strategies.

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in Canada has found that despite rising temperatures due to global warming, snowshoe hares with mismatched coats are experiencing reduced mortality rates. They have written a paper describing their findings and have posted it on the bioRxiv preprint server.

Solid oxide electrolysis cell (SOEC) is promising in CO2 conversion and renewable clean electricity energy storage. It can convert CO2 and H2O simultaneously into syngas or hydrocarbon fuel at the cathode, and produce high purity O2 at the anode.

Intensified reactors are used in a variety of chemical processes. One such reactor is the rotating packed bed (RPB) reactor which uses high centrifugal forces to accelerate chemical reactions between constituents. However, the RPB reactor has a number of issues that affect its efficiency. With this in mind, for this Ph.D. research, Jasper Hacking designed a new reactor referred to as rotating liquid redistributor. Key to the new reactor is the inclusion of liquid-filled rings in the packing, which... Читать дальше...

The quantum behavior of atomic vibrations excited in a crystal using light pulses has much to do with the polarization of the pulses, say materials scientists from Tokyo Tech. The findings from their latest study offer a new control parameter for the manipulation of coherently excited vibrations in solid materials at the quantum level.