Новости за 14.10.2021

For the second straight year, the world heads into fall and winter with a La Nina weather event. This would tend to dry out parts of an already parched and fiery American West and boost an already busy Atlantic hurricane season.

For nearly 50 years, the incarceration rate in the U.S. has grown at an exponential rate. Today, the U.S. has the largest prison population in the world. Incarceration is especially common in poor communities of color where nearly 70% of Black men who did not finish high school and are approaching midlife will be in prison at some point in their lives.

Facial recognition, body cameras and other digital technologies are increasingly used by police departments, municipalities and even gated communities, but these tools manufactured by private companies raise the specter of unchecked surveillance, a University of California, Davis researcher suggests.

Bacteria can store extra resources for the lean times. It's a bit like keeping a piggy bank or carrying a backup battery pack. One important reserve is known as cyanophycin granules, which were first noticed by an Italian scientist about 150 years ago. He saw big, dark splotches in the cells of the blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) he was studying without understanding either what they were or their purpose. Since then, scientists have realized that cyanophycin was made of a natural green biopolymer... Читать дальше...

With each passing day, the dark side of our addiction to fossil fuels becomes more apparent. In addition to slashing emissions of carbon dioxide, society must find sustainable alternatives to power the modern world.

Known as a crucial component in the body's ability to absorb and retain calcium, essential to processes such as the development and maintenance of healthy bones, vitamin D has also been found to play important roles in immune defense. A new study in the October issue of the Journal of Dairy Science explores the effects of different sources and amounts of vitamin D in dairy cows, revealing promising possibilities for improvements to health and welfare.

Researchers led by Edwin Fohtung, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, have developed a new technique for revealing defects in nanostructured vanadium oxide, a widely used transition metal with many potential applications including electrochemical anodes, optical applications, and supercapacitors. In the research—which was published in an article in the Royal Chemical Society journal CrystEngComm, and also featured on the cover of the edition—the... Читать дальше...

A new version of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) is two times faster than its earlier version released in 2018.

Scientists studying probiotics, beneficial bacteria that show promise for their ability to treat inflammatory bowel disease and other intestinal disorders, continue to face a problem: How to keep probiotics from getting obliterated in the gut before they can be helpful.

The widespread flooding that submerged parts of the province's most densely populated regions in 2017 and 2019 exposed important gaps in Quebec's flood preparedness regime. With thousands of people displaced and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damages incurred, the disasters spurred urgent re-investment in the aging system.

The red flags came early.

Hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites have already demonstrated high photovoltaic efficiencies of greater than 25%. The prevailing wisdom in the field is that the organic (carbon- and hydrogen-containing) molecules in the material are crucial to achieving this impressive performance because they are believed to suppress defect-assisted carrier recombination.

More than a third of all medicines available today are based on active substances from nature, and a research team from the University of Jena has developed a procedure to identify small active substance molecules much more quickly and easily. Secondary natural substances that occur in numerous plants, bacteria and fungi can be anti-inflammatory, can ward off pathogens or even prevent the growth of cancer cells. However, making use of the riches provided by nature's medicine cabinet and identifying new natural substances is time-consuming... Читать дальше...

Jellyfish have voracious appetites, and they aren't considered the most selective eaters. Almost anything that gets stuck to their tentacles winds up in the gelatinous sack that they use to digest their food.

For bacteria, like people, lifestyle matters.

Past studies have raised the possibility that performance pay—programs that give employees incentives to be productive by offering rewards for achieving performance objectives—may widen the gender earnings gap because women do not respond to performance incentives as strongly as men for psychological or cultural reasons. A new study evaluated this notion by aggregating evidence from experiments on performance incentives from around the world. The study found that the difference in response between... Читать дальше...

Weather and climate disasters in the United States have cost more than $100 billion this year, according to reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. The devastating year of heatwaves, flooding and wildfires is making it clear that humanity is interconnected to natural systems—and that the impacts of human activities on nature are in turn driving negative consequences for humans in a vicious feedback loop. But are research, investment and science-policy interactions keeping pace? Читать дальше...

Hydropower is the dominant source of energy in the Amazon region, the world's largest river basin and a hotspot for future hydropower development. However, a new Global Environmental Change study warns that in the coming decades, climate change-driven reductions in precipitation and river discharge will diminish the Amazon's hydropower capacity.

The Southern Ocean's role in driving the global carbon cycle may be stronger than expected as the biological carbon pump is not "switched off" in winter as previously thought.

A new study documents the formation of a 3,000-square-kilometer rift in the oldest and thickest Arctic ice. The area of open water, called a polynya, is the first to be identified in an area north of Ellesmere Island, Canada's northernmost island, and is another sign of the rapid changes taking place in the Arctic, according to researchers.

Not all ice is the same. The solid form of water comes in more than a dozen different—sometimes more, sometimes less crystalline—structures, depending on the conditions of pressure and temperature in the environment. Superionic ice is a special crystalline form—half solid, half liquid—and electrically conductive. Its existence has been predicted on the basis of various models and has already been observed on several occasions under extreme laboratory conditions. However, the exact conditions at which... Читать дальше...

Uses of facial images and facial recognition technologies—to unlock a phone or in airport security—are becoming increasingly common in everyday life. But how do people feel about using such data in healthcare and biomedical research?

Modern snakes evolved from ancestors that lived side by side with the dinosaurs and that likely fed mainly on insects and lizards.

Phosphines are among the most important ligands for transition metal catalysis. Phosphines bind to a metal and modify its structure, reactivity, and selectivity. Many of the most practiced catalytic reactions in the pharmaceutical/commodity chemical industry use phosphines as ligands, such as cross-coupling. In these and many other cases, small changes to the phosphine structure often have significant impacts on the catalyst structure and reactivity.

The well-known India and Sativa labels that are used on cannabis products and form the basis for the information provided to users of medicinal cannabis are usually wrong and misleading. That is what researchers from Wageningen University & Research and the Canadian Dalhousie University conclude after analysizing hundreds of cannabis samples. Their research showed that the genetic and chemical composition of the cannabis tested often does not match the Indica or Sativa label.