Новости за 04.11.2021

Because of their high strength and light weight, carbon-fiber-based composite materials are gradually replacing metals for advancing all kinds of products and applications, from airplanes to wind turbines to golf clubs. But there's a trade-off. Once damaged or compromised, the most commonly-used carbon fiber materials are nearly impossible to repair or recycle.

Every cell is a master builder, able to craft useful and structurally complex molecules, time and again and with astonishingly few mistakes. Scientists are keen to replicate this feat to build their own molecular factories, but first they'll need to understand it.

Spain's environment ministry on Thursday unveiled a roadmap for regenerating the stricken Mar Menor, one of Europe's largest saltwater lagoons that is slowly dying from agricultural pollution.

A US federal judge on Thursday ruled against Blue Origin brought by Jeff Bezos' company in a bid to overturn a NASA contract awarded to rival SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, to build the next craft for Moon landings.

As our world adapts to climate change, a renewed focus on social vulnerability is critical to supporting affected communities, according to a study by University of Alberta urban planning experts.

Over 100 nations have issued new commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions ahead of the United Nations Conference of the Parties, or COP26, currently underway in Glasgow, Scotland.

A new study published today by journal PLOS ONE has revealed that mountaintop removal mining poses a more serious and widespread threat to endangered species and people than was previously understood. The researchers from Defenders of Wildlife's Center for Conservation Innovation (CCI) and conservation technology nonprofit SkyTruth, combine water-quality data with satellite imagery of mountaintop removal mining activity to estimate the full extent of water-quality degradation attributable to the practice at the landscape level.

Light with sub-millimeter and far-infrared wavelengths from deep space can travel long distances, penetrating right through dust clouds, and bring us information about the history of the universe and the origin of galaxies, stars and planets. However, the long journey has weakened these signals, and we require sensitive detectors operating at millikelvin temperatures on a space instrument.

The most widely grown of all the herbs, basil, is also highly susceptible to downy mildew, which spreads quickly through spores dispersed by wind and can wipe out an entire field or greenhouse. The disease was first spotted in Uganda in 1932; then it disappeared for nearly 70 years. Later, it was spotted again in Switzerland in 2001. Scientists still don't understand why it reappeared, but they are working hard to learn more about the disease and develop effective management strategies.

Many nursery plants around the world are ravaged by root-destroying Phytophthora water molds. These disease organisms can lurk undetected for months or even years, thanks in part to the use of chemicals that suppress symptoms but do not eliminate the infection. As a result, many infected plants are sold. After planting, these plants can survive for many months but grow poorly and eventually die from root rot. In the meantime, the water mold can permanently infest the planting site and infect adjacent plants... Читать дальше...

Fruit flies provide an effective platform for screening new obesity genes, and fat flies implicate a neuronal signaling pathway in weight gain, according to a new study publishing November 4th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Sadaf Farooqi and Andrea Brand of the University of Cambridge, UK, and colleagues.

Female zebra finches are choosy but flexible when it comes to finding a mate, allowing them to avoid the fitness costs of being too selective when competition for males is high, report Wolfgang Forstmeier at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany, and colleagues, in a study publishing November 4th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.

Despite its central importance, the brain's origins have not yet been uncovered. The first animal brains appeared hundreds of millions of years ago. Today, only the most primitive animal species, such as aquatic sponges, lack brains. Paradoxically, these species may hold the key to unlock the mystery of how neurons and brains first evolved.

Tackling pollution from the emission of nitrogen compounds, particularly ammonia, could reduce many of the 23.3 million years of life that were lost prematurely across the world in 2013 due to nitrogen-related air pollution, an international study led by Chinese scientists has discovered using a modeling framework, including the IIASA GAINS model.

Radiocarbon records are critical to understanding the history of Earth's climate, magnetic field, and the sun's activity, say researchers.

Researchers led by Prof. Sun Zhoutong at the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed Proline Induced Loop Engineering Test (PiLoT) method that helps to discover additional hotspots beyond the conventional ones around the active site.

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are highly involved in the progression of diverse diseases. Therefore, targeting EV biogenesis is a potential strategy for the treatment of the related diseases, which urges an improved understanding of EV biogenesis. During the biogenesis of EV subset, exosomes, invagination of the plasma membranes forms early endosomes which mature into late endosomes and multivesicular bodies (MVBs) eventually. MVBs fuse with not only the plasma membranes to release EVs but also lysosomes for degradation. Читать дальше...

Researchers led by Dr. Sho Ohata of the Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research, Nagoya University, Japan, Dr. Makoto Koike of the University of Tokyo, and Dr. Andreas Herber of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany, have revealed that the year-to-year spring variation in Arctic black carbon aerosol abundance is strongly correlated with biomass burning in the mid-latitudes. Moreover, current models underestimate the contribution of BC from biomass burning by a factor of three.

The galaxy Messier 87 (M87) is located 55 million light years away from Earth in the Virgo constellation. It is a giant galaxy with 12,000 globular clusters, making the Milky Way's 200 globular clusters appear modest in comparison. A black hole of six and a half billion sun masses is harbored at the center of M87. It is the first black hole for which an image exists, created in 2019 by the international research collaboration Event Horizon Telescope.

Lightspeed is the fastest velocity in the universe. Except when it isn't. Anyone who's seen a prism split white light into a rainbow has witnessed how material properties can influence the behavior of quantum objects: in this case, the speed at which light propagates.

Only half of young people in the United States are getting sex education that meets minimum standards, according to a Rutgers researcher who found that adolescents are not receiving critical information. Of even greater concern is that a significant percentage of young people do not receive any information about birth control and sexually transmitted disease prevention before they begin to have sexual intercourse.

Compressed blocks of pulverized coal can be used as the basis of sunlight-powered off-grid water purification. The technology is already being progressed by commercial partners toward pilot-scale production of drinking water.

It's not always women who lose out when looking for a job. Men experience disadvantages in hiring processes for female dominated occupations in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. The reverse is not the case for women who apply for typical 'male' jobs. No gender discrimination was found in Norway or the United States. These are the findings of a study by the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, the University of Oslo, the University Carlos III of Madrid and the University of Amsterdam. Читать дальше...

As natural weather disasters, tropical cyclones possess enormous destructiveness related to their intensity (maximum speed of tangential winds in the lower troposphere within 50 km of the tropical cyclone center). The long-term variability of tropical cyclone intensity is related to climate change, and it has been found that there has been a considerable increase in the number and proportion of intense tropical cyclones over the recent period since satellite observations of tropical cyclones have become available.

A sweat-collecting patch has been developed using the principle based on how the cactus spines attract water.