Новости за 12.11.2021

MIT biologists have answered an important biological question: Why do cells control their size?

The most pristine parts of the Amazon rainforest devoid of direct human contact are being impacted by human-induced climate change, according to new research by LSU scientists. New analyses of data collected over the past four decades show that not only has the number of sensitive resident birds throughout the Amazon rainforest declined, but the body size and wing length have changed for most studied species. These physical changes in the birds track increasingly hot and dry conditions in the dry season, from June to November.

By merging two or more sources of light, interferometers create interference patterns that can provide remarkably detailed information about everything they illuminate, from a tiny flaw on a mirror, to the dispersion of pollutants in the atmosphere, to gravitational patterns in far reaches of the Universe.

Borophene may be done tantalizing materials scientists and start serving their ambitions, if a new approach by Rice University researchers can be turned into practice.

Testing rationality of decision-making and choice by evaluating the mathematical property of transitivity has a long tradition in biology, economics, psychology, and zoology. However, this paradigm is fraught with conceptual, mathematical, and statistical pitfalls. A new article published in The Quarterly Review of Biology provides a tutorial review for animal scientists in testing whether animal behavior satisfies or violates rational choice theory.

The microbes that make us sick often have ways to evade our attacks against them. Perhaps chief among these strategies is a sticky, armor-like goo, called the biofilm matrix, that encases clusters of disease-causing organisms.

In one of the mysteries of mammalian development, every cell in the early female embryo shuts down one of its two copies of the X chromosome, leaving just one functional. For years, the mechanics behind this X chromosome inactivation have been murky, but scientists from the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA have now taken a major step forward in understanding the process.

Crop and varietal diversity are critically important for global food and nutrition security, as well as the livelihoods of millions of people, especially those living in marginal areas. This diversity includes many different crop species and farmer varieties, many of which have been cultivated and safeguarded by farmers and indigenous peoples for millennia on their farms. Each one contains unique genetic traits which could help breeders and farmers adapt our food systems to meet urgent global challenges... Читать дальше...

Daily record keeping was introduced during World War One in the British Expeditionary Forces (BEF), designed to record the bare minimum of facts. However, soldiers were also able to express the trauma and chaos of war.

Here's the recipe to decontaminate a disposable facemask: Heat it at 160 degrees Fahrenheit in an oven for five minutes. You can use your own oven.

New York City ZIP codes with a higher percentage of Black residents had significantly higher rates of COVID-19-specific criminal court summonses and public health and nuisance arrests in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study by Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Pandemic policing also mirrored the discretionary nature of the New York stop-and-frisk program, which was deemed unconstitutional in 2013 due to racially discriminatory practices.

Grand global commitments to plant trees to fight climate change are welcome. Healthy landscapes that suck planet-heating carbon out of the atmosphere—locking it into forests and soils—are among the best technologies there are yet to bend the Keeling Curve in a new direction. Tree planting is no alternative to ending the burning of fossil fuels, but along with zero deforestation, restoration can draw carbon out of the atmosphere while simultaneously benefiting biodiversity, food security and livelihoods.

That feeling in your gut? Well, it's in your head, but some of it does truly start in the gastrointestinal tract.

As the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, enters its final day Friday, global leaders can point to signs of real progress. But the Earth is still headed for a dangerous level of warming.

A space object with an intimidating name—"earthgrazer"—zoomed over Georgia and Alabama this week, offering witnesses a glimpse of something rare, NASA says.

Providing light with tailored properties through ultrafast supercontinuum generation represents an active field of nonlinear science research. A German-Australian research collaboration has presented a new concept that includes a longitudinally varying thickness nano-films in microstructured exposed core fibers. This offers low input energy, broadband and spectrally flattened spectra in the near infrared with high pulse-to-pulse stability, establishing a novel class of light sources for fields such as biophotonics... Читать дальше...

Chemical topology is a unique dimension for protein engineering. Over the past few years, the discovery of topological non-trivial proteins in nature has already revealed their many potential functional benefits, such as enhanced thermal/mechanical/chemical stability. Engineering the chemical topology of proteins thus holds the promise of engineering therapeutically relevant proteins and industrial enzymes.

Forming planets are one possible explanation for the rings and gaps observed in disks of gas and dust around young stars. But this theory has trouble explaining why it is rare to find planets associated with rings. New supercomputer simulations show that after creating a ring, a planet can move away and leave the ring behind. Not only does this bolster the planet theory for ring formation, the simulations show that a migrating planet can produce a variety of patterns matching those actually observed in disks.

Rink Hoekstra and Simine Vazire, psychologists with the University of Groningen and the University of California, Davis, respectively, have published a Perspective piece in the journal Nature Human Behavior calling for more humility in the social, behavioral and life sciences. In their paper they outline a methodology for imbuing intellectual humility into the paper writing and publishing process.

A new rocket designed to launch humans to the moon, Mars and beyond will launch next year from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. On board, will be a familiar fuzzy figure—Snoopy.

After a spell of unexpected rain, before the harvest season, a farmer may be faced with the unpredictable problem of untimely sprouting of barley. Sprouted barley fetches considerably lower market prices and poses an economic burden on farmers and corporations that are at the mercy of nature. The aggravation of climate change has not made this situation any better.

A University of Wollongong-led team across three FLEET nodes has combined two traditional semiconductor doping methods to achieve new efficiencies in the topological insulator bismuth-selenide (Bi2Se3).

Crop and livestock production are among the main drivers of biodiversity loss globally. Due to the ever-increasing demand of land for food production, reverting global biodiversity decline and feeding the world is one of the greatest challenges of our time. A new study finds that integrating food production and biodiversity conservation within a single spatial planning framework can minimize these trade-offs to the benefit of both nature and people.

Global reservoir constructions are still in a period of rapid development. However, building reservoirs tends to cause eutrophication and phytoplankton blooms due to the changes in hydrological conditions, which can reduce the ecosystem service values. Water level regulation has been considered as a promising measure for phytoplankton bloom controlling in reservoirs. So far, most knowledge of the impacts of water level changes on phytoplankton blooms has been based on qualitative descriptions.

One of the primary objectives of quantum physics studies is to measure the quantum states of large systems composed of many interacting particles. This could be particularly useful for the development of quantum computers and other quantum information processing devices.