Новости за 17.11.2021

Dr. Cathy Williams knew something wasn't right. The veterinarian had felt off for weeks after her 2014 trip to Madagascar.

The term "greenhouse effect" became part of public lexicon decades ago, thanks to the ongoing discourse on climate change. A natural phenomenon, the greenhouse effect describes how heat from the sun, in the form of radiation, is trapped by gases in the Earth's atmosphere. But a large amount of radiation is still lost to outer space, because these wavelengths are poorly absorbed by atmospheric gases. These wavelengths constitute long wavelength infrared (LWIR) radiation.

Imagine being able to grow plants that could absorb even more CO2 from Earth's atmosphere and thereby help solve the world's climate problems. Humans have selected, bred and optimized plants to increase food production and ensure for our survival for thousands of years.

Tiny marine plants called phytoplankton are the foundation of most food webs in the ocean, and their productivity drives commercial fisheries, carbon sequestration, and healthy marine ecosystems. But little is known about how they will respond to increasing ocean temperatures resulting from the changing climate. Most climate models assume they will all respond in a similar way.

Since July, every weekly update from state wildlife officials has set a new record for the most manatee deaths counted in a single year. On Wednesday, Florida crossed an especially tragic threshold: More than 1,000 manatees dead.

As devices continue to shrink, new challenges in their measurement and design present themselves. For devices based on molecular junctions, in which single molecules are bound to metals or semiconductors, we have a variety of techniques to study and characterize their electric transport properties. In contrast, probing the thermal transport properties of such junctions at the nanoscale has proven more challenging, and many temperature-related quantum phenomena in them remain poorly understood.

When you think about how rapidly computers filled our homes, our cars and even ourselves through watches and earpieces, it might be hard to believe that there is a massive gap between computer's processing power and the speed, capacity and reliability of our brains. But, by 2040, it is predicted that this gap will pose a critical problem for energy consumption, because by one estimate all the energy produced in the world will be needed to meet the computational demands of our society.

The third millennium BCE is a highly dynamic period in the prehistory of Europe and western Asia, characterized by large-scale social and political changes. In the Iberian Peninsula, the Copper Age was in full swing in around 2500 years BCE with substantial demographic growth, attested by a large diversity of settlements and fortifications, monumental funerary structures, as well as ditched mega-sites larger than 100 hectares. For reasons that are still unclear, the latter half of the millennium... Читать дальше...

A team of scientists has identified an additional force that likely contributed to a mass extinction event 250 million years ago. Its analysis of minerals in southern China indicate that volcano eruptions produced a "volcanic winter" that drastically lowered earth's temperatures—a change that added to the environmental effects resulting from other phenomena at the time.

Analysis of results from a survey conducted in Japan reveals how financial literacy and financial behaviors are associated with age and gender, suggesting potential targets for policies to improve financial health. Shohei Okamoto of the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology and Kohei Komamura of Keio University in Tokyo, Japan, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on November 17, 2021.

A team of researchers from University of Toronto Engineering and Rice University have reported the first measurements of the ultra-low-friction behavior of a material known as magnetene. The results point the way toward strategies for designing similar low-friction materials for use in a variety of fields, including tiny, implantable devices.

An unprecedented glimpse of the human embryo at an early stage of development has provided critical clues on how undifferentiated cells become the specialized ones of which we are made, researchers reported on Wednesday.

A paper in Nature proposes a new evolutionary scenario that helps to better understand the evolution of our phylum and to discover what the ancestor of tunicates—the sister group of vertebrates—were like. Specifically, it reveals that the massive gene losses which deconstructed the gene network in the heart of tunicates eased the transition to a free pelagic lifestyle in appendicularian tunicates from their ancestral sessile lifestyle.

Chemistry researchers at the University of Bath have developed a new method using blue light to create pharmaceuticals in a more sustainable way, significantly reducing the amount of energy needed and the chemical waste created in the manufacture process.

Affordable plastic shields reduce the risk of COVID-19 infection for passengers on motorcycle taxis popular in many developing countries—offering an economic lifeline for drivers during any future waves of the pandemic, a new study suggests.

Building insulation has become an increasingly important topic in recent years. Good exterior insulation reduces heating costs, which means lower CO2 emissions. Nowadays, sustainable natural insulation materials are already available for the interiors of buildings. But what does sustainability really mean? It means the material should be environmentally friendly and made from renewable raw materials, it must have good thermal insulation and fire protection, and it must be easy to recycle at the end of its useful life. Читать дальше...

In a recently published article in Physical Review Letters, the ALICE collaboration has used a method called femtoscopy to study the residual interaction between two-quark and three-quark particles. Through this measurement, an interaction between the ɸ meson (strange-antistrange quarks) and a proton (two up and one down quarks) was unveiled for the first time.

New TRIUMF research from the Saint Mary's University-led IRIS group has unveiled an unexpected shape deformation in the nucleus of helium-8 (He8), providing further insight into the unique dynamics of how neutron-rich nuclei take shape and maintain stability.

For almost two years, newsfeeds have kept us updated on the daily battle to annihilate the coronavirus. So, it' s easy to forget that there are also many types of bacteria threatening human health—our survival depends on the constant quest for new antibiotics that can destroy them. Recent research provides an important insight into the complex response of bacteria to antibiotics and opens up the possibility of developing a novel and more effective class of drugs to combat major bacterial diseases.

A team of researchers from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) and the Spanish National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, CSIC) has developed genetically modified plants that are capable of producing and releasing insect sex pheromones to deal with pests that affect herbaceous and similar plants, thus reducing the need for using pesticides. These plants have been developed at laboratory level, and the team's results have been published in the journal Biodesign Research.

Artificial intelligence (AI) recommender tools are widely used by industries such as e-commerce, media, banking and utilities. The tool's algorithm uses website visitors' past online activity and other data, both implicit and explicit, to predict what that visitor would like to view or buy next, and then presents those options to them. This can be highly beneficial; for example, for customers, the recommender can save them time by suggesting options tailored to their tastes and needs. While, for companies... Читать дальше...

Carbon dioxide (CO2), a product of burning fossil fuels and the most prevalent greenhouse gas, has the potential to be sustainably converted back into useful fuels. A promising route for turning CO2 emissions into a fuel feedstock is a process known as electrochemical reduction. But to be commercially viable, the process needs to be improved, to select for, or to yield, a higher amount of desirable carbon-rich products.

Proteins are the building blocks of all living things. A vast amount research takes place on how these proteins are made and what they do, from enzymes that carry out chemical reactions to messengers that transmit signals between cells. In 2004, Aaron Ciechanover, Avram Hershko, and Irwin Rose won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a different but just as important process of protein machinery: how organisms break down proteins when they are finished doing their job.

The social cost of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that is the largest remaining threat to the ozone layer, is understated, concludes an international team of researchers. In their assessment, which appears in the journal Nature Climate Change, the authors write that improving the accuracy of these calculations would not only give a more accurate picture of the impact of climate change, but also spur nations to more aggressively address it.

Clonal dominance is a phenomenon that occurs when descendants (i.e., clones) of one or more founder cells in an organism contribute disproportionally to the system's final structure as the tissue grows. This phenomenon is associated with numerous biological processes, including bacterial growth and the genesis of tumors. While numerous studies have investigated clonal dominance, its origin is still is poorly understood.