Новости за 19.11.2021

Scientists are a step closer to breeding plants with genes from only one parent. New research led by plant biologists at the University of California, Davis, published Nov. 19 in Science Advances, shows the underlying mechanism behind eliminating half the genome and could make for easier and more rapid breeding of crop plants with desirable traits such as disease resistance.

Diseases affecting different UK tree species have been shown to have a multiplying effect on the loss of associated biodiversity, according to new research published in the Journal of Ecology by James Hutton Institute scientists and partners in the UK and Portugal. The research team reveals that the decline of ash and oak trees may affect more species than just the ones that only use oak and ash as their habitat.

Stimuli-responsive hydrogels not only express excellent biocompatibility, but also can respond when exposed to external stimulation, enabling a wider range of applications in biomedicine. However, at present, stimuli-responsive hydrogel shows poor mechanical properties and limited response to a single stimulus. There is a great need for stimuli-responsive hydrogels with excellent mechanical properties and capability to respond to multiple stimuli.

Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Biological Sciences Laurence J. Zwiebel is part of a team of researchers at Vanderbilt and the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute who are working to understand how Plasmodium falciparium—the pathogen that causes malaria in humans—affects the mosquitoes that spread the disease. The research was spearheaded by Ann Carr, a current visiting scholar and former postdoctoral fellow in the Zwiebel Lab.

Demonstrating that a material thought to be always chemically inert, hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), can be turned chemically active holds potential for a new class of catalysts with a wide range of applications, according to an international team of researchers.

Horseweed is one of the most common and most troublesome weeds in soybean production—shown to cause yield losses of up to 39 percent in the Midwest growing region. A single horseweed plant can produce up to 200,000 seeds that can be easily spread across vast distances. In addition, herbicide resistance has made horseweed increasingly difficult to control.

Understanding how climate change will affect the flooding of rivers may become easier with a new framework for assessing flood risk that's been developed by an interdisciplinary team from Penn State.

When a magician suddenly pulls a tablecloth off a table laden with plates and glasses, there is a moment of suspense as the audience wonders if the stage will soon be littered with broken glass. Until now, an analogous dilemma had faced scientists working with special electrical bubbles to create the next generation of flexible microelectronic and energy storage devices.

Expedition members of IA RAS have found a unique plate depicting winged Scythian gods surrounded by griffons during their excavations of the burial ground Devitsa V in Ostrogozhsky District of Voronezh region. This is the first case of such a finding in the Scythian barrows on Middle Don. No other items depictions of gods from the Scythian pantheon have been found in this area.

Widely accepted myths that urbanization negatively impacts food and land use biodiversity are incorrect, according to a team of researchers who developed a framework for evaluating this intersection. Their results could also affect nutrition and food insecurity in urban areas.

Barges carrying mounds of coal toward St. Louis passed by Starved Rock at a snail's pace, inching past yellow-orange trees and sandstone canyons. A bald eagle hovered above a path leading hikers toward Lover's Leap. Near the Starved Rock Lock and Dam, a pinch point along the Illinois River, the water was dull and unremarkable.

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China has found evidence of natural selection based evolutionary changes to people living in Europe over the past two to three thousand years. In their paper published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, the group describes their comparative study of people living in the U.K. today, with those living across Europe over the past several thousand years.

Ammonia is the feedstock for nitrogen fertilizers and thus vital to the sustainable development of society.

Even after 30 months in space, The Planetary Society's LightSail 2 mission continues to successfully "sail on sunbeams," demonstrating solar sail technology in Earth orbit. The mission is providing hard data for future missions that hope to employ solar sails to explore the cosmos.

The limited reservoir of fossils fuels and the ever-increasing threats of climate change have encouraged researchers to develop alternative technologies to produce eco-friendly fuels. Green hydrogen generated from the electrolysis of water using renewable electricity is considered a next-generation renewable energy source for the future. But in reality, the overwhelming majority of hydrogen fuel is obtained from the refining of fossils fuels due to the high cost of electrolysis.

How a child learns is as individual as the child themselves. Yet with the pressures of large class sizes, decreases in school funding and, most recently, home-schooling, many teachers are struggling to keep track of their students' performance.

University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus researchers have observed how an RNA molecule from a virus forms a complex, three-dimensional structure, and is able to change its shape to hijack host proteins. The details of this process, elusive to scientists for decades, were revealed by using cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM).

Living a long, healthy life is everyone's wish, but it is not an easy one to achieve. Many aging studies are developing strategies to increase health spans, the period of life spent with good health, without chronic diseases and disabilities. Researchers at KAIST presented new insights for improving the health span by just regulating the activity of a protein.

When a muscle becomes injured, it repairs itself using a flurry of cellular activity, with stem cells splitting and differentiating into many types of specialized cells, each playing an important role in the healing process.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) this week released a much anticipated policy document aimed at making the Olympics more inclusive for transgender athletes and athletes with sex variations.

In vertebrates, large exons often skip splicing events and are evolutionarily conserved. Scientists from Nagoya University, Japan, led by Associate Professor Akio Masuda, have recently identified the mechanism behind regulated splicing of large constitutive exons which are rich in disordered regions, and their potential involvement in the assembly of transcription factors. They also explained how dual-regulation by two distinct groups of splicing factors ensures phase-separation of large exon-containing transcription factors.

An upside of the increase in forest fires in the West is that they reduce the amount of fuel available for other burns. That might provide a buffering effect on western fires for the next few decades, but the threat of climate-driven forest fires is not diminishing, a new study shows.

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa arrived at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Friday for training ahead of his flight to the International Space Station on a Russian-operated spacecraft.

The 26th United Nations climate change conference, COP26, recently came to an end, having aimed to get countries united in the fight against climate change. Climate change issues are likely to hit African countries the hardest though the continent is the least responsible for driving climate change. We asked Mouhamadou Bamba Sylla the AIMS-Canada Research Chair in Climate Change Science at AIMS-Rwanda, who is a lead author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report 6 for Working Group 1... Читать дальше...

Strain-mediated magnetic coupling in ferroelectric and ferromagnetic heterostructures can offer a unique opportunity for scientific research in low-power multifunctional devices. Ferroelectrics are materials that can maintain spontaneous and reversible electric polarization. Relaxor-ferroelectrics that exhibit high electrostriction are ideal candidates for ferroelectric layer constructs due to their large piezoelectricity. Although the properties of relaxor ferroelectrics are known, their mechanistic origins remain a mystery... Читать дальше...