Новости за 22.11.2021

It's a tempting thought: With climate change so difficult to manage and nations unwilling to take decisive action, what if we could mitigate its effects by setting up a kind of chemical umbrella—a layer of sulfuric acid in the upper atmosphere that could reflect the sun's radiation and cool the Earth?

NASA's latest launch into outer space is going to make an impact. In fact, that's its entire mission.

The intricate biological process known as autophagy plays a vital role in keeping our cells healthy and functioning by sweeping up and recycling bits of debris and invading microorganisms.

Rice University engineers have achieved a new benchmark in the design of atomically thin solar cells made of semiconducting perovskites, boosting their efficiency while retaining their ability to stand up to the environment.

A University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist has discovered a method for detecting and better defining meteorite impact sites that have long lost their telltale craters. The discovery could further the study of not only Earth's geology but also that of other bodies in our solar system.

Children as young as age 6 develop ideas that girls are less interested than boys in computer science and engineering—stereotypes that can extend into the late teens and contribute to a gender gap in STEM college courses and related careers.

Just about everyone knows that exercise is good for you. Some people can even rattle off reasons it keeps your muscles and joints strong, and how it fights off certain diseases. But how many people can tell you the story of why and how physical activity was built into human biology?

Over the past several decades, researchers have moved from using electric currents to manipulating light waves in the near-infrared range for telecommunications applications such as high-speed 5G networks, biosensors on a chip, and driverless cars. This research area, known as integrated photonics, is fast evolving and investigators are now exploring the shorter—visible—wavelength range to develop a broad variety of emerging applications. These include chip-scale LIDAR (light detection and ranging)... Читать дальше...

Scientists from the University of Newcastle, Australian Museum, South Australian Museum, and Queensland National Parks and Wildlife have found and described two new, very loud frog species from eastern Australia: the Slender Bleating Tree Frog, Litoria balatus, and Screaming Tree Frog, Litoria quiritatus.

UN projections of how much current climate policies and national pledges to cut carbon pollution will slow global warming are more uncertain than widely assumed, researchers reported Monday.

Attempts to curb illegal fishing in African waters while turning a blind eye to large fishing fleets which are most damaging to fish stocks are putting small-scale fisheries at risk, according to new research from the University of St Andrews.

Residential energy use represents roughly one-fifth of annual greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. A team of researchers led by McGill University has used data from 60 million individual American households to look into how carbon emissions caused by household energy use vary by race and ethnicity across the country. Paradoxically, this first national level analysis found that even though energy-efficient homes are more often found in Caucasian neighborhoods, carbon emissions from these... Читать дальше...

Cornell researchers have developed an innovative technique to track microbes and understand the various ways they process soil carbon, findings that add to our knowledge of how bacteria contribute to the global carbon cycle.

Our galaxy is not alone. Swirling around the Milky Way are several smaller, dwarf galaxies—the biggest of which are the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, visible in the night sky of the Southern Hemisphere.

By the late 21st century, northeastern U.S. cities will see worsening hurricane outcomes, with storms arriving more quickly but slowing down once they've made landfall. As storms linger longer over the East Coast, they will cause greater damage along the heavily populated corridor, according to a new study.

Manatees are starving in Florida, so state and wildlife agencies are considering an unprecedented measure: supplemental feedings.

The 10-year-old took off running down a dirt road in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, turning cartwheels, playing tag and picking fistfuls of wild bougainvillea.

A white dwarf star that completes a full rotation once every 25 seconds is the fastest spinning confirmed white dwarf, according to a team of astronomers from the Universities of Sheffield and Warwick.

A study examining eye disease in a common bird species shows how pathology and behavior interact in complex ways that determine how widely a pathogen can spread.

Monarch butterflies and their close relatives thrive on poisonous milkweed, thanks to genetic mutations that block the effects of the plant's toxins while allowing the poisons to accumulate in the caterpillar or adult insects as deterrents to hungry predators.

It sounds like modern-day alchemy: Transforming sugar into hydrocarbons found in gasoline.

Like a mirage on the horizon, an innovative process for converting a potent greenhouse gas into a food security solution has been stalled by economic uncertainty. Now, a first-of-its-kind Stanford University analysis evaluates the market potential of the approach, in which bacteria fed captured methane grow into protein-rich fishmeal. The study, published Nov. 22 in Nature Sustainability, finds production costs involving methane captured from certain sources in the U.S. are lower than the market price for conventional fishmeal. Читать дальше...

Quantum dots, discovered in the 1990s, have a wide range of applications and are perhaps best known for producing vivid colors in some high-end televisions. But for some potential uses, such as tracking biochemical pathways of a drug as it interacts with living cells, progress has been hampered by one seemingly uncontrollable characteristic: a tendency to blink off at random intervals. That doesn't matter when the dots are used in the aggregate, as in TV screens, but for precision applications it can be a significant drawback.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge have used a suite of correlative, multimodal microscopy methods to visualize, for the first time, why perovskite materials are seemingly so tolerant of defects in their structure. Their findings were published today in Nature Nanotechnology.

Direct band gap GeSn alloys have emerged as a promising group-IV gain material for low-cost infrared laser manufacturing. They face major issues like high threshold power, and low lasing temperature that hinder their integration into full CMOS-compatible photonic chips. Scientists in France have developed a specific GeSn-on-insulator (GeSnOI) technology that combines defects, strain, electronic-band, modal, and thermal engineering all together. They show a GeSn laser on a versatile photonic platform with improved performances.