Новости за 24.11.2021

Two lions at the Zagreb zoo have tested positive for COVID-19 that they had contracted from their keeper, officials said on Wednesday.

The Arctic Ocean has been getting warmer since the beginning of the 20th century—decades earlier than records suggest—due to warmer water flowing into the delicate polar ecosystem from the Atlantic Ocean.

Play is important for the development of complex social, emotional, physical, and cognitive skills. Play provides young individuals with a safe space to practice new behaviors without grave repercussions. While most animals engage in play, only humans engage in rule-based games. Which kinds of games people play—competitive or cooperative—may depend on their cultural background. In a new study, published in PLoS ONE, researchers from Germany and Australia screened historical data to answer the question... Читать дальше...

Referred to as China's Venice of the Stone Age, the Liangzhu excavation site in eastern China is considered one of the most significant testimonies of early Chinese advanced civilisation. More than 5000 years ago, the city already had an elaborate water management system. Until now, the cause of the sudden collapse has been a subject of debate. Massive flooding triggered by anomalously intense monsoon rains caused the collapse, as an international team with Innsbruck geologist and climate researcher... Читать дальше...

A health coach from Antigua and Barbuda has won two tickets worth almost $1 million to be among Virgin Galactic's first space tourists—and plans to take the trip of a lifetime with her teenage daughter.

Carnegie's Yingwei Fei and Lin Wang were part of an international research team that synthesized a new ultrahard form of carbon glass with a wealth of potential practical applications for devices and electronics. It is the hardest known glass with the highest thermal conductivity among all glass materials. Their findings are published in Nature.

Apps and websites like eBird and iNaturalist encourage members of the public to report their observations on everything from songbird migration patterns to the presence of new planets. The result is massive datasets that far outmatch what professionally trained scientists could collect, at least in terms of quantity. However biases in the quality of data collected by "citizen scientists" sometimes prevent it from being used to address foundational scientific questions.

China's Père David's deer was nearly gone in the late 1800s. Just 18 deer—the very last of their kind—were brought into captivity after the rest had been hunted to extinction. When 11 of the deer reproduced, the species had a chance. Today, after centuries of reintroductions and breeding under human care, the population sits at around 3,000.

Brown dwarfs, also known as "coffee colored dwarfs" or "failed stars" are the natural link between stars and planets. They are more massive than Jupiter but now sufficiently to burn hydrogen, which is the fuel the stars use to shine. For that reason these substellar objects were not observed until observers detected them in the mid 1990's. They are particularly interesting because it was predicted that some of them could preserve intact their content of lithium, sometimes known as "white petroleum" because of its rarity and its relevance.

Monarch butterflies are famous for their annual long-distance migration, which takes them over several thousand kilometers from the north of the USA to their overwintering habitat in central Mexico. On their migration, the conspicuously orange-black-white colored butterflies use sun information as main orientation reference.

Six years ago, Michael Niederweis, Ph.D., described the first known toxin of the deadly pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), an exotoxin that had gone undetected for 132 years.

On the heels of COP-26, where global leaders agreed to make unprecedented investments in the energy transition, frontline communities already in the crosshairs of mining for critical minerals warn of the dangers posed by the mining boom for 'green tech."

In contrast to the oil painting technique that supplanted it at the end of the 15th century, tempera painting, practiced on wood panels, walls or canvas has received little attention on the physico-chemical scale. This painting technique, which has been practiced since Antiquity, is characterized by pigments applied in a water-based binding-medium, often egg-yolk.

The ability to precisely control and change properties of a photon, including polarization, position in space, and arrival time, gave rise to a wide range of communication technologies we use today, including the Internet. The next generation of photonic technologies, such as photonic quantum networks and computers, will require even more control over the properties of a photon.

Optical imaging is useful to investigate the structure and function of cellular genomes, but it is nevertheless challenging to image the immensely convoluted and irregular compacted DNA polymer. In a new report now published on Nature, Light: Science & Applications, Svitlana M. Levchenko and a team of researchers in China, Poland, and the U.S., developed fluorescence life-time imaging (FLIM) to advance the genomic structure during DNA compaction. During the work, they used two mechanisms, where... Читать дальше...

Based on recent breakthroughs in instruments and data modeling, researchers from the Department of Geoscience and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Aarhus University have collaborated to develop an effective technology to measure groundwater accurately from the surface.

The threat of disease transmission from conservationists moving wild animals between habitats or back into the wild needs to be urgently assessed to minimize risk. Experts at the University of Birmingham are calling on local and national health authorities and wildlife managers to adopt a robust approach.

Exposure to automation led to an increase in support for radical-right parties in Western European countries between the late 1990s and 2016, according to a newly published study byBocconi professors Massimo Anelli, Italo Colantone and Piero Stanig. They find that individuals that, due to their characteristics and to those of the labor market in which they are inserted, are more exposed to the automation shock are significantly more likely to vote for a radical right party. The observed difference... Читать дальше...

If spilled coffee is not immediately wiped off, it leaves behind a stain where the edges are darker than the rest. This phenomenon is called the coffee ring effect. Using this principle, a POSTECH research team has recently developed a new method for arranging quantum dots (QDs) which are nanosized semiconducting crystals. This new simple method facilitates the development of display panels with up to 20 times higher resolution than the conventional ones.

While electrons are well known to carry both charge and spin, only the electric charge portion is used as an information carrier in modern electronic devices. However, the limits of modern electronics and the impending end of Moore's Law have rekindled the interest in the development of spintronic devices, which are capable of harnessing the spin of the electrons. It is expected that the widespread adoption of spintronic computing devices can revolutionize information technology similar to the invention of electronics.

A sugar-containing polymer coating could one day help repair artificial joint implants, like hip replacements, when they are damaged through wear and tear, according to new research.

Physicists have created a new ultra-thin, two-layer material with quantum properties that normally require rare earth compounds. This material, which is relatively easy to make and does not contain rare earth metals, could provide a new platform for quantum computing and advance research into unconventional superconductivity and quantum criticality.

Neutrinos may be the key to finally solving a mystery of the origins of our matter-dominated universe, and preparations for two major, billion-dollar experiments are underway to reveal the particles' secrets. Now, a team of nuclear physicists have turned to the humble electron to provide insight for how these experiments can better prepare to capture critical information. Their research, which was carried out at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and recently published in Nature... Читать дальше...

Since artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky patented the principle of confocal microscopy in 1957, it has become the workhorse standard in life science laboratories worldwide, due to its superior contrast over traditional wide-field microscopy. Yet confocal microscopes aren't perfect. They boost resolution by imaging just one, single, in-focus point at a time, so it can take quite a while to scan an entire, delicate biological sample, exposing it light dosages that can be toxic.

Most human diseases can be traced to malfunctioning parts of a cell—a tumor is able to grow because a gene wasn't accurately translated into a particular protein or a metabolic disease arises because mitochondria aren't firing properly, for example. But to understand what parts of a cell can go wrong in a disease, scientists first need to have a complete list of parts.