Новости за 28.12.2021

Scientists at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory evaluate early data the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft sent back to Earth as it observes comet Leonard, a mass of space dust, rock and ice just over half a mile across (1 kilometer) as it heads inbound to the sun.

Hot weather can be dangerous to our canine friends. Humans can sweat all over our body, but dogs can only sweat on their paw pads, which is not much use when it comes to shedding body heat.

Afforestation is an important strategy to enhance terrestrial carbon sink. It alters regional landscapes and affects microbial processes in soil ecosystems. In particular, soil fungi, which play an important role in carbon and nitrogen cycling, could be greatly affected. However, at a watershed scale, the changes of soil fungal communities under afforestation could not only be influenced by host plant and soil environment, but also by spatial distance. How to distinguish the sources of the influences is particularly important.

The Changjiang Estuary and adjacent sea area suffer from frequent harmful algal blooms, exerting impacts on ecological environment and fishery resources.

For the past century, Southwestern archaeologists have debated what happened to the Mimbres people of southwestern New Mexico after AD 1150, a group known for their vibrant pottery with its distinctive geometric and animal designs.

Just like every other organism on Earth, plants' ultimate goal is to survive and reproduce. In order to achieve this, they must make trade-offs between where and how to allocate their finite set of resources. Whether they put their resources and energy into their growth, reproduction or maintenance, is all part of their so-called plant strategy. With a new framework, Ph.D. candidate Jianhong Zhou and her supervisors found that not all of the currently known strategies represent a plant strategy in real life.

Oceanographers have great difficulty conducting investigations by ship in Antarctic continental shelf areas where ice is attached to the shore, so a team of researchers have replaced these boat-based studies with sensors attached to seals, which have far less trouble navigating such waters.

Not all superheroes wear capes—some live in rubbish bins, garbage dumps and on dead bodies. Maggots are the offspring of the blowfly, the scourge of the Aussie picnic, nuisance of summer and feared by farmers for infesting and killing sheep.

Like a sprinkle of powdered sugar on a rich red velvet cake, this scene from the ESA/Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter captures the contrasting colors of bright white water-ice against the rusty red martian soil.

From simulated moondust to an ultraflat floor, a 3D-printed human bone to a wall decoration that once flew on the Hubble Space Telescope, the new 99 Objects of ESA ESTEC website gives visitors a close-up view of intriguing, often surprising artifacts assembled together to tell the story of ESA's technical heart.

Ahh, summer at the beach! The sun on your face, sand between your toes, an ice cream in your hand.

Editorial choices can impact the amplitude of business cycles even if the information that is reported is correct. On reason is that the focus of the reports can be on sectors that are non-representative of the economy in general. A new study shows that financial reporting can explain up to 20 percent of the business cycles for GDP and 40 percent of the business cycles for unemployment.

In a new study that appeared in the renowned journal Systematic Biology, scientists of Ghent University (Belgium), and the University of Basel (Switzerland) have examined the evolution of waterfleas using state-of-the-art tools. These small crustaceans of the class Branchiopoda are key zooplankton species in aquatic ecosystems worldwide. Daphnia is perhaps the best known waterflea, containing herbivorous species that are widely used model organisms in biology, yet there are also predatory lineages such as the glass waterflea (Leptodora).

As rising sea-levels threaten coastal communities, people have turned from costly infrastructure to seagrass for coastal defense. But most research has stuck to testing similar coasts, grasses and soils.

Forest cover is being lost in South-East Asian protected forest areas at almost the same rate as non-protected areas in many countries amid ballooning populations, says a new eight-country study.

Each one of the trillions of cells that make up the human body suffers more than 10,000 DNA lesions every day. These injuries would be catastrophic if cells were unable to repair them, but a very delicate machinery that detects and repair genetic damage is at work to prevent DNA mutations and diseases such as cancer. With the help of machine learning applied to high-throughput microscopy, among other techniques, researcher Bárbara Martínez, a member of the Metabolism and Cell Signalling Group led... Читать дальше...

When environmental protection was a barely noticed issue on the political agenda, it was able to achieve massive support from the American public. The air pollution, water pollution, solid and toxic waste programs of the 1970s and 1980s were not partisan issues. In 1972 the Water Act was enacted over then-President Nixon's veto. Public support for these laws was well over 70%, and the laws were crafted by a bipartisan coalition of committed legislators. What happened?

The United States unemployment rate of 4.2 percent is the lowest since 1969—a stunning dynamic that has created optimism for the American workforce.

Cell generated force plays essential roles in a wide range of biological processes, such as cell motility, cytokinesis, and tissue morphogenesis. In a study published in Nature Communications, a research team led by the Division of Quantitative Biology at the National Institute for Basic Biology in Japan has successfully developed "OptoMYPT": an optogenetic tool that utilizes focused light to reduce actin and myosin-based contractile force.

The three-body problem is one of the oldest problems in physics: It concerns the motions of systems of three bodies—like the sun, Earth, and the moon—and how their orbits change and evolve due to their mutual gravity. The three-body problem has been a focus of scientific inquiry ever since Newton.

Tree growth is an important part of forest dynamics, the symbiosis between trees and mycorrhizal fungi (e.g., arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM), ectomycorrhizal (EM) and dual-mycorrhizal (AEM)) can improve species ability to absorb nutrients and adapt to the local environment, which ultimately results in the difference of species response to biotic and abiotic factors. However, it remains unclear how species with different mycorrhizal associations exhibit growth responses to local abiotic and biotic gradients.

The prokaryotic clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) and CRISPR-associated (CRISPR/Cas) protein system has been reconstructed for a revolutionary targeted genome modification platform and nucleic acid detection tool. Restricted by the protospacer adjacent motif (PAM) requirement, specificity, and efficiency, more Cas proteins need to be characterized and adapted for genome editing and other applications. The RNA-guided DNA interference activity and ssDNA (single-strand... Читать дальше...

Antarctica is a mysterious continent, we have barely scratched its icy surface in terms of exploration and within this frozen realm, there are unimagined resources that remain untapped. The continent lies without state, nations stake claims to chunks of it but its legal status is frozen like its vast wildernesses. Now, a new paper in the International Journal of Technology, Policy and Management suggests an approach based on the anarcho-capitalist and heterodox-economist philosophy of Murray Newton... Читать дальше...

The formation of the dorsal-ventral (DV) axis is one of the most important events during the early development of bilaterian animals. It is widely accepted that a conserved molecular logic (BMP2/4 and Chordin) regulates tissue differentiation along the DV axis.

Most scientists would blanch at being labeled a spin doctor. But when it comes to Evgeny Tsymbal, Ding-Fu Shao and their colleagues, the lab coat fits.