Новости за 07.02.2022

Some plants and patches of Earth withstand heat and dry spells better than others. A new Stanford University study shows those different coping mechanisms are closely linked to wildfire burn areas, posing increasing risks in an era of climate change.

A college degree has long been touted as the great equalizer in our country, but a new Portland State University study suggests that the rising tuition and subsequent debt burdens that families shoulder limit the power of higher education to reduce socioeconomic disparities between children from different family backgrounds.

The United States generates more plastic trash than any other country—about 46.3 million tons of it—or 287 pounds per person a year, according to a 2020 study.

In an international collaboration, AMOLF researchers have theoretically described and experimentally observed spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) in two laser-driven coupled optical cavities. SSB is a universal phenomenon that occurs in many physical systems. It is at the heart of the laser, superconductivity, and the Higgs mechanism, for example. In the case of laser-driven systems like optical cavities, it was not yet understood how SSB occurs. Because laser-driven systems are always in a state imposed by the laser... Читать дальше...

Predators kill prey and prey attempt to avoid being killed by predators; the former obviously reduces the number of prey but, according to a new study, fear (avoiding being killed) can itself halve the population size of prey in 5 years or less, by so impairing parental investment and care fewer than half as many young reach adulthood and those that do are permanently handicapped.

In a landmark study of airborne microorganisms from ground level up to 3,500 meters, scientists from the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE) at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have found that bacteria and fungi populate the planet's lower atmosphere in very specific ways and if changed, may negatively impact human health and food supply.

An international team led by researchers at the University of Huddersfield has used ancient DNA to rewrite the history of the Orkney islands to show that Orkney actually experienced large-scale immigration during the Early Bronze Age, which replaced much of the local population.

A new report released today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) is a call to action for policymakers worldwide seeking to develop sustainable and equitable solutions to our most urgent global challenges. "Ten Facts about Land Systems for Sustainability" was co-authored by 50 leading land use scientists from 20 countries. A companion report offers specific examples to help policymakers and the public understand what's at stake at this critical moment in global development.

A fire that raged for two days in Kenya's Aberdare National Park has been extinguished after burning through hundreds of hectares of wilderness, a government forest official said on Monday.

Scientists from the UK and Singapore have successfully engineered common baker's yeast to produce a key ingredient for dementia medicines.

A new rocket company on the Space Coast looked to make its first launch on a mission for NASA Saturday as Astra Space lined up its Rocket 3 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, but an issue on the Eastern Range caused a late scrub at the end of its three-hour launch window.

The microscopic world resembles our world in some surprising ways. The environment around us is inhabited by microbes living in complex communities—some friendly and some not so friendly. Microbes compete with each other for resources and must also hide from or fight predators. One example of this is the fungus Rhizopus, which grows in the soil and on spoiled food and is the cause of "black fungus" outbreaks in COVID patients.

Whether for use in cybersecurity, gaming or scientific simulation, the world needs true random numbers, but generating them is harder than one might think. But a group of Brown University physicists has developed a technique that can potentially generate millions of random digits per second by harnessing the behavior of skyrmions—tiny magnetic anomalies that arise in certain two-dimensional materials.

Researchers from the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont (ICP), the Conca Dellà Museum (MCD), the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), the University of Zaragoza (UNIZAR) and the NOVA University of Lisbon (UNL) have described the new species of titanosaur dinosaur Abditosaurus kuehnei from the remains excavated at the Orcau-1 site, in the southern Pyrenees (Catalonia, Spain). The semiarticulated 70.5-million-year-old skeleton is the most complete specimen of this herbivorous group of dinosaurs discovered so far in Europe. Читать дальше...

There's a pandemic sweeping across the globe. No, not COVID, a different one. For decades, a brutal fungal infection has been decimating amphibians worldwide.

Thanks to 20 years of seismic data processed through one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, scientists have created the first complete, 3D visualization of a mountain-size rock called the Kumano Pluton buried miles beneath the coast of southern Japan. They can now see the rock could be acting like a lightning rod for the region's megaquakes, diverting tectonic energy into points along its sides where several of the region's largest earthquakes have happened.

As climate change pushes temperatures ever higher, Californians could lose air conditioning for roughly one week each summer because the demand for cooling will have exceeded the capacity of the electrical grid, a new study has found.

Most of the Great Lakes will remain above their long-term average water levels in the coming months but won't reach the record highs of recent years, Army Corps of Engineers hydrologists said in their latest forecast.

A cocktail of prescription drugs—from blood pressure medications to opioids—has found its way into the flesh of South Florida's population of bonefish, one of the state's most sought-after game fish, according to a study released this week.

A research team from Osnabrück University and the Ozouga Chimpanzee Project has, for the first time, observed chimpanzees applying insects to their own wounds and the wounds of conspecifics. The new findings have been published under the title "Application of insects to wounds of self and others in chimpanzees in the wild" in the journal Current Biology.

The fight against the COVID-19 pandemic is an international scientific challenge regarding the search for strategies to fight the viral infection and prevent its damaging consequences. Besides the vaccines and approved drugs by the health authorities, it is necessary to find new treatments to fight against the viral infection once this appears.

Global mean sea-level has risen by more than 3 centimeters per decade since precise satellite measurements began in the 1990s. A good third of this rise is due to thermal expansion of the warming ocean. Nearly two thirds are due to water masses added to the ocean, mainly through melting of glaciers and the two ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. The melting has increased since the 1990-s, thereby speeding up sea-level rise. Another addition of water to the ocean results from a decrease of water storage on land... Читать дальше...

Graphene is a carbon material that forms extremely thin layers. Because of its unusual properties, it is interesting for many technical applications. This also applies to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which can be regarded as cut-outs of graphene. They are considered promising materials for organic photovoltaics or for field-effect transistors.

What role do experiences with climate change and extreme events play in shaping environmental attitudes and to what extent can they explain the recent rise in environmental concerns and willingness to vote for Green parties across Europe? IIASA researchers set out to investigate these and related issues in a new study just published in Nature Climate Change.

The first atlas to measure the movement and thickness of the world's glaciers gives a clearer, but mixed picture of the globe's ice-bound freshwater resources, according to researchers from the Institute of Environmental Geosciences (IGE) and Dartmouth College.