Новости за 22.02.2022

Permafrost—ground that has been permanently frozen for two or more years—makes up a large part of the Earth, around 15% of the Northern Hemisphere.

About the size of a small school bus, the basking shark is the second largest fish in the ocean and is found in temperate and tropical waters across the globe. In the mid-1900s, basking sharks were observed by the thousands each year off California's coast. Now they are rarely seen at all in this region, called the California Current Ecosystem, or CCE.

So, a metal head shows up at a techno party... pretty unlikely, right? Right. Disliking certain kinds of music is just as constitutive of personal taste as is liking other kinds; and because it influences music-related behavior, this has consequences for our everyday lives. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, have now investigated some of the possible reasons why people dislike music. Their study has just appeared in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

In a new study, North Carolina State University researchers used artificial intelligence to predict where flood damage is likely to happen in the continental United States, suggesting that recent flood maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) do not capture the full extent of flood risk.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered a long-predicted magnetic state of matter called an "antiferromagnetic excitonic insulator."

Axolotls are no strangers to the University of Kentucky (UK).

The third-largest crater on the dwarf planet Ceres was geologically active at least once many millions of years after its formation. In a recent study published today in the journal Nature Communications, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Göttingen, the University of Münster (WWU) and the National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER) in Bhubaneswar, India present the most detailed study of Urvara crater to date. For the first time, they evaluated... Читать дальше...

For all its massive popularity, Minecraft—the highest-selling video game of all time—is not highly regarded among the gaming world's snob class. The graphics are blocky, and there isn't much of a point to it. It's for kids.

Newspapers around the world printed the discovery on their front pages: Astronomers had found that a red dwarf star called TRAPPIST-1 was home to a close-knit family of seven Earth-size planets. NASA announced the system Feb. 22, 2017.

Migrants in Iceland having frequent contact with their countries of origin are also more involved in Icelandic online communities and consume more Icelandic media, according to a new study published by Nordicom at the University of Gothenburg. However, they are less integrated in terms of offline activities.

NASA is launching a prototype instrument that could make it easier to monitor volcanic activity and air quality. Perched aboard a CubeSat about 300 miles (480 kilometers) above Earth's surface, the "Nanosat Atmospheric Chemistry Hyperspectral Observation System," or NACHOS, will use a compact hyperspectral imager to locate sources of trace gasses in areas as small as 0.15 square miles (0.4 square kilometers)—about the size of the Mall of America in Minnesota. NACHOS is part of Northrop Grumman's... Читать дальше...

Thanks to their capacity for introspection, human beings are able to estimate the duration of their actions. When they perform a task—especially a time-based task—they can evaluate their performance and correct themselves in order to do better next time. This ability is not exclusive to the human species—new research has just demonstrated for the first time that the rat can also do so.

A new NASA sounding rocket mission will soon take to the Alaskan skies. The LAMP mission, short for Loss through Auroral Microburst Pulsations, will fly above an often-overlooked kind of northern lights to test a theory on what causes them. The launch window at Poker Flat Research Range in Fairbanks, Alaska, opens on Feb. 24, 2022.

Protein-RNA complexes are ubiquitous in modern life and are essential to many stages of the cell cycle and metabolism. New research presents experimental support to provide a new perspective on how early protein-RNA interactions evolved.

A spectacular head-on collision between two galaxies fueled the unusual triangular-shaped star-birthing frenzy, as captured in a new image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

Scientists think they may have uncovered a whole new approach to fighting antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which, if successful, would help address a health crisis responsible for more deaths every year than either AIDS or malaria.

Researchers have identified a species of milkweed that holds promise for planting on roadsides to improve conservation habitat for migrating monarch butterflies.

In a paper in Cell Reports, Anindya Dutta, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues detail the first structure-function study of a long non-coding RNA, or lncRNA, called MUNC lncRNA. Their findings point out the importance of experimentally determining the structure of an lncRNA through a chemical method—rather than computer modeling—to identify structural domains that turn out to have multiple different functions.

Scientists have discovered a possible new way to fight COVID-19 by turning part of SARS-CoV-2 against itself.

How migratory animals find their way to the wintering grounds, thousands of kilometers apart from their breeding ground, is a fascinating riddle of nature. Previous studies have suggested they possibly follow the geomagnetic field lines and olfactory cues to determine the direction. However, the physiological mechanisms behind this magnetic orientation remain unknown. Now, neuroscientists and ecologists from Doshisha University and Nagoya University, Japan, conducted a study to understand how birds... Читать дальше...

Using electricity, a new method offers the possibility of recycling CO2 while also performing a notoriously difficult reaction, producing compounds potentially useful for drug development.

The recent ABC TV series Muster Dogs has brought into sharp focus the incredible skills of our working stock dogs.

When we attached tiny, backpack-like tracking devices to five Australian magpies for a pilot study, we didn't expect to discover an entirely new social behavior rarely seen in birds.

In several countries, students with disabilities were severely affected by school closures. An international study shows how students in Malawi, Ethiopia, Nepal and Qatar were left without education and had increased mental health concerns.

A combined team of researchers from Japan and Egypt has found evidence that suggests a dagger found in King Tut's tomb had origins outside of Egypt. In their paper published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, the group describes their study of the dagger and also of the Amarna Letters tablets and what they learned by doing so.