Новости за 02.03.2022

One person's wastewater is another person's treasure. A new Stanford University study paves the way to mining sewage for valuable materials used in fertilizers and batteries that could someday power smartphones and airplanes. The analysis, published recently in ACS ES&T Engineering, reveals how to optimize electrical processes for transforming sulfur pollution, and could help lead to affordable, renewable energy-powered wastewater treatment that creates drinkable water.

It was a turbulent run up to the 2020 U.S. Presidential election: COVID-19 struck, ending and upending lives and livelihoods, while the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and other Black Americans led to Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests nationwide.

Mollusk shells at 4,000-year-old Native American shell ring villages indicate that environmental change may have driven the formation and abandonment of these coastal communities, according to a study by Carey Garland and Victor Thompson in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on March 2, 2022.

Data from large-scale travel surveys suggest that socioeconomic status may amplify underlying differences in the spatial patterns of how men versus women travel within cities. Mariana Macedo of the University of Exeter, U.K., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on March 2, 2022.

Sex roles in birds describe sex differences in courtship, mate competition, social pair-bonds, and parental care. Different explanations have been put forward to explain these differences but none are based on a comprehensive study. Therefore, an international team of experts set out to analyze data on 1,800 of the approximately 9,000 different species of birds as their study organisms. The results show that adult sex ratios are the main driving force for differences in sex roles. A paper on this... Читать дальше...

Research by University of Liverpool ocean scientists has found that found that food webs in the Barents Sea have been affected by our changing climate since at least the 1950s.

UCLA researchers have developed a unique design of ultrathin films for highly flexible yet mechanically robust bioelectronic membranes that could pave the way for diagnostic on-skin sensors that fit precisely over the body's contours and conform to its movements.

They thrive everywhere from bustling cities to remote rainforests—even in our own backyards. Pervasive and unapologetic mooches, parasites rely on other organisms for their survival.

Most people are familiar with the cell nucleus from grade school biology as a storage compartment for DNA. But the nucleus also contains several distinct structures, called nuclear bodies or domains, whose roles scientists are just beginning to understand.

The IPCC report warns many of the impacts of global warming are now irreversible, and humans and nature are being pushed beyond their abilities to adapt.

A research team led by the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has successfully used specific enzymes to destroy the genetic information of SARS-CoV-2 directly after the virus penetrates the cell. The findings could serve as the basis for a therapy to treat COVID-19.

In Washington state, many counties in recent years have supplemented their revenues through court-imposed fines such as traffic citations and court processing fees.

A shark hunt that could make history is being staged off North Carolina, as a team of scientists set out to prove this is the coastline where great white sharks gather annually to mate in the Western Atlantic.

"Spongy moth" has been formally adopted as the new common name for the moth species Lymantria dispar by the Entomological Society of America.

A group of scientists walked out on to frozen Lake Michigan to do something they've done time and again throughout the Great Lakes: collect water.

Qubits, the building blocks of quantum computers, can be made from many different technologies. One way to make a qubit is to trap a single neutral atom in place using a focused laser, a technique that won the Nobel Prize in 2018.

A rare spectroscopy technique performed at Swinburne University of Technology directly quantifies the energy required to bind two excitons together, providing for the first time a direct measurement of the biexciton binding energy in WS2.

With deadlines to address climate change looming, countries worldwide missed a chance with unprecedented pandemic stimulus spending, a new Johns Hopkins University study finds.

Marcel Dicke already knew that insects are an excellent source of protein for humans, but he didn't expect to learn that they have such a positive impact on plants. In an Opinion paper published on March 2 in the journal Trends in Plant Science, Dicke, a researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and colleagues discuss the benefits of using the waste from insect-as-food-and-feed production to promote sustainable crops. The authors argue this approach could enhance plant growth, health, pollination, and resilience.

Using the most powerful telescopes on Earth and in space, a team of astronomers has found for the first time blasts of hot, warm and cold winds from a neutron star whilst it consumes matter from a nearby star. The discovery provides new insight into the behaviors of some of the most extreme objects in the universe.

One of the grand challenges with using CRISPR-based gene editing on humans is that the molecular machinery sometimes makes changes to the wrong section of a host's genome, creating the possibility that an attempt to repair a genetic mutation in one spot in the genome could accidentally create a dangerous new mutation in another.

An international team of researchers led by DESY scientists has demonstrated for the first time at the FLASHForward experiment that, in principle, it is possible to operate plasma accelerators at the repetition rates desired by particle physicists and photon scientists. This opens the opportunity to utilize such high-gradient accelerators as booster stages in existing high-repetition-rate facilities, such as the large-scale X-ray free-electron lasers FLASH and European XFEL, in order to significantly... Читать дальше...

When did populations of Homo sapiens first arrive in China and what happened when they encountered the Denisovans or Neanderthals who lived there? A new study in Nature by an international team of researchers opens a window into hunter-gatherer lifestyles 40,000 years ago. Archaeological excavations at the site of Xiamabei in the Nihewan Basin of northern China have revealed the presence of innovative behaviors and unique toolkits.

A new review paper on magnetic topological materials introduces a theoretical concept that interweaves magnetism and topology. It identifies and surveys potential new magnetic topological materials and suggests possible future applications in spin and quantum electronics and as materials for efficient energy conversion.

Invasive alien species (IAS) are a leading contributor to biodiversity loss, and they cause annual economic damage in the order of hundreds of billions of US dollars in each of many countries around the world. Smartphone apps are one relatively new tool that could help monitor, predict, and ideally prevent their spread. But are they living up to their full potential?