Новости за 10.03.2022

Whether virtual or in-person learning is better may be the wrong question.

The unwelcome, unsought and altogether unsexy COVID-19 pandemic was arguably the greatest monkey wrench for the dating app industry. The business model is founded on forging proximate relationships, and—rightly or wrongly—associated with casual sex. Beginning in March 2020, it was facing a bleak future as relationships were to be mediated by screens for an unforeseeable amount of time.

The emotional cost of a customer-facing job—or emotional labor—puts a heavy burden on tourism resort workers, according to a new study.

Two-thirds of Muslims, half of Jews and more than a third of evangelical Protestant Christians experience workplace discrimination, albeit in different ways, according to a new study from Rice University's Religion and Public Life Program (RPLP).

Companies in the software industry, where novel ideas are prized, use linguistic tactics to develop new labels for their innovations to stay ahead of competitors. Using language to signal that something is "new and different" is an important tool for success, University of California, Davis, research suggests.

Ice cores allow climate researchers to look 800,000 years back in time. New research indicates that atmospheric carbon acts as fertilizer, increasing biological production. The mechanism removes carbon from the air and thereby slows the acceleration in global warming.

Scientists have unraveled the science behind the jets of plasma—the fourth state of matter consisting of electrically charged particles that occur just about everywhere in the sun's chromosphere, which is the atmospheric layer just above the sun's visible surface.

A new discovery by physicists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) could make certain components in computers and smartphones obsolete. The team has succeeded in directly converting frequencies to higher ranges in a common magnetic material without the need for additional components. Frequency multiplication is a fundamental process in modern electronics. The team reports on its research in the latest issue of Science.

With the help of special telescopes, researchers have observed a cosmic particle accelerator as never before. Observations made with the gamma ray observatory H.E.S.S. in Namibia show for the first time the course of an acceleration process in a stellar process called a nova, which comprises powerful eruptions on the surface of a white dwarf. A nova creates a shock wave that tears through the surrounding medium, pulling particles with it and accelerating them to extreme energies. Surprisingly, the... Читать дальше...

Clemson University researchers have discovered a genetic variation associated with an often deadly esophageal disorder frequently found in German shepherd dogs.

Around the world, between 40 and 50 volcanoes are currently erupting or in states of unrest, and hundreds of millions of people are at risk of hazards posed by these potentially active volcanos. Yet, despite the profound hazards posed to human life and property by volcanic eruptions, humanity still cannot reliably and accurately predict them, and even when forecasts are accurately made by experts, they may not afford ample time for people to evacuate and make emergency preparations.

Manatees resorted to eating a staggering amount of algae after seagrasses died-off in Florida's Indian River Lagoon.

The development of new scientific ways to see more deeply into the building blocks of nature on a cellular level has led to the some of the greatest advances in medicine over the last century. Now, new research into phosphoinositides, which are a family of membrane lipids essential for many biological and pathological processes and which represent one of the most functionally versatile membrane lipid families involved in human health and disease, has seen further developments in the use of mass spectrometry... Читать дальше...

Scientists reveal a new part of the recipe for complex life on planets, and it involves the onset of a microbial fertilizer factory on the Earth's seafloor roughly 2.6 billion years ago.

Superconductors—metals in which electricity flows without resistance—hold promise as the defining material of the near future, according to physicist Brad Ramshaw, and are already used in medical imaging machines, drug discovery research and quantum computers being built by Google and IBM.

Economists have long studied the question of whether machines might one day replace human workers, but the advent of new technologies makes it particularly important as we consider the future of work in the 21st century. New research by Wake Forest economics professor Mark Curtis and co-researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Grinnell College and Duke University, sheds light on the question by studying a tax policy that incentivized firms to invest in new machinery.

A new analysis spanning more than 86,000 plant species from John Kress, botany curator emeritus at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, and Gary Krupnick, head of the museum's plant conservation unit, finds that on this human-dominated planet, many more species of plants are poised to "lose" rather than "win." The study was published today, March 10, in the journal Plants, People, Planet.

The discovery of new structures holds tremendous promise for accessing advanced functional materials in energy and environmental applications. Although cage-based porous materials, metal-organic polyhedra (MOPs), are attracting attention as an emerging functional platform for numerous applications, hardly predictable and seemingly uncontrollable packing structures remain an open question. There is a high demand for a roadmap for discovering and rationally designing new MOP structures.

A long-term study of Hawaiian coral species provides a surprisingly optimistic view of how they might survive warmer and more acidic oceans resulting from climate change.

To have a better chance of holding global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we need to accelerate the phase-down of HFC refrigerants under the Montreal Protocol. This could also reduce pollution and improve energy access.

Besides climate change, which is mostly the result of our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, plastic pollution stands as one of the most critical environmental concerns of this decade. The sheer quantity of discarded and misplaced plastic is dealing irreparable damage to Earth's ecosystems, affecting our crops and contaminating our water supplies. If we are to transition into truly sustainable societies, we need to find efficient ways to repurpose discarded plastics. But, what if we could fight fire with fire or, in this case, carbon with carbon?

Tuberculosis (TB) is the second most common cause of death worldwide by an infectious pathogen (after Covid-19), but many aspects of its long history with humans remain controversial. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and Arizona State University in Tempe, USA, found that ancient TB discovered in archeological human remains from South America is most closely related to a variant of TB associated today with seals, but surprisingly these cases... Читать дальше...

To prevent the extinction of the northern white rhino, the international consortium BioRescue is attempting to create artificial egg cells from stem cells. A team led by MDC's Sebastian Diecke and Micha Drukker of Leiden University has now revealed in Scientific Reports that they are one step closer to achieving this goal.

Several natural disasters have afflicted various parts of Brazil since 2022 began, from deadly flooding and mudslides due to abnormally heavy rain in the states of Minas Gerais, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, to severe drought in Rio Grande do Sul state. However, only 6.1% of its 5,568 municipalities have plans of any kind to mitigate the risk and impact of such disasters, according to a survey by IBGE, the national census and statistics bureau.

The Queensland and New South Wales floods are a powerful reminder that health crises and natural disasters can arrive without warning and wreak havoc on the lives of those affected.