Новости за 16.03.2022

A challenge in materials design is that in both natural and manmade materials, volume sometimes decreases, or increases, with increasing temperature. While there are mechanical explanations for this phenomenon for some specific materials, a general understanding of why this sometimes happens remains lacking.

China's Yellow River has a long and tumultuous history of flooding, and has been the cause of the some of the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded. Before the introduction of dams and other modern disaster management methods, floods would not only lead to multiple drownings, but spark long-term famines and the emergence of infectious diseases.

Chemists have developed a nano-scale structure that combines copper, gold and silver to work as a superior catalyst in a chemical reaction whose improved performance will be essential if carbon capture and utilization efforts are to succeed in helping to mitigate global warming.

Fires have gotten larger, more frequent and more widespread across the United States since 2000, according to a new University of Colorado Boulder-led paper. Recent wildfires have stoked concern that climate change is causing more extreme events, and the work published today in Science Advances shows that large fires have not only become more common, they are also spreading into new areas, impacting land that previously did not burn.

In March 2022, Russia took censorship to new extremes, blocking access to Facebook and enacting a law that threatened to punish coverage of its war on Ukraine with forced labor and imprisonment. To what extent does censorship actually reduce activity on banned media among different societal groups in the context of international conflict?

In what they call surprise findings, Johns Hopkins Medicine scientists report that unlike those in fruit flies, mosquitoes' odor sensing nerve cells shut down when those cells are forced to produce odor-related proteins, or receptors, on the surface of the cell. This "expression" process apparently makes the bugs able to ignore common insect repellants.

Attosecond pulses are indispensable tools for time-resolved studies of electron dynamics on their natural time scale (1 attosecond = 10-18 seconds). Such studies include coincidence spectroscopy and experiments with high demands on statistics or signal-to-noise ratio, especially in the case of solid and molecular samples in chemistry and biology, all with an exponentially growing interest. For these cutting-edge research topics, scientists need to increase the number of attosecond pulses in a certain unit of time... Читать дальше...

There's a powerful new member of NASA's family of giant antennas that enable engineers and scientists on Earth to communicate with the growing number of spacecraft exploring our solar system.

Despite wide variety amongst hunger-gatherer cultures, a new analysis finds that a "small world" network configuration is common to the social structures of all such groups. These network structures are constrained by the flows of energy and information through them and operate as "collective computers" optimized for the solving of complex problems.

Educational videos are one of the most widely used resources in the world of education, in both online and on-site environments. A thesis by Victor Jesús García Hernández to obtain his doctorate in the doctoral program in Education and ICT (E-learning) at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) analyzed students' perception of the usefulness of these audiovisual resources and their use in physics courses in the first year of engineering at the UOC, and at an on-site center, the Salesian University School of Sarrià (EUSS). Читать дальше...

The length of the border between Finland and Russia is 1,340 kilometers. Besides separating the European Union country from its neighbor, the border has also marked a grim reality: the largest happiness gap in Europe, with the happiest country alongside one of the unhappiest.

If humanity is ever going to find life on another planet in the solar system, it's probably best to know where to look. Plenty of scientists have spent many, many hours pondering precisely that question, and plenty have come up with justifications for backing a particular place in the solar system as the most likely to hold the potential for harboring life as we know it. Thanks to a team led by Dimitra Atri of NYU Abu Dhabi, we now have a methodology by which to rank them.

A massive release of greenhouse gases, likely triggered by volcanic activity, caused a period of extreme global warming known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) about 56 million years ago. A new study now confirms that the PETM was preceded by a smaller episode of warming and ocean acidification caused by a shorter burst of carbon emissions.

The international sanctions imposed on Russia are expected to lead to a double-digit contraction of the Russian economy, according to a new Policy Brief by the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH). Considering China and India follow the current sanctions imposed by Western countries, the Russian economy would contract by 17%. With a worldwide embargo on Russian oil and gas, the country's economy would shrink by another 12.4%.

Plant hormones are well known for their important roles in plant development, including fruit development, and many researchers have devoted significant effort towards understanding the relationship between plant hormones and parthenogenesis. What are the latest research advances in hormones and parthenogenesis? What are the molecular mechanisms that underlie parthenocarpic fruit formation, specifically the role of plant hormones? Until recently, a current summary of this information was lacking.

Eugene Parker, a pioneering American astrophysicist whose mathematical prediction that charged particles streamed from stars in a solar wind was met with disbelief before he was ultimately vindicated, has died aged 94, NASA said on Wednesday.

Redwoods are among the most well-studied trees on the planet, and yet their mysteries continue to surprise and delight scientists and nature lovers.

If we looked at Earth from outer space, it would appear that our blue-and-green planet has abundant water. But of all that blue, less than 3% is freshwater, and less than 1% of that is available for use. More than a billion people lack access to water, and 2.7 billion experience water scarcity for at least one month out of the year.

One proposed strategy in the fight against climate change is to increase tree cover in the world's savannas, either through the planting of new trees or fire suppression, to increase the uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, a new Yale-led study of African savannas suggests this approach is far less effective than previously estimated.

"Streams to the river, river to the sea." If only it were that simple.

A new study in the journal Earth's Future led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst shows that, since Euro-American settlement approximately 160 years ago, agricultural fields in the midwestern U.S. have lost, on average, two millimeters of soil per year. This is nearly double the rate of erosion that the USDA considers sustainable. Furthermore, USDA estimates of erosion are between three and eight times lower than the figures reported in the study. Finally, the study's authors conclude that plowing... Читать дальше...

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Nagoya Protocol (NP) are multilateral agreements aimed at conserving biodiversity, promoting sustainable use of biological components, and facilitating the equitable sharing of the benefits arising from genetic resources. Although widely considered to be born of good intentions, the access and benefit sharing (ABS) framework introduced under these agreements have been criticized for introducing bureaucratic hurdles to effective biodiversity conservation and other scientific endeavors... Читать дальше...

Ice cores drilled in Antarctica and Greenland have revealed gigantic volcanic eruptions during the last ice age. Sixty-nine of these were larger than any eruption in modern history. According to the University of Copenhagen physicists behind the research, these eruptions can teach us about our planet's sensitivity to climate change.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham, U.K. and Duke University, U.S., have described the exceptional strength and toughness of novel polymers made from sugars, and the chemistry underpinning their characteristics, in a study published in Angewandte Chemie.

Researchers from the TU Delft have come up with a physical-based model that establishes a quantitative framework on how gene-editing with CRISPR-Cas9 works, and allows them to predict where, with what probability, and why targeting errors (off-targets) occur. This research, which has been published in Nature Communications, gives us a first detailed physical understanding of the mechanism behind the most important gene editing platform of today.