Новости за 13.04.2022

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will see the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang, but to do that, its instruments first need to get cold—really cold. On April 7, Webb's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI)—a joint development by NASA and ESA (European Space Agency)—reached its final operating temperature below 7 kelvins (minus 447 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 266 degrees Celsius).

Clouds come in myriad shapes, sizes and types, which control their effects on climate. New research led by the University of Washington shows that splintering of frozen liquid droplets to form ice shards inside Southern Ocean clouds dramatically affects the clouds' ability to reflect sunlight back to space.

Garlic has traditionally been used to ward off evil spirits, but its reputed powers do not stop it from being infected by multiple viruses.

Biobanking and assisted reproduction could become a reality for koalas by leveraging the existing technology used to help humans conceive. A detailed model, published in the international journal Animals, reveals this would significantly help captive breeding programs to retain genetic diversity, and drastically cut the costs currently required to deliver these programs.

State biologists on Wednesday recommended against designating the western Joshua tree as threatened with extinction, saying claims in a petition filed by environmentalists about the effects climate change will have on the living symbols of the California desert are premature.

As consumers seek fewer preservatives in packaged food—while the environment needs less plastic waste—Cornell scientists are finding ways to make active packaging materials with a biologically-derived polymer that helps salad dressings, marinades and beverages last longer in the fridge.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory physicists Christian Bauer, Marat Freytsis and Benjamin Nachman have leveraged an IBM Q quantum computer through the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's Quantum Computing User Program to capture part of a calculation of two protons colliding. The calculation can show the probability that an outgoing particle will emit additional particles.

What's the link between social life and brain structure? Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, the Stem Cell and Brain Research Institute at Inserm, and elsewhere are now one step closer to understanding this connection for rhesus macaques.

Diverse microbial life existed on Earth at least 3.75 billion years ago, suggests a new study led by UCL researchers that challenges the conventional view of when life began.

Alternative splicing is a fundamental biological process that allows cells to make many different types of mRNAs and proteins from a limited number of genes. For many animals, including humans, it is a feature that is essential for the development of complex cells such as muscles or neurons.

A survey study of the guardians of more than 2,500 dogs explored links between dog diet and health outcomes, suggesting that nutritionally sound vegan diets may be healthier and less hazardous than conventional or raw meat-based diets. Andrew Knight of the University of Winchester, U.K., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on April 13, 2022.

A new, U.S.-based survey study suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic may have amplified prejudicial attitudes against East Asian and Hispanic colleagues in the workplace. Neeraj Kaushal, Yao Lu and Xiaoning Huang of Columbia University, New York, and Northwestern University, Chicago, U.S.A., present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on April 13.

Tropical forests play a crucial role in driving fluctuations of the land carbon sink and may therefore influence the Earth's climate system. It is important to understand how tree growth of tropical trees responds to climate change locally and regionally. However, our understanding of how Asian tropical forest growth responds to climatic variations is still limited.

A research collaboration has discovered a new mechanism by which glucose that was captured by E. coli is then secreted from the bacterial cell as glucose-6-phosphate (G6P). This finding has significant applications for improving methods to sustainably produce useful aromatic compounds and raw materials for the medicine, food and chemical industries (among others) from biomass. The research group consisted of Associate Professor Tanaka Tsutomu of Kobe University's Graduate School of Engineering, Special... Читать дальше...

If you find yourself shouting and gesticulating wildly if others can't hear you during a Zoom call, you're not alone. The more the video quality of an online meeting degrades, the louder we start talking, a new study by researchers at Radboud University and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics finds. People also tend to change up their gestures to compensate. Their findings were published today in the Royal Society Open Science journal.

Only 33% of U.S. households believe that Black people are more likely to experience environmental pollution and that this well-documented inequality is unfair, a Washington State University study has found.

Achieving the perfect al dente texture for a pasta noodle can be tough. Noodles can take different times to fully cook, and different recipes call for different amounts of salt to be added. To boot, sometimes noodles will stick to each other or the saucepan.

Across the United States, historically redlined neighborhoods that scored lowest in racially discriminatory maps drawn by the government-sponsored Home-Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the 1930s had twice the density of oil and gas wells than comparable neighborhoods that scored highest. Wells likely contribute to disproportionate pollution and related health problems in redlined neighborhoods.

When Dr. Shiran Barber-Zucker joined the lab of Prof. Sarel Fleishman as a postdoctoral fellow, she chose to pursue an environmental dream: breaking down plastic waste into useful chemicals. Nature has clever ways of decomposing tough materials: Dead trees, for example, are recycled by white-rot fungi, whose enzymes degrade wood into nutrients that return to the soil. So why not coax the same enzymes into degrading man-made waste?

Tracing the regional origin of everything from milk to invasive bugs is now possible thanks to a University of Otago project.

If nations do all that they've promised to fight climate change, the world can still meet one of two internationally agreed upon goals for limiting warming. But the planet is blowing past the other threshold that scientists say will protect Earth more, a new study finds.

In a breakthrough that could lead to scientific advancement in the treatment of human diseases, researchers from BGI-Research, together with scientific research teams from China, Germany, Italy, Singapore, Spain, Sweden and the UK, today published the world's first non-human primate whole-body cell transcriptomic atlas in the scientific journal Nature.

Implementing climate-smart policies such as irrigation and growing recommended crops could increase crop production by 50 to 700% in Sub-Saharan Africa, a modeling tool shows.

Monarch butterflies, among the most iconic insects in North America, are increasingly plagued by a debilitating parasite, a new analysis shows. The Journal of Animal Ecology published the findings by scientists at Emory University and other institutions.

Climate change doesn't just mean warmer weather. Cold spells can hit unusual lows, too, and the fluctuations between warm and chilly are becoming more extreme.