Новости за 20.04.2022

The test version of a unique satellite navigation receiver has been delivered for integration testing on the Lunar Pathfinder spacecraft. The NaviMoon satnav receiver is designed to perform the farthest ever positioning fix from Earth, employing signals that will be millions of times fainter than those used by our smartphones or cars.

The U.S. Department of Energy has formally approved the start of full construction for the PIP-II project, an essential upgrade to the accelerator complex at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The heart of the project is a powerful new superconducting linear accelerator that will enable the world's most intense high-energy neutrino beam.

Communication seems natural to us, but there are plenty of situations where background noise makes it hard for us to understand each other. In those moments, gesturing can come in handy, particularly if conversations in your native language are taking place in the background. This has been shown in research by psycholinguist Veerle Wilms in cooperation with Susanne Brouwer and Linda Drijvers. Their paper is published on 19 April in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.

The Sun emitted two solar flares on April 19, 2022, one moderate peaking at 9:35 p.m. EST and one strong peaking at 11:57 p.m. EST. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the Sun constantly, captured an image of both events.

Earth's oceans are warming and becoming more acidic as the climate changes. For much of the flora and fauna of the sea, that could mean extinction, unless species can adapt to new conditions and food sources—or migrate to more hospitable waters.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta/Facebook, recently remarked in a podcast interview that when it came to hiring new staff, his preference was people whose "values aligned in the things that you care about". This, he said, was akin to "choosing a friend or a life partner". He went on to state that many young people were too "objective-focused" and "not focused enough on connections and … people".

The world is a wickedly complex place, especially when people have a need to share limited resources. Herding communities in northern Namibia, for instance, are afflicted by poverty, drought and degraded landscapes. International groups want to help—development agencies have made several attempts to improve conditions in these communities with outside investments, but without much success. The reasons for the failures, up to now, have remained something of a puzzle.

Over half of the world's population now lives in an urban area, according to a recent report by the United Nations. And that number is expected to grow to two-thirds by the middle of this century. Rapid urbanization's effects on local ecosystems and their biodiversity are not yet fully understood. But the Global Urban Evolution Project (GLUE), an ongoing international collaboration involving hundreds of researchers including two from the University of Concordia, is working to build a more complete... Читать дальше...

Climate changes. It has done so, often dramatically, over the course of Earth's geologic timescales, measured in hundreds of thousands and millions of years. Some of these changes might have caused a phenomenon called snowball Earth, a period in which the entire planet froze over. Other changes have taken the planet in the opposite direction.

There is much disinformation surrounding the preventative measures that have been implemented across the globe in order to reduce the spread of the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, and deaths from the disease it causes COVID-19. However, the research suggests that many of the measures, including social distancing, lockdown, face-covering mandates, and vaccination, all help reduce infection rates, hospitalizations, and deaths regardless of the disinformation.

An international consortium of scientists has launched a new effort to create a reference genome that captures the genetic diversity of all the peoples of the world. The researchers describe the initiative, called the Human Pangenome Project, in a paper published Wednesday, April 20, in the journal Nature.

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has captured dramatic footage of Phobos, Mars' potato-shaped moon, crossing the face of the Sun. These observations can help scientists better understand the moon's orbit and how its gravity pulls on the Martian surface, ultimately shaping the Red Planet's crust and mantle.

With marijuana now legal in many U.S. states, some veterinarians are seeing more cases of cannabis poisoning in dogs and other pets, according to a new survey.

An international team led by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego used computer model simulations to find that climate change is altering the mechanics of surface ocean circulations, making them become faster and thinner.

Our early ancestors probably created intricate artwork by firelight, an examination of 50 engraved stones unearthed in France has revealed.

Climate change could lead to more small-bodied bees but fewer bumblebees, according to research published Wednesday, warning of potential "cascading" effects on plant pollination and across whole ecosystems.

For single-atom catalysts (SACs), the catalyst supports are not only anchors for single atoms, but also modulators for geometric and electronic structures, which has an important impact on the catalytic performance. Selecting an appropriate support to prepare SACs with uniform coordination environments is critical for achieving optimal performance and clarifying the relationship between the structure and the property of SACs.

Graphene (GR), a single-layer carbon sheet with a hexagonal packed lattice structure, has displayed attractive potential in artificial photocatalysis due to its enchanting properties in enhancing light absorption, electron transfer dynamics, and surface reactions. Nowadays, multifunctional GR-based photocatalysts, such as GR-semiconductor, GR-metal, and GR-organics have been widely employed in photocatalytic water splitting, environmental purification, carbon dioxide reduction, and selective organic... Читать дальше...

On 15 January, the eruption of a submarine volcano in the Tonga archipelago destroyed 90% of the uninhabited island of Hunga Tonga Ha'apai and formed an ash plume half the size of France. It also generated an atmospheric shock wave that circled the Earth several times, and, more classically, seismic waves recorded by monitoring stations around the world.

Ever since they were discovered in 2018, fast blue optical transients (FBOTs) have utterly surprised and completely confounded both observational and theoretical astrophysicists.

When U.S. couples have their first child, mothers' earnings still drop substantially relative to fathers', and new Cornell research demonstrates the stubborn, decades-old pattern isn't changing despite broad increases in other aspects of gender equality.

In some of the most crowded parts of the universe, black holes may be tearing apart thousands of stars and using their remains to pack on weight. This discovery, made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, could help answer key questions about an elusive class of black holes.

A proposed land management project could cause a population of dolphins in the Northern Gulf of Mexico to become functionally extinct, according to a new study led by the University of St Andrews.

The 2022 Atlantic hurricane season will see 17 to 21 named storms forming in the Atlantic basin, according to researchers at North Carolina State University. The Atlantic basin includes the entire Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.

Just by moving around, microorganisms like bacteria and sperm are performing a remarkable feat. The effects of viscosity are amplified at small scales, which means a microorganism swimming in water is a bit like a person trying to do the backstroke in a tar pit. Scientists still don't have a complete picture of how they do it.