Новости за 25.04.2022

New research led by Lancaster University and published today by the United Kingdom's Financial Reporting Council (FRC), in conjunction with the UK Anti-Slavery Commissioner, has identified significant shortcomings in the quality of companies' modern slavery reporting.

When visiting cities, coyotes seem to prefer the nightlife while deer and squirrels would rather be home before dark. That's the finding of new research from University of Utah ("the U") scientists who found that mammals in urban environments shifted the timing of their daily activities, likely to avoid encountering humans.

Microplastics are all around us—in the water we drink, the food we eat and the air we breathe. But before researchers can understand the real impact of these particles on health, they need faster and more effective ways to quantify what is there.

Open water swimming is not for the fainthearted, especially when air and water temperatures are frigid. So how do furry Weddell seal pups born on the Antarctic sea ice keep on swimming?

Just as an electrical switch regulates the flow of electric current, thermal switches can control the flow of heat. These switches serve as thermal control devices and are useful for thermal management applications. For example, they can be used in industries to reduce waste heat, resulting in cost and energy savings. These switches require materials whose thermal conductivity (κ) can be modulated to a large extent. This would allow the switch to have an "on" and "off" state depending on the thermal conductivity. Читать дальше...

NASA's SpaceX Crew-4 mission, originally scheduled to launch to the International Space Station on Saturday, April 23, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, has been rescheduled to Wednesday, April 27. This launch carries three NASA astronauts—Kjell Lindgren, Robert Hines, and Jessica Watkins—and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. This spaceflight is the first for Hines and Watkins and the second for Lindgren and Cristoforetti.

Every EU citizen consumes around 80 kilograms of meat per year. But every juicy steak, every delicious sausage has a price that we do not pay at the counter, because livestock farming damages the climate and the environment. Ruminants, for instance, produce methane, which accelerates global warming. Animals also convert only a portion of the calories they are fed into meat. In order to feed the same number of people, meat therefore requires a much larger land area. This is to the detriment of ecosystems... Читать дальше...

As someone who has extensively studied what nature has produced, Associate Professor Guy German likes to tell his students: You think you're a good engineer, but evolution is a better one.

A research group led by Sa Kan Yoo at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research (BDR) has discovered a completely unknown type of cell death that takes place in the guts of the common fruit fly. The new process, called erebosis by the researchers, is thought to play a role in gut metabolism. The findings compel a revision of the conventional concept of cell death and overturn the previously established theory of tissue homeostasis in the gut. The study was published April 25 in PLoS Biology.

Bees are among the most important pollinators on earth. They pollinate not only plants with beautiful flowers, but also many crops. But despite the insects' great importance for humans and nature, their population is declining. Researchers cite various possible causes for this, including pesticides. This factor has now been investigated in a study by an international research team with the participation of the Julius-Maximilians-University (JMU) Würzburg. They found that pesticides are probably a major factor in the reproduction of bees.

How do we perceive music and sounds? This question is the basis of the research by the Language and Comparative Cognition Group (LCC) of the UPF Center for Brain and Cognition (CBC) published recently in the journal Animal Cognition.

Pollination by insects is essential for the production of many food crops. The presence of pollinators, such as bees, depends on the availability of nesting sites and sufficient food. If these conditions are lacking, the pollinators also fail to appear and the yield of flowering arable crops, such as broad beans or oilseed rape, suffers as well. A team from the University of Göttingen and the Julius Kühn Institute (JKI) in Braunschweig has investigated how the composition of flowering crops and semi-natural... Читать дальше...

Vervet monkeys are quick and clever planners of the best route to follow on foraging trips, shows a new study. When dominant group mates are too far away to interfere, vervets tend to choose the shortest route along successive food sites, snacking on each at leisure. But when dominants group mates are nearby, they seem to assess the time before these can approach and displace them at the feeding site. They then choose the route that maximizes their food intake and minimizes travel distance before the competitors' arrival.

Antibiotics were once proclaimed the salvation of the world. Today, researchers fear that antibiotics could become a threat to public health and the natural environment.

High-temperature polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (HT-PEMFC) can be applied in electric vehicles and marine power supplies.

In areas where water is scarce, reusing wastewater is one way to increase the supply. But to do that safely, water has to undergo lots of cleaning procedures, including some new innovations using edible materials like okra!

A new study from researchers in Finland, published Monday, found that diets that simply cut down on meat and dairy are nearly as climate-friendly as diets that rely on culture-grown meat and milk.

As educators and industry mull strategies for attracting more young adults to math-oriented professions, a new study in the journal Child Development suggests that children's early experiences doing math homework and activities with their parents shape their motivation and achievement.

The Back River in Baltimore County is unsafe for drinking, swimming or any human contact, Maryland environmental officials declared Friday amid ongoing concerns about failing systems at the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant in Dundalk.

Among the many complex arguments over water in California, one particularly heated debate centers on whether the state should seek more drinking water from a plentiful but expensive source: the Pacific Ocean.

Bear with them. They were just hibernating.

Plants have been the primary source of our food for ages. With the human population growing rapidly, there is a continual increase in the demand for food produce. Since agricultural land is limited, fulfilling this increasing demand requires finding ways to improve the food crop productivity from existing cultivations. "Crop architecture," or the design of the crop plant, can have a major influence on its produce. Identifying crop architecture patterns and underlying biology could, therefore, help improve agricultural productivity.

The Karnali River is one of the major transboundary rivers of the Nepalese central Himalaya and a major tributary of the Ganges River. Though there is a huge potential for dendrohydrological research in the Karnali River Basin (KRB) region in Nepal, no multi-centuries streamflow reconstruction is available yet.

Remnant trees play an important role for post-disturbance forest landscape recovery. Due to the nucleation of remnant trees in forest recovery, their spatial configuration, e.g., location and abundance, is a critical factor driving forest landscape recovery.

Determining the processes and mechanisms underlying community assembly is a favorite pastime for ecologists. During the past decade, functional trait-based approaches have been widely used to test mechanistic community assembly hypotheses through quantifying functional patterns, which could reflect different ecological processes acting on community assembly with diversified evolution of functional traits.