Новости за 12.05.2022

The vibrational modes of nanomechanical resonators are analogous to different notes of a guitar string and have similar properties such as frequency (pitch) and lifetime. The lifetime is characterized by the quality factor, which is the number of times that the resonator oscillates until its energy is reduced by 70%. The quality factor is crucial for the modern applications of mechanical resonators as it determines the level of thermal noise, which is a limit for sensing weak forces and observation of quantum effects.

Optical computing uses photons instead of electrons to perform computations, which can significantly increase the speed and energy efficiency of computations by overcoming the inherent limitations of electrons. The basic principle of optical computing is the light-matter interaction. Matrix computing has become one of the most widely used and indispensable information processing tools in science and engineering, contributing a large number of computational tasks to most signal processing, such as... Читать дальше...

Water often falls from the sky and is stored in mountains across the U.S. as snow before it melts and flows down to urban and rural communities. Knowing what factors influence when and how much of that snowmelt ultimately makes it to streams, rivers and reservoirs is crucial for water managers trying to make the most of limited water resources. A new study led by researchers at University of Nevada, Reno and the Desert Research Institute (DRI) published in Environmental Research Letters identifies... Читать дальше...

For a creature that—legs and all—might be no larger than a pencil eraser, spiders continue to surprise researchers with their cognitive abilities.

The Hunga volcano ushered in 2022 with a bang, devastating the island nation of Tonga and sending aid agencies, and Earth scientists, into a flurry of activity. It had been nearly 140 years since an eruption of this scale shook the Earth.

At the dawn of the 1970s, the idea of a massive scalar boson as the keystone of a unified theoretical model of the weak and electromagnetic interactions had yet to become anchored in a field that was still learning to live with what we now know as the standard model of particle physics. As the various breakthroughs of the decade gradually consolidated this theoretical framework, the Brout–Englert–Higgs (BEH) field and its boson emerged as the most promising theoretical model to explain the origin of mass.

With rare exceptions, each of the trillions of cells in our bodies carries an exact duplicate of the human genome, which contains between 20,000 and 25,000 protein-coding genes. But to carry out the specialized functions that make life possible, organs like the kidney, lung, heart, and brain rely on tissues built from distinctive cell types, which come about when individual cells develop to express only a particular subset of genes in the genome.

Imagine sitting at a meeting where the shape of the table and your place at it might impact how you get along with the other members. Cells also communicate with their nearest neighbors, and in embryos, nothing is left to chance in the "seating plan" for the first few cells. However, questions remain about the how this process is controlled and how it can influence the overall growth of an organism.

Researchers from ETH Zurich, University Hospital of Bern and the University of Bern have equipped gut bacteria with data logger functionality as a way of monitoring which genes are active in the bacteria. These microorganisms could one day offer a noninvasive means of diagnosing disease or assessing the impact of a diet on health.

Genetic studies have revealed many genes linked to both common and rare disease, but to understand how those genes bring about disease and use those insights to help develop therapies, scientists need to know where they are active in the body. Research on single cells can help achieve this goal, by surveying gene activity in specific cell types. Scientists need to profile all cell types and compare them across organs in the body to learn about the full range of human diseases, but this is difficult to do with existing methods.

What will happen to the world's forests in a warming world? Will increased atmospheric carbon dioxide help trees grow? Or will extremes in temperature and precipitation hold growth back? That all depends on whether tree growth is more limited by the amount of photosynthesis or by the environmental conditions that affect tree cell growth—a fundamental question in tree biology, and one for which the answer wasn't well understood, until now.

At first glance, a system consisting of 51 ions may appear easily manageable. But even if these charged atoms are only changed back and forth between two states, the result is more than two quadrillion (1015) different orderings that the system can take on.

Water scarcity is a growing problem around the world. Desalination of seawater is an established method to produce drinkable water but comes with huge energy costs. For the first time, researchers use fluorine-based nanostructures to successfully filter salt from water. Compared to current desalination methods, these fluorous nanochannels work faster, require less pressure and less energy, and are a more effective filter.

KyotoU researchers have discovered a physical phenomenon that previously was only observed in human males.

President Joe Biden, from campaign trail through his first year in office, declared himself a climate-forward leader.

Anyone walking past a meadow on a mild summer evening is often exposed to an impressive concert. It is the grasshoppers, bush crickets and crickets that create a Mediterranean atmosphere with their chirping. The songs are usually those of males trying to attract females to mate with them. But they can also be rival songs when two males get too close to each other.

A research group led by Prof. Piao Hailong from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) uncovered a new function of growth factor Midkine to suppress the Liver Kinase B1 / AMP-Activated Protein Kinase (LKB1-AMPK) axis in a noncanonical intracellular manner.

Cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS), a double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) sensing protein, plays an important role in the strong innate immune response induced by pathogen derived nucleic acids.

The cnidocytes—or stinging cells—that are characteristic of sea anemones, hydrae, corals and jellyfish, and make us careful of our feet while wading in the ocean, are also an excellent model for understanding the emergence of new cell types, according to new Cornell research.

Entrepreneurs who find themselves in over their heads could be better off hiring specialists than investing to improve their own skills, according to a study from researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and the World Bank.

Peggy Stenger casually admits to having a freezer of dead birds.

"Hello, world!"

Two sperm whales died within seven days of each other in the Florida Keys, according to state and federal officials.

Forested lands across the U.S. provide 83 million people with at least half of their water, according to a broad new study of surface water sources for more than 5,000 public water systems. 125 million people, or about 38% of the country's population, receive at least 10% of their water from forests. In the arid western U.S., 39.5 million people get more than half of their surface drinking water from forests that are increasingly under threat of wildfires.

Research is currently being completed at Empa on a world-first in the sound insulation of wooden buildings. Using a physical theory from the 1990s and the tools of digitization, a research team has developed new floor elements made of solid wood panels that have so-called acoustic black holes. The idea came from Stefan Schoenwald, head of Empa's Building Acoustics laboratory in Dübendorf. He has encountered the theory of acoustic black holes several times at conferences and in scientific publications since it was first published in 1987. Читать дальше...