Новости за 06.06.2022

The Chesapeake Bay watershed received an overall grade of C+ on its latest report card, released Monday by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

Over the last few decades, researchers have built minuscule molecular machines that rotate or shuttle other molecules. However, it's difficult to determine the mechanical work and forces that these tiny contraptions produce, which is important when using them as nanorobots or in artificial muscles. Now, in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, researchers report molecular motors that twist and untwist like whirligig toys—enabling the measurement of the energy and torque of their rotations.

As we approach Juneteenth, a day marked each year to commemorate the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, new research in the INFORMS journal Management Science finds that racially-charged events and protests over the past decade have a direct and positive effect on what children are learning in U.S. public school classrooms.

Human-caused wildfires in California are more ferocious than blazes sparked by lightning, a team led by scientists from the University of California, Irvine reported recently in the journal Nature Communications. The research could help scientists better understand fire severity and how likely a blaze is to kill trees and inflict long-term damage on an ecosystem in its path.

A new study shows that American Sign Language (ASL) is more linguistically complex than previously understood. In particular, research appearing in the June 2022 issue of the journal Language, authored by Tory Sampson (UC San Diego) and Rachel Mayberry (UC San Diego), documents the emergence of the copula—a word meaning to be (e.g. is, was, are, were)—in ASL, something that has been overlooked in previous linguistic analyses.

Quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is a state of matter existing at extremely temperatures and densities, such as those that occur in collisions of hadrons (protons, neutrons and mesons). Under so-called "normal" conditions, quarks and gluons are always confined in the structures that constitute hadrons, but when hadrons are accelerated to relativistic velocities and made to collide with each other, as they are in the experiments performed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)... Читать дальше...

A Bristol-led team of physicists has found a way to operate mass manufacturable photonic sensors at the quantum limit. This breakthrough paves the way for practical applications such as monitoring greenhouse gases and cancer detection.

A new study is providing an enhanced look at the intertwined evolutionary histories of polar bears and brown bears.

A combined defense of different chemical defense substances could result in a negative interaction and mutual detoxification, according to researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in a new study, appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on the wild tobacco species Nicotiana attenuata and one of its specialized herbivores. Chemical analyses of frass revealed that larvae of the tobacco hawkmoth Manduca sexta are able to split off components of one defense substance and use them to detoxify another. Читать дальше...

New research transforms our understanding of the circumstances and timing of the domestication of chickens, their spread across Asia into the west, and reveals the changing way in which they were perceived in societies over the past 3,500 years.

In response to the historical devastation of mass shootings in the United States, including the recent mass shooting of 19 innocent children in Uvalde, TX, Violence and Gender Editor-in-Chief Mary Ellen O'Toole, Ph.D. has issued an immediate call to action for superior gun control laws and legislation.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday blocked fracking off the California coast, ruling that the federal government must complete a full environmental review before approving permits for such offshore oil drilling platforms.

Driving home from work, Kristin Herman was gripping her steering wheel hard. It was mid-April, and one of the region's heaviest rainstorms since Hurricane Ida was hurtling through Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

The largest, highest quality analysis of data ever conducted reveals that genetically modified Bt corn has little impact on nontarget insects and other organisms, especially compared to growing conventional corn. This study was published today in Environmental Evidence by a USDA Agricultural Research Service scientist and his Swiss colleagues.

Dr. Michael Rodriguez is tired of "thoughts and prayers."

Can wolf personalities change ecosystems? According to the latest research from the Voyageurs Wolf Project, published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, they can.

A team of researchers from the University of Central Florida will be exploring an unknown and mysterious region of the moon.

Many of us try to repress the thought of them, while others have come to accept them. Whatever your take on parasites is, they can tell scientists a lot about ecology, health and the environment.

Quantum computers are expected to revolutionize the way researchers solve difficult computing problems. These computers are being designed to tackle major challenges in fundamental research areas, such as quantum chemistry. In its current stage of development, quantum computing is still very sensitive to noise and disruptive factors in the environment. This makes quantum computing "noisy" as quantum bits—or qubits—lose information by getting out of sync, a process called decoherence.

New research published in Ibis has identified the red-billed leiothrix, a small brightly colored bird native to subtropical Asia, as an emerging example of an invasive non-native species (INNS) in Britain. The work also demonstrates how climate change and human activity—such as the cage-bird trade and garden bird-feeding—could increase the likelihood of INNS becoming established in new regions.

Operating observatories around the globe target sky regions characterized by low contamination from Galactic radiation, looking for the imprint of Cosmological Gravitational Waves (CGWs) produced during Inflation, the mysterious phase of quasi-exponential expansion of space in the very early Universe. A new study by the POLARBEAR collaboration, led by SISSA for the part concerning the interpretation for Cosmology and published in the Astrophysical Journal, provides a new correction algorithm that... Читать дальше...

Currently, electrocatalytic water splitting is one of the most inexpensive, clean, reliable, quiet and affordable industrial-grade efficient hydrogen (H2) production technologies. However, the most effective platinum (Pt) based catalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) are subject to high price and unsatisfactory stability. Therefore, low cost, high efficiency and high stability HER electrocatalysts are urgently needed to replace Pt based electrocatalysts.

The chemical composition of lichens depends on the basis (substrate) on which they grow. In this way lichens adapt to adverse conditions—such as a high level of acidity (low pH) or the presence of toxic metals. A new property of these organisms was discovered by biologists of the Ural Federal University (UrFU), who studied more than 740 species of lichens. Samples were collected from rocks and trees (spruce, pine, birch, alder, aspen, poplar). The research results was published in Frontiers in Forest and Global Change.

The ocean is a dynamic enigma. Humans have strived to understand its many behaviors since the first ocean-going craft hit its complex waters.

Although about 20% of Illinois cropping systems are planted to continuous corn, it's nearly impossible to find fields planted this way for decades at a time. Yet long-term experiments like one at the University of Illinois, including over 40 years of continuous corn under different nitrogen fertilizer rates, provide incredible learning opportunities and soil management lessons for researchers and farmers alike.