Новости за 13.07.2022

Humor has a large role to play when it comes to engaging students in a classroom environment. By facilitating student laughter with appropriate jokes, quips, and visual humor, a teacher can make the learning experience immensely gratifying for their students. Studies have shown that humor improves the in-class experience by diffusing the tension and can even serve as a mnemonic device to help learners prepare for tests.

Grab your binoculars: A comet that has fascinated scientists for five years approaches its closest distance from Earth this week—and you might be able to catch a glimpse.

The latest technology to study glaciers fits in a backpack and can be carried up steep mountains.

Sometime around 400 million years after the birth of our universe, the first stars began to form. The universe's so-called dark ages came to an end and a new light-filled era began. More and more galaxies began to take shape and served as factories for churning out new stars, a process that reached a peak about 4 billion years after the Big Bang.

A team of researchers led by Wayne State University has published a study that aims to assist state and local water authorities in making decisions about where to prioritize funding for infrastructure improvements on drinking water lead service line replacement programs. The study, Improved Decision-Making: A Sociotechnical Utility-Based Framework for Drinking Water Investment, was published recently in ACS ES&T Engineering.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have been able to produce antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in hen eggs. Antibodies harvested from eggs might be used to treat COVID-19 or as a preventative measure for people exposed to the disease. The work was published July 9 in the journal Viruses.

The paradox startled scientists at the U.S Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) more than a dozen years ago. The more heat they beamed into a spherical tokamak, a magnetic facility designed to reproduce the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars, the less the central temperature increased.

Despite being only a few atoms thick, MXene packs a powerful punch. This class of single layer, two-dimensional (2D) nanomaterials exhibits desirable properties like excellent thermal and electrical conductivity, heat resistance and high specific surface area. These characteristics promise to revolutionize high-performance electronic devices and energy storage systems.

Motors are everywhere in our day-to-day lives—from cars to washing machines. A futuristic scientific field is working on tiny motors that could power a network of nanomachines and replace some of the power sources we use in devices today.

Researchers are a step closer to understanding how Parkinson's disease develops and progresses thanks to chemical biological tools developed at Simon Fraser University.

Researchers in the Oregon State University College of Engineering have harnessed the power of artificial intelligence to help protect bees from pesticides.

Each year, strong winds carry more than a billion metric tons—or the weight of 10,000 aircraft carriers—of mineral dust from Earth's deserts and other dry regions through the atmosphere. While scientists know that the dust affects the environment and climate, they don't have enough data to determine, in detail, what those effects are or may be in the future—at least not yet.

There is an urgent need for the UK and allies like the U.S. and Australia to give clearer information about how they would respond in self-defense to "imminent" armed attacks, a new study says.

A comprehensive new genetic and statistical study from researchers at the University of Kansas reveals that two groups of scrub jays—one in Mexico and one in Texas—deserve status as independent species. The paper, appearing in Systematic Biology, also uses genomic data to sketch a natural history of scrub jays, showing how geographic changes over millennia split up and reconnected groups of the birds, swaying the flow of genes between them.

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) researchers and their collaborators at home and abroad have successfully demonstrated a new platform for guiding the compressed light waves in very thin van der Waals crystals. Their method to guide the mid-infrared light with minimal loss will provide a breakthrough for the practical applications of ultra-thin dielectric crystals in next-generation optoelectronic devices based on strong light-matter interactions at the nanoscale.

Fluctuations in space weather are disrupting train signals and causing significant delays. A project investigating the effect of solar storms on railway signals will be presented this week at the National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2022) by Cameron Patterson, a Ph.D. student at Lancaster University.

U.S. Naval Research Laboratory scientists launched the second Strontium Iodide Radiation Instrument (SIRI-2) instrument in December 2021 onboard Space Test Program (STP) Sat-6. SIRI-2, a gamma-ray spectrometer, will demonstrate the performance of europium-doped strontium iodide gamma ray detection technology with sufficient active area for Department of Defense (DoD) operational needs.

New work looks at using machine learning to decipher the early stages of supernovae explosions by reconstructing the light emitted during the outburst. The research was presented today at the 2022 National Astronomy Meeting by Eleonora Parrag, a Ph.D. student at the University of Cardiff.

A new analysis describes how UK residents shifted the amount of time they spent on various activities over the course of the pandemic and whether they participated online or in-person. Lan Li of University College London, Center for Digital Health in Emergencies (dPHE), U.K., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on July 13, 2022.

A new analysis of voting data for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA)'s World's Best Male Football Player Award suggests that cultural similarity between voters and players biases results. Michael Johnson and Ian McCarthy of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONEon July 13, 2022.

After discovering the honeybee-killing parasite Varroa destructor in Newcastle late last week, New South Wales authorities have acted quickly to try to stop the spread.

A University of the Sunshine Coast researcher is investigating whether spider and scorpion venoms have the potential to save Australia's honeybees from the invasive and deadly varroa mite parasite.

Researchers have shown that a quantum-inspired technique can be used to perform LiDAR imaging with a much higher depth resolution than is possible with conventional approaches. LiDAR, which uses laser pulses to acquire 3D information about a scene or object, is usually best suited for imaging large objects such as topographical features or built structures due to its limited depth resolution.

Social media platforms are a ubiquitous communication tool, with nearly 2 billion people using Facebook every day, for example. But these platforms curate their offering, with neural networks using algorithms to recommend content to their users, using inputs such as age, gender and location. For sciences, including astronomy, the result is a largely male audience watching, listening and reading to content from men. Now one leading woman astronomer, Dr. Becky Smethurst of the University of Oxford... Читать дальше...

New observations from the Budongo Forest in Uganda help us to understand why chimpanzee mothers carry their dead infants.