Новости за 03.08.2022

As satellites crawl across the sky, they reflect light from the sun back down to Earth, especially during the first few hours after sunset and the first few hours before sunrise. As more companies launch networks of satellites into low-Earth orbit, a clear view of the night sky is becoming rarer. Astronomers, in particular, are trying to find ways to adapt.

Less than two years after shocking the science world with the discovery of a material capable of room-temperature superconductivity, a team of UNLV physicists has upped the ante once again by reproducing the feat at the lowest pressure ever recorded.

The traditional idea of symbiosis—long-term interactions between two organisms—is that the participants mutually benefit each other. However, researchers have debated whether the interests of the symbionts always line up with the hosts they inhabit, or whether genes that benefit symbionts might come at the expense of their hosts. A new study investigates this question through genomic sequencing and infecting plant hosts with their microbial symbionts.

Bioscientists from Durham University, UK and Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, Germany have predicted in their latest research that bird communities will change worldwide in 2080 due to climate change, largely as result of shifting their ranges.

The northern and central Great Barrier Reef have recorded their highest amount of coral cover since the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) began monitoring 36 years ago.

Researchers from Western University have verified the authenticity of a South American tsantsa (shrunken head) as human remains, an important step in the global effort toward decolonization and preserving and understanding Indigenous history.

Physicists are (temporarily) augmenting reality to crack the code of quantum systems.

University of California, Irvine researchers have developed a COVID-19 test that detects and identifies specific SARS-CoV-2 variants with 100% accuracy. In a study, the RNA-encoded viral nucleic acid analytic reporter correctly determined the Alpha, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon and Omicron genetic mutations in nasopharyngeal clinical samples. This ability could enable healthcare providers to make personalized treatment decisions for improved patient care.

NASA's Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission will share a ride to space with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Re-ionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) mission. The missions will launch no earlier than April 2025 on a SpaceX Falcon 9.

It's sunburn season. Many of us have experienced the pain and peeling that comes from unprotected time in the sun, but we may not focus on a remarkable and vital part of the process: the regeneration of skin as the damaged tissue is replaced with new.

Following the successful launch of NASA's Lucy spacecraft on Oct. 16, 2021, a group of engineers huddled around a long conference table in Titusville, Florida. Lucy was mere hours into its 12-year flight, but an unexpected challenge had surfaced for the first-ever Trojan asteroids mission.

Rising temperatures pose major challenges to the dairy industry—a Holstein's milk production can decline 30 to 70% in warm weather—but a new Cornell-led study has found a nutrition-based solution to restore milk production during heat-stress events, while also pinpointing the cause of the decline.

Humans aren't the only targets for viruses. Like us, bacteria become infected by many types of viruses. In fact, across billions of years, bacteria and viruses have engaged in a non-stop evolutionary arms race for survival that includes countless innovations and counter-adaptations.

Clearcutting and wildfires decimated the red spruce, once the dominant, high-elevation tree species in West Virginia, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Nowadays, only 10% of the state's historic red spruce coverage remains and it faces a new threat in climate change.

Polymer brush films consists of monomer chains grown in close proximity on a substrate. The monomers, which look like "bristles" at the nanoscale, form a highly functional and versatile coating, such that it can selectively adsorb or repel a variety of chemicals or biological molecules. For instance, polymer brush films have been used as a scaffold to grow biological cells and as protective anti-biofouling coatings that repel unwanted biological organisms.

In its heyday, UIUC's Blue Waters was one of the world's top supercomputers. Anyone who was curious could drop by its 30,000-square-foot machine room for a tour, and spend half an hour strolling among the 288 huge black cabinets, supported by a 24-megawatt power supply, that housed its hundreds of thousands of computational cores.

The Antarctic region is particularly vulnerable to climate change, and studies have shown that the melting of Antarctic ice sheets has accelerated considerably in recent years. As a result, sea levels continue to rise globally, threatening the lives of coastal inhabitants.

As much of Europe bakes in a third heatwave since June, fears are growing that extreme drought driven by climate change in the continent's breadbasket nations will dent stable crop yields and deepen the cost-of-living crisis.

They are hunters, farmers, harvesters, gliders, herders, weavers, and carpenters. They are ants, and they are a big part of our world, comprising over 14,000 species and a large fraction of animal biomass in most terrestrial ecosystems. Like other invertebrates, ants are important for the functioning of ecosystems. They play vital roles from aerating soil and dispersing seeds and nutrients, to scavenging and preying on other species. Yet a global view of their diversity is lacking. Now, researchers... Читать дальше...

Researchers have developed and demonstrated the potential benefit of a simple set of physical gestures that participants in online group video meetings can use to improve their meeting experience. Paul D. Hills of University College London, U.K., and colleagues from University College London and the University of Exeter, U.K., present the technique, which they call Video Meeting Signals (VMS), in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on August 3, 2022.

It was just a piece of junk sitting in the back of a lab at the MIT Nuclear Reactor facility, ready to be disposed of. But it became the key to demonstrating a more comprehensive way of detecting atomic-level structural damage in materials—an approach that will aid the development of new materials, and could potentially support the ongoing operation of carbon-emission-free nuclear power plants, which would help alleviate global climate change.

A volcano erupted in Iceland near the capital Reykjavik on Wednesday, the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO) said as live images on local media showed lava spewing out of a fissure in the ground.

Time is flying. Literally.

A pair of researchers, one with the Max Planck Institute of Brain Research, the other with Imperial College, has found more efficient ways to mix two fluids using simulations run on a supercomputer. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Fluids, Maximilian Eggl and Peter Schmid describe the factors they took into account in creating their simulations and the strategies they found that worked the best.

Efficient adsorbents for industrial wastewater treatment are important to minimize potential environmental damage. In particular, organic dyes, as a significant group of industrial pollutants, are usually highly water soluble, non-degradable and many are toxic to carcinogenic. Changxia Li and Freddy Kleitz from the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Vienna together with colleagues now presented a new approach to design an innovative composite material, consisting of a nanoporous, ultrathin... Читать дальше...