Новости за 05.08.2022

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have found a way to reduce the amount of nitrogen fertilizers needed to grow cereal crops. The discovery could save farmers in the United States billions of dollars annually in fertilizer costs while also benefiting the environment.

Did the 12th century B.C.E.—a time when humans were forging great empires and developing new forms of written text—coincide with an evolutionary reduction in brain size? Think again, says a UNLV-led team of researchers who refute a hypothesis that's growing increasingly popular among the science community.

Ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, projected to draw some $1.2 billion in digital political spending, NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy (C4D) at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering today launched a new, enhanced version of Ad Observatory—AdObservatory.org—available in both English and Spanish, with increased search functionality.

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health have developed a three-dimensional structure that allows them to see how and where disease mutations on the twinkle protein can lead to mitochondrial diseases. The protein is involved in helping cells use energy our bodies convert from food. Prior to the development of this 3D structure, researchers only had models and were unable to determine how these mutations contribute to disease. Mitochondrial diseases are a group of inherited conditions that... Читать дальше...

DNA-based information is a new interdisciplinary field linking information technology and biotechnology. The field hopes to meet the enormous need for long-term data storage by using DNA as an information storage medium. Despite DNA's promise of strong stability, high storage density and low maintenance cost, however, researchers face problems accurately rewriting digital information encoded in DNA sequences.

A systematic review of 301 academic articles on "cultural ecosystem services" has enabled researchers to identify how these nonmaterial contributions from nature are linked to and significantly affect human well-being. They identified 227 unique pathways through which human interaction with nature positively or negatively affects well-being. These were then used to isolate 16 distinct underlying mechanisms, or types of connection, through which people experience these effects. This comprehensive... Читать дальше...

A common weed harbors important clues about how to create drought resistant crops in a world beset by climate change.

In the beginning, there was boredom. Following the emergence of cellular life on earth, some 3.5 billion years ago, simple cells lacking a nucleus and other detailed internal structure dominated the planet. Matters would remain largely unchanged in terms of evolutionary development in these so-called prokaryotic cells—the bacteria and archaea—for another billion and a half years.

PCR tests, also called molecular tests or nucleic acid tests, are considered the gold standard in detecting the presence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that gives rise to COVID-19. However, they can take a few days to process, resulting in unnecessary quarantine for negative individuals or delays for those who require proof of negative testing for travel or other commitments. Rapid antigen-detecting tests, on the other hand, are convenient, but less reliable than PCR tests.

In recent work published in the journal Horticulture Research, researchers from Northeast Agricultural University and Huazhong Agricultural University characterized a negative regulator of late blight resistance in potato.

Researchers at Michigan State University have shown that locusts can not only "smell" the difference between cancer cells and healthy cells, but they can also distinguish between different cancer cell lines.

We have recently witnessed the stunning images of distant galaxies revealed by the James Webb telescope, which were previously visible only as blurry spots. Washington University in St. Louis researchers have developed a novel method for visualizing the proteins secreted by cells with stunning resolution, making it the James Webb version for visualizing single cell protein secretion.

Despite signs of wear, the intrepid spacecraft is about to start an exciting new chapter of its mission as it climbs a Martian mountain.

Alongside cultural heavyweights such as Disney's "Encanto" and Warner Brothers' "The Batman," a short film created at Goddard shares the screen next week at a festival honoring standout works of computer animated storytelling.

NASA's ShadowCam is heading to the Moon aboard Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI)'s Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) mission. KPLO, also known as Danuri, launched at 7:08 p.m. EDT on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Launch Complex 40 on the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on August 4.

Adam Wraight pulled a blue sewage "warning" sign out of the sand near Imperial Beach Pier on Thursday morning, replacing it with the more ominous yellow and red placard telling beachgoers that waters were officially closed.

Ultrafast pulses from X-ray lasers reveal how atoms move at timescales of a femtosecond. That's a quadrillionth of a second. However, measuring the properties of the pulses themselves is challenging. While determining a pulse's maximum strength, or 'amplitude,' is straightforward, the time at which the pulse reaches the maximum, or 'phase,' is often hidden. A new study trains neural networks to analyze the pulse to reveal these hidden sub-components. Physicists also call these sub-components 'real'... Читать дальше...

After an exhaustive historical investigation into the barrels of DDT waste reportedly dumped decades ago near Catalina Island, federal regulators concluded that the toxic pollution in the deep ocean could be far worse—and far more sweeping—than what scientists anticipated.

An intense heatwave swept across Europe in July. The scorching heat fuelled fires in Spain, France and Portugal. With the thermometer topping 40 °C, the United Kingdom (UK) was the center of attention after breaking temperature records. The murderous heat nearly paralyzed the country.

The SNAD team, an international network of researchers including Matvey Kornilov, Associate Professor of the HSE University Faculty of Physics, has discovered 11 previously undetected space anomalies, seven of which are supernova candidates. The researchers analyzed digital images of the Northern sky taken in 2018 using a k-D tree to detect anomalies through the 'nearest neighbor' method. Machine learning algorithms helped automate the search. The paper is published in New Astronomy.

According to the standard model of cosmology, the vast majority of galaxies are surrounded by a halo of dark matter particles. This halo is invisible, but its mass exerts a strong gravitational pull on galaxies in the vicinity. A new study led by the University of Bonn (Germany) and the University of Saint Andrews (Scotland) challenges this view of the Universe. The results suggest that the dwarf galaxies of Earth's second closest galaxy cluster—known as the Fornax Cluster—are free of such dark matter halos. Читать дальше...

The MikroIker team of the UPV/EHU's Department of Immunology, Microbiology and Parasitology has conducted a study into the prevalence and characterization of bacteria of the Arcobacter genus using a large number of samples of different foods (seafood, vegetables, meat products and fresh cheese), including some that have never been analyzed in our environment previously. In addition, they have studied the ability of these bacteria to adhere to various surfaces frequently found in food processing environments.

A pair of researchers, one with the University of California, Davis, the other Drew University, believe they may have solved the mystery of why people living during the time of the Roman Empire used lopsided dice in their games. In their paper published in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, Jelmer Eerkens and Alex de Voogt, describe their study of dice used during the days of the Roman Empire.

A study published recently in Nature Ecology and Evolution has unveiled some of the key processes in marine microbial evolution. According to the study, led by the Uppsala University (Sweden) and with the participation of the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC) of Barcelona, it is the large number of habitat transitions -from sea to land and vice versa- that have occurred in the last millions of years that explains the great current diversity.

Among the extreme weather impacts resulting from climate change, drought is a growing problem around the globe, leading to frequent wildfires, threats to water resources, and greater food insecurity.