Новости за 16.08.2022

A light-based, food sanitization technique successfully eliminated multiple harmful pathogens in a new study carried out by Penn State researchers.

Large wildland fires commonly burn in sub-Saharan Africa from August to October, late in the dry season. In Botswana, a period of quiet fire activity in early August 2022 was short lived as several active blazes filled the sky with smoke by mid-month.

The dumping of plastics in the Pacific Islands (Te Moananui) is a form of waste colonization, leading to disproportionate plastics pollution in the region and threatening the health and livelihoods of its people.

Hundreds of animals eat fruit, from toucans to fruit bats to maned wolves to humans. But most fruit-bearing plants evolved relatively recently in Earth's history, showing up for the first time in the Cretaceous, the final period of the dinosaurs. In a new paper in eLife, scientists have tracked down the first fossil evidence of fruit consumption by comparing the skull shapes and stomach contents of fossil birds. The verdict: the earliest-known fruit-eater was an early bird called Jeholornis that lived 120 million years ago... Читать дальше...

Cryopreserving tissues and organs without damaging them requires a delicate dance through the principles of thermodynamics. Carnegie Mellon University's Biothermal Technology Laboratory has a novel modeling approach for isochoric preservation to keep the work moving forward. Prem Solanki and Yoed Rabin have developed a new way of modeling the solidification of fluids in confined volumes, with applications to organ and tissue preservation. Their research is published in PLOS ONE.

While turmeric root has been used medicinally throughout the world for centuries, science has found that its main chemical component, curcumin, breaks down in the body before its ultimate benefits can be achieved. An exciting collaboration among Carnegie Mellon University researchers Sai Yerneni, Phil Campbell, Burak Ozdoganlar, and Ezgi Yalcintas has created an approach to uniquely enable the use of curcumin as a robust therapeutic.

At a time when astronomers around the world are reveling in new views of the distant cosmos, an experiment on the International Space Station has given Cornell researchers fresh insight into something a little closer to home: water.

New structural information about an enzyme target in cancer medicine could help the development of next generation inhibitors. The enzyme, called PARP1, senses DNA damage and sends a cellular signal to carry out repair. PARP1 activity is important to many cancer types, making it an attractive target for treatments.

Newly arrived refugees in Australia have been resilient in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new research report has found launched by Settlement Services International and Western Sydney University on 16 August.

While thermometers have been well into the red across the northern hemisphere, people are panicking about the cost of energy bills once winter starts to bite. According to the latest forecasts in the UK, the minimum price cap for households' electricity and heating costs is set to more than double over the winter.

New research based on an expedition to the icy waters off Greenland reveals soaring levels of antifreeze proteins in a species of tiny snailfish, underlying the importance of this unique adaptation to life in sub-zero temperatures. The study, led by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History and the City University of New York (CUNY), and published today in the journal Evolutionary Bioinformatics, also warns that warming oceanic temperatures in the Arctic could pose a threat to these highly specialized fishes.

The vision of cars that drive or planes that fly themselves can only become true if the electronics on board can determine where they are in space, anytime and with reliable precision. In the aerospace sector, this job is given over to gyroscopes that measure light to check and stabilize the course of a vessel in flight. But such gyroscopes can be affected by certain material properties or by electrical or magnetic fields—and the consequences can be disastrous. This is why a German-Polish consortium... Читать дальше...

When early humans discovered how to harness fire, they were able to push back against the nightly darkness that enveloped them. With the invention and widespread adoption of electricity, it became easier to separate heat from light, work through the night, and illuminate train cars to highways. In recent years, old forms of electric light generation such as halogen lightbulbs have given way to more energy efficient alternatives, further cheapening the costs to brighten our homes, workplaces, and lives generally.

ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) has imaged the result of a spectacular cosmic collision—the galaxy NGC 7727. This giant was born from the merger of two galaxies, an event that started around a billion years ago. At its center lies the closest pair of supermassive black holes ever found, two objects that are destined to coalesce into an even more massive black hole.

Recently, researchers led by Prof. Huang Qing from Institute of Intelligent Machines, Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) suggested a new method to evaluate the antioxidant activity of astaxanthin isomers against singlet oxygen.

Sodium ion batteries are considered to be one of the most promising alternative systems to lithium-ion batteries, especially for large scale applications. Sodium-based transition-metal oxides with layered structure have been the focus of studies, due to the merits of easy synthesis, stable structure, and high energy densities. Unfortunately, most layered-type cathode materials are air-sensitive, which leads to a high manufacturing cost of sodium-ion batteries, and greatly impedes the practical utilization of sodium-ion batteries.

Destructive quantum interference (DQI) provides the possibility to significantly suppress the leakage current in the OFF state of molecular devices. However, the DQI in π-conjugated molecules cannot exhibit ultralow conductance due to the existence of covalently bonded σ-transport channels.

A team from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) has now demonstrated the important influence of maternal, social and ecological factors during early life on survival, longevity and reproductive performance of female adult spotted hyenas: For example, the social status of the mother had a significant, positive effect on the reproduction of the following generation. On the other hand, being born to an elder mother or growing up during a period of increased rainfall reduced survival and longevity. Читать дальше...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many live musical events and festivals were postponed and even canceled to protect musicians and audience members. When they started performing again, many groups resorted to performing with remote or limited crowds. They also adapted their repertoire to promote pieces featuring strings and made significant changes in the number of musicians and their positions in the auditorium.

A new framework for classifying the positive impacts of non-native species will allow conservationists and policymakers to make better-informed management decisions, according to a Consensus View article by Giovanni Vimercati at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and colleagues, publishing August 16 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.

A new study into the multipurpose uses of boomerangs has highlighted how the hardwood objects were used to shape the edges of stone tools used by Australian Indigenous communities.

Transferring the nuclear genome from one egg into the cytoplasm of a donor egg is a strategy to enable women carrying mutations in their mitochondrial DNA to have healthy babies. A new study from Wei Shang of Chinese PLA General Hospital, Beijing, Fuchou Tang of Peking University, Beijing, and colleagues, publishing August 16 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, uses multiple "omics" techniques to show that this strategy, called spindle transfer, is likely to be safe, with little evidence of... Читать дальше...

Feeding calves transition milk instead of milk replacer in the first days of life stimulates intestinal development and improves health scores. In a new report in the Journal of Dairy Science, five researchers from Michigan State University examine the effects of transition milk on the health and growth of Holstein bull calves. They found several benefits, including improved development in all sections of the small intestine and increased weight gain compared with calves fed milk replacer.

Global decarbonisation scenarios envisioned by oil and gas majors are incompatible with the Paris climate deal temperature goals aimed at averting devastating heating, according to research published Tuesday.

The pedalos lie far from the water's edge and the flat stone slabs around the Sirmione peninsula are exposed after drought reduced the level of Italy's Lake Garda to a 15-year low.