Новости за 07.09.2022

What went wrong with Artemis I was on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center, so that's where NASA has decided to try and fix it.

New research from the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program finds racial and ethnic differences in how extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs) are perceived and used in California. The study, published in Preventive Medicine, found Black Californians perceived ERPOs as less appropriate and were less willing to ask a judge to approve one. Black Californians were also less likely to have legal representation at an ERPO hearing.

Every day, about one quadrillion gallons of water are silently pumped from the ground to the treetops. Earth's plant life accomplishes this staggering feat using only sunlight. It takes energy to lift all this liquid, but just how much was an open question until this year.

Over the last few years, the pandemic has forced most of us to stay home in our own neighborhoods. New research from Michigan State University found that for some groups of people, spending time in their neighborhoods is no block party.

On-chip laser frequency combs—lasers that emit multiple frequencies or colors of light simultaneously separated like the tooth on a comb—are a promising technology for a range of applications including environmental monitoring, optical computing, astronomy, and metrology. However, on-chip frequency combs are still limited by one serious problem—they are not always efficient. There are several ways to mitigate the efficiency problem, but they all suffer from trade-offs. For example, combs can either... Читать дальше...

The design of efficient solar cells, which harness energy to generate electricity or produce hydrogen by splitting water, has received much attention globally. Another route to harnessing abundant, free solar energy: using it as a pumping source for lasers. High-power lasers are earmarked for several applications, including deep space communication, atmospheric sensing, high-temperature material processing, and hydrogen production. But, they are often expensive and suffer from performance setbacks arising from thermal stress effects.

A ferocious heat wave scorching the western United States could finally begin to wane in the coming days, forecasters said Wednesday, but they warned of dangerous fire conditions as howling winds sweep through the bone-dry region.

Rutgers University has conducted the first study showing how many more species of bees are needed to maintain crop yields when a longer-term time frame is considered.

Let's pretend it's the Late Cretaceous, roughly 66 to 100 million years ago. We've got dinosaurs roaming the land and odd-looking early species of birds, although the shark as we know it is already swimming in the prehistoric oceans—which cover 82% of Earth. Redwood trees and other conifers are making their debut, as are roses and flowering plants, and with them come bees, termites and ants. Most of all, it's warm, volcanically active and humid all over the place with nary an ice sheet in sight.

Developing a lightweight material that is both strong and highly ductile has been regarded as a long-desired goal in the field of structural materials, but these properties are generally mutually exclusive. However, researchers at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) have recently discovered a low-cost, direct method to turn commonly used 3D printable polymers into lightweight, ultra-tough, biocompatible hybrid carbon microlattices, which can be in any shape or size, and are 100 times stronger than the original polymers. Читать дальше...

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis recently invented a technique for generating ultrasound waves that can self-bend, like the rainbow.

When it comes to American barn owls, forget spring cleaning.

Researchers have developed a camera that uses a thin microlens array and new image processing algorithms to capture 3D information about objects in a scene with a single exposure. The camera could be useful for a variety of applications such as industrial part inspection, gesture recognition and collecting data for 3D display systems.

Wildfires, characterized by unplanned, uncontrolled, and unpredictable fires erupting in areas such as forests, grasslands, and prairies, have recently grown in frequency and intensity. Likely resulting from climate change effects, wildfires are increasingly impacting ecosystems and human lives. While wildfires are considered ecologically beneficial, there have been rising concerns over the negative effects, namely degradation of air quality from the smoke and pollutants released.

All magnets—from the simple souvenirs hanging on your refrigerator to the disks that give your computer memory to the powerful versions used in research labs—contain spinning quasiparticles called magnons. The direction one magnon spins can influence that of its neighbor, which affects the spin of its neighbor, and so on, yielding what are known as spin waves. Information can potentially be transmitted via spin waves more efficiently than with electricity, and magnons can serve as "quantum interconnects"... Читать дальше...

Say you live across from a bakery. Sometimes you are hungry and therefore tempted when odors waft through your window, but other times satiety makes you indifferent. Sometimes popping over for a popover seems trouble-free but sometimes your spiteful ex is there. Your brain balances many influences in determining what you'll do. A new MIT study details an example of this working in a much simpler animal, highlighting a potentially fundamental principle of how nervous systems integrate multiple factors to guide food-seeking behavior.

Soil nematodes represent a major component of soil communities in terrestrial ecosystems, and play an important role in regulating nutrient cycling and soil health. High-throughput sequencing technology is increasingly used in the study of nematode biodiversity. A recent study demonstrates that the selection of different primers and databases influenced the annotation of nematode taxa, but the diversity of the nematode community showed consistent patterns among different vegetation types.

A research group from Nagoya University in Japan has found that an event that occurs only once every 120 years—the large-scale flowering, seeding, and dying of dwarf bamboo (Sasa borealis)—provides ideal breeding conditions for Japanese field mice.

A growing number of Native American households in Nevada have no access to indoor plumbing, a condition known as "plumbing poverty," according to a new study by a team from DRI and the Guinn Center for Policy Priorities.

Imagine you have a group of 30 children who want to play soccer. You would like to divide them into two teams, so they can practice their skills and learn from their coaches to become better players.

Hurricane Kay gathered strength in the Pacific Ocean on Wednesday and was on course to bring strong winds and heavy rain to Mexico's Baja California Peninsula, forecasters said.

Chemists at Umeå University within the MicroBioRefine consortium show that Nordic microalgae that are allowed to grow in salt water both purify this water efficiently and produce valuable compounds, so-called carotenoids. The research results are published in the journal Bioresource Technology.

Successful start-up ecosystems are characterized by good transport and telecommunications infrastructure, a high population density, a high proportion of foreign citizens, and numerous qualified employees. IfM Bonn researchers found this and published results in their study, "Start-up activity at the district level and in independent cities: What characterizes successful start-up ecosystems?"

The weight and grinding movement of glaciers has carved distinctive valleys and fjords into Earth's surface. Because Mars lacks similar landscapes, researchers believed ancient ice masses on the Red Planet must have been frozen firmly to the ground. New research suggests they were not stuck in place, but just moved very slowly.

Even though it reaches deep into human history, hazing remains a puzzling behavior for social scientists. Why would people systematically abuse their own future allies by making them participate in extremely unpleasant group initiation practices?