Новости за 19.09.2022

Are elephants important? How about rhinoceros? Or lions? What happens if Earth loses its last remaining large animals? New research by Professor of Biology Felisa Smith at the University of New Mexico shows the profound impacts of losing large-bodied mammals, or megafauna, in ecosystems.

You don't need a Ph.D. in agriculture to know that water is critical to crop production. But for years, people like Jonathan Proctor, who has a Ph.D. in Agriculture and Resource Economics from the University of California Berkeley, have been trying to explain why the importance of water isn't showing up in statistical models of crop yield.

How many stars are there in our galaxy? How many grains of sand in the Sahara? How many ants live on Earth? These are all questions that seem impossible to answer. However, through intensive and extensive data analysis, science is coming amazingly close to finding the solutions. When it comes to ants, a team led by Würzburg biologists Sabine Nooten and Patrick Schultheiss has done just that.

Lysine is an essential amino acid for dairy cows, helping boost milk production when added to the diet at adequate levels. But could lysine benefit cows in other ways? A new University of Illinois study shows rumen-protected lysine can improve uterine health if fed during the transition period. The study, "Effect of feeding rumen-protected lysine through the transition period on postpartum uterine health of dairy cows," is published in the Journal of Dairy Science.

The fixes have been addressed, so now it's time to add some stress to ensure NASA's Artemis I mission success.

If everything is to run smoothly in living cells, the genetic information must be correct. But unfortunately, errors in the DNA accumulate over time due to mutations. Land plants have developed a peculiar correction mode: They do not directly improve the errors in the genome, but rather elaborately in each individual transcript. Researchers at the University of Bonn have transplanted this correction machinery from the moss Physcomitrium patens into human cells. Surprisingly, the corrector started working there too... Читать дальше...

Smoke from a Siberian wildfire may have transported enough nitrogen to parts of the Arctic Ocean to amplify a phytoplankton bloom, according to new research from North Carolina State University and the International Research Laboratory Takuvik (CNRS/Laval University) in Canada. The work, which appears in Communications Earth & Environment, sheds light on some potential ecological effects from Northern Hemisphere wildfires, particularly as these fires become larger, longer and more intense.

The search for extraterrestrial life has just become more interesting as a team of scientists, including Southwest Research Institute's Dr. Christopher Glein, has discovered new evidence for a key building block for life in the subsurface ocean of Saturn's moon Enceladus. New modeling indicates that Enceladus's ocean should be relatively rich in dissolved phosphorus, an essential ingredient for life.

Despite earning more than half of all doctoral degrees conferred in the U.S., women are significantly underrepresented in faculty positions at colleges and universities. This is particularly true in tenure-track and tenured positions, with women making up just over a third of all full professors. Women are also less likely to receive tenure or be promoted to full professor, a situation known as the academic "leaky pipeline," where women's representation continues to decline the further they advance in their careers. Читать дальше...

From species of marmots to moles, shrews and mice, many of the world's endangered mammals are small. Genetic sampling is important for understanding how to conserve and protect their populations. But finding efficient, non-invasive ways to collect genetic samples from small animals can be challenging.

Nearly 66 million years ago, a large asteroid hit Earth and contributed to the global extinction of dinosaurs, leaving birds as their only living descendants.

Innovative experiments using temperature-controlled field plots have helped to explain the link between early winter temperatures and yield in some of our most marketable arable crops.

A new study led by Claus M. Azzalin, group leader at Instituto de Medicina Molecular João Lobo Antunes- iMM and published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows, for the first time, that the cell's telomeres can set the damage threshold a cancer cell can sustain and above which cells cannot continue to divide and die. These results open new possibilities for cancer therapeutics.

Western India was struck by the "Deccan famine" between 1630 and 1632 as crops failed after three consecutive years of Indian monsoon failures. While traveling through the region, Peter Mundy, an English merchant with the East India Company, vividly described the traumatic scenes of starvation, mass mortality, and even cannibalism in his travelog. In fact, such scenes of catastrophic drought-induced famines are widely noted in historical documentary sources suggesting that the Indian subcontinent... Читать дальше...

South America has more canid species than any place on Earth, and a surprising new UCLA-led genomic analysis shows that all these doglike animals evolved from a single species that entered the continent just 3.5 million to 4 million years ago. Scientists had long assumed that these diverse species sprang from multiple ancestors.

Texas A&M University researchers accomplished what was once considered impossible—they created a device capable of squeezing the quantum fluctuations of light down to a directed path and used it to enhance contrast imaging.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope captured its first images and spectra of Mars Sept. 5. The telescope, an international collaboration with ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency), provides a unique perspective with its infrared sensitivity on our neighboring planet, complementing data being collected by orbiters, rovers, and other telescopes.

Hurricane Fiona slammed into the Dominican Republic on Monday after knocking out power and causing widespread flooding in Puerto Rico.

X-rays are electromagnetic waves with short wavelengths and strong penetrability in physical matter, including live organisms. Scintillators capable of converting X-rays into the ultraviolet (UV), visible or near-infrared (NIR) photons are widely employed to realize indirect X-ray detection and XEOL imaging in many fields. They include medical diagnosis, computed tomography (CT), space exploration, and non-destructive industrial material and security inspections.

It's ancient, it's massive, and it is faltering. The gargantuan aspen stand dubbed "Pando," located in south-central Utah, is more than 100 acres of quivering, genetically identical plant life, thought to be the largest living organism on earth (based on dry weight mass, 13 million pounds). What looks like a shimmering panorama of individual trees is actually a group of genetically identical stems with an immense shared root system.

Could an ancient martial art created by African slaves in Brazil unlock new perspectives on design? For his doctoral thesis, defended at Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University, Nicholas Torretta drew upon his native culture to shine a light on the oppressive and consumeristic power structures that still permeate industrial design thinking. Inspired by the intrinsic decolonial traits within Capoeira, he began to explore alternative ways of designing, and living.

In May 2022, a group of monsoon researchers conducted "Earth Summit Mission 2022: Scientific Expedition and Research on Mt. Qomolangma" within the Himalayan Mountains. This mission implemented new advanced weather observation technologies, methods, and means to investigate both the vertical change characteristics and interaction mechanisms of the region's prevailing westerlies and monsoonal flow. Research data covered all six spheres, or atmospheric layers, near Mt. Qomolangma, also known as Mount Everest, the highest mountain on Earth.

Ammonia is a carbon-neutral energy carrier and potential transportation fuel applied extensively in fertilizers, plastics, and explosives. Conventional ammonia synthesis methods rely primarily on the high-temperature and high-pressure Haber–Bosch process, which leads to considerable energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Researchers have been concerned that as the makeup of America's families grows more complex, adult children in stepfamilies may not be as willing as those in biological families to care for aging parents.

White-tailed deer are heavily overpopulated along the East Coast of the U.S., and they play an important role in spreading and supporting tick populations that transmit diseases like Lyme disease and anaplasmosis. Efforts to control deer populations have long been based on the assumption that deer live mostly in wooded parklands, primarily passing through neighborhoods at night to graze on gardens and landscaped yards.