Новости за 23.09.2022

Since ancient times, humans have extracted salts, like table salt, from the ocean. While table salt is the easiest to obtain, seawater is a rich source of different minerals, and researchers are exploring which ones they can pull from the ocean. One such mineral, magnesium, is abundant in the sea and increasingly useful on the land.

New UMBC-led research in Frontiers in Microbiology suggests that viruses are using information from their environment to "decide" when to sit tight inside their hosts and when to multiply and burst out, killing the host cell. The work has implications for antiviral drug development.

Tiny nets woven from DNA strands can ensnare the spike protein of the virus that causes COVID-19, lighting up the virus for a fast-yet-sensitive diagnostic test—and also impeding the virus from infecting cells, opening a new possible route to antiviral treatment, according to a new study.

From a box of Cracker Jack to The Da Vinci Code, everybody enjoys deciphering secret messages. But biomedical engineers at Duke University have taken the decoder ring to place it's never been before—the patterns created by bacterial colonies.

The impacts of air pollution on human health, economies, and agriculture differ drastically depending on where on the planet the pollutants are emitted, according to a new study that could potentially incentivize certain countries to cut climate-changing emissions.

Model animals, such as mice and fruit flies, have provided scientists with powerful insights into how cellular biology works. However, model animals are really just a guide, and it can be risky to generalize findings across animals from studying a selection of model organisms.

Due to their very high efficiency in transporting electric charges from light, perovskites are known as the next generation material for solar panels and LED displays. A team led by Dr. Lei Su at Queen Mary University of London now have invented a brand-new application of perovskites as optical fibers. The results are published in Science Advances.

Do we fall for political tricks—when politicians tell us things that seem completely meaningless? Social psychologists of the University of Amsterdam tested how people respond to vague and meaningless statements like "To politically lead the people means to always fight for them" and "For better and stronger Gonfel!" (a fictitious country). They find that right-wing people, and especially neoliberals, are more receptive to such statements. The study is now published in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology.

Details of the orbits of 450 candidate exoplanet targets of the European Space Agency's Ariel space mission have been presented this week at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2022, and submitted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. The study, coordinated by the ExoClock project, has been co-authored by 217 professional and amateur astronomers, as well as university and high school students.

Lunar enthusiasts of all ages are challenged to help identify features on the moon that might pose a hazard to rovers or astronauts exploring the surface.

Creating a mutation that inhibits how the bacterial pathogen Neisseria gonorrhoeae causes gonorrhea, a common sexually transmitted infection, could offer a new way to prevent and treat the disease, according to researchers in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University.

In 2012, a crop of California's most prized ornamental trees was overrun by an invisible invader. The growing shoots of coral beans—the official city tree of Los Angeles—began wilting and falling away, revealing stems that had been hollowed out from the inside by the caterpillars of Erythrina stem borer moths.

From love charms to getting rid of demons and curing illness, ancient documents give a unique glimpse into how rich and poor in Malta used magic to improve their lives.

One of the fascinating aspects of scientific research is certainly the serendipity that comes with it, which is something the team of Prof. Alain Vanderplasschen, virologist and immunologist at the FARAH (Faculty of Veterinary Medicine) of the University of Liège can only agree with. His team has just published in Nucleic Acids Research the results of ten years of research on the study of an original protein of a carp virus.

Stargazers across the globe will get a great view of Jupiter come Monday night, weather permitting.

Bermuda assessed damage Friday after Hurricane Fiona brushed past the island overnight, causing flooding and leaving most of the population without power as it set course for Canada.

Researchers at Tufts University have developed a method to make silk-based materials that refuse to stick to water, or almost anything else containing water for that matter. In fact, the modified silk, which can be molded into forms like plastic, or coated onto surfaces as a film, has non-stick properties that surpass those of nonstick surfaces typically used on cookware, and it could see applications that extend into a wide range of consumer products, as well as medicine.

In 2014, Los Angeles cut its annual carbon emissions by 43% and saved $9 million in energy costs by replacing the bulbs in more than half of the city's street lamps with light-emitting diodes.

Researchers from Uppsala University and elsewhere have been studying the effect of rising temperatures on the lifespan of pollinating fig wasps. The findings show that the wasps lived much shorter lives at high temperatures, which would make it difficult for them to travel the long distances between the trees they pollinate.

As the old saying goes, many hands can make light work. They can also work together to make light vanish.

Lithium sulfide (Li-S) batteries are considered a promising and efficient energy storage system because of their high energy density (2600 Wh kg-1) and low sulfur material cost. However, numerous obstacles to the practical implementation of Li–S batteries remain, including low sulfur conductivity, the shuttle effect, and the requirement for an adequate volume change (80%) of sulfur during charging and discharging operations. These have limited the applicability of Li–S batteries.

A well-known phenomenon in the atmospheric sciences that challenges the classical baroclinic instability theory of cyclone development is midwinter suppression. That is, the North Pacific storm-track activity has a minimum in midwinter, despite the surface baroclinicity being at its highest.

Extreme climate warming has been shown to change how cloud cover behaves throughout East Asia (EA). Recent research suggests that in a warmer climate with greater amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere, slow cloud responses to meteorological mechanisms can cause a cooling effect over certain regions of EA. However, in some areas within Asia, fast cloud responses may have the opposite effect. This new dynamic is concerning to climatologists who are working to better understand how CO2 and clouds interact.

Climate change (e.g., global warming) is intensifying the global water cycle and the temporal variation of precipitation has increased significantly. The distribution of precipitation is more uneven over time, and drought and flood events occurred more frequently. This unstable variability in precipitation is particularly negative for crop growth.

Whether residents of high-income countries are morally obliged to have fewer children is a growing debate in climate ethics. Due to the high anticipated carbon impact of future population growth, some climate ethicists express support for non-coercive population engineering policies such as reduced child tax credits.