Новости за 04.10.2022

Belgian investigators have improved the flavor of contemporary beer by identifying and engineering a gene that is responsible for much of the flavor of beer and some other alcoholic drinks. The research appears in Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Before any NASA mission is launched, the spacecraft goes through weeks of harsh treatment. It's strapped to a big table that shakes as hard as the pounding of a rocket launch. It's bombarded with louder noise than a stadium rock concert. It's frozen, baked, and irradiated in a vacuum chamber that simulates the extremes of space. The Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission (SWOT), a collaborative U.S.-French mission to monitor all the water on Earth's surface, has passed these major tests. Now... Читать дальше...

The first direct evidence of orcas killing white sharks in South Africa has been captured by both a helicopter and drone pilot, and a new open-access paper published today in The Ecological Society of America's journal Ecology presents both sets of video footage, which provide new evidence that orcas are capable of pursuing, capturing and incapacitating white sharks. One predation event was filmed on drone, but the researchers believe that three other sharks may also have been killed.

The alignment between galaxy spins and the large-scale structure of the universe reveals the processes by which different components of galaxies form.

How lightning travels from the sky to the ground inspired the concept behind a new algorithmic approach to digitally separate individual trees from their forests in automatic forest mapping.

Scientists at UC Riverside are suggesting something is missing from the typical roster of chemicals that astrobiologists use to search for life on planets around other stars—laughing gas.

Corals live symbiotically with a variety of microscopic algae that provide most of the energy corals require, and some algae can make coral more resilient to heat stress. In assessing one of the main reef builders in Hawai'i, Montipora capitata (rice coral), researchers from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa found that the symbiont community in those corals varied significantly in different parts of Kaneohe Bay.

Cornell scientists have created an evolutionary model that connects organisms living in today's oxygen-rich atmosphere to a time, billions of years ago, when Earth's atmosphere had little oxygen—by analyzing ribonucleotide reductases (RNRs), a family of proteins used by all free-living organisms and many viruses to repair and replicate DNA.

Alain Aspect, who won a long-expected Nobel Physics Prize on Tuesday, not only helped prove the strange theory of quantum entanglement but also inspired a generation of physicists in his native France, according to former students and colleagues.

The asteroid that got smacked by a NASA spacecraft is now being trailed by thousands of miles of debris from the impact.

Gene banks worldwide make an important contribution to the conservation of biological diversity. In the Federal Ex situ Gene Bank at the IPK Leibniz Institute alone, more than 150,000 old varieties are preserved. In addition to negative traits, old and exotic varieties possess many valuable gene variants that have been lost in modern varieties but may be crucial for plant production in the future. But how can this hidden treasure of valuable biodiversity be tapped for agriculture?

The Parks & Green Space Research Portal promotes collaboration and shared research between academics and parks professionals worldwide.

What happens when we breathe in nanoparticles emitted by, for example, a laser printer? Could these nanoparticles damage the respiratory tract or perhaps even other organs? To answer these questions, Fraunhofer researchers are developing the "NanoCube" exposure device.

Although just cute little creatures at first glance, the microscopic geckos and octopuses fabricated by 3D laser printing in the molecular engineering labs at Heidelberg University could open up new opportunities in fields such as microrobotics or biomedicine.

A large part of our DNA is made up of selfish repetitive DNA elements, some of which can jump from one site in the genome to another, potentially damaging the genome. Researchers from the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA) describe how different types of repetitive DNA elements are controlled by the same silencing mechanism in fruit fly ovaries.

A UCLA chemist and colleagues are now a step closer to their goal of developing a handheld tool similar to an alcohol Breathalyzer that can detect THC on a person's breath after they've smoked marijuana.

Economists from HSE University and the Vienna University of Economics and Business have figured out why, with all else being equal, trading goods across borders can be more expensive than trading the same goods within state borders. They argue that one of the reasons is underdeveloped infrastructure in border regions. Their study was published in the Journal of Urban Economics.

A simple two-carbon compound may have been a crucial player in the evolution of metabolism before the advent of cells, according to a new study published October 4 in the open access journal PLOS Biology, by Nick Lane and colleagues of University College London, U.K. The finding potentially sheds light on the earliest stages of prebiotic biochemistry, and suggests how ATP came to be the universal energy carrier of all cellular life today.

Over the past 40 years, considerable progress has been made in lowering rates of domestic violence (DV) in our communities. However, this progress has been uneven due to continuing misconceptions about the causes and dynamics of domestic violence.

Prosecutors exert considerable power in the criminal justice system, and while defendants are predominantly Black and Latinx, prosecutors are overwhelmingly White. Despite calls for addressing racial disparities in this field, we know little about whether recruiting minority prosecutors would yield more equitable outcomes for defendants.

Authoritarian regimes worldwide have embraced the digital age. And they have been generally effective at limiting the online presence of perceived adversaries within their borders—from intellectual dissidents to transnational activists.

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, in collaboration with ETH Zurich, have optimized a method for tumor diagnosis using radionuclides. Potential side-effects can now be significantly reduced through a molecular trick. The researchers report their results in the current issue of Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry.

Environmental advocates, Alaska Natives and commercial fishermen say they are at once confident and anxious as they wait for the EPA to announce a final ban on mining wastes in Bristol Bay, Alaska—home to one of the world's largest salmon fisheries—that would effectively kill a gold and copper mine estimated to be worth $350 billion.

With striking high-speed video footage, scientists have for the first time detailed how predatory mosquito larvae attack and capture prey in aquatic habitats. Published today in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America, this new research sheds light on behavior that has long proven too small and too fast to study, until now.

A small piece of foreign object debris (FOD) was seen in footage from the Mars helicopter's navigation camera (Navcam) for a portion of its 33rd flight. This FOD was not visible in Navcam footage from the previous flight (32).