Новости за 24.10.2022

NASA's Mars rovers strive for groundbreaking scientific discoveries as they traverse the Martian landscape. At the same time, the crews operating the rovers do all they can to protect them and the billions of dollars behind the mission. This balance between risk and reward drives the decisions surrounding where the rovers go, the paths they take to get there and the science they uncover.

In a study that confirms its promise as the next-generation semiconductor material, UC Santa Barbara researchers have directly visualized the photocarrier transport properties of cubic boron arsenide single crystals.

Over the last decade, the lush olive groves one associates with the Italian countryside have become desiccated, as if stuck in a perpetual winter. The culprit is Xylella fastidiosa, a species of aggressive bacteria that have caused devastating epidemics in several important crops. X. fastidiosa now threatens almonds, olives, and grapevines—staples of Europe's economy and cuisine.

Jeholornis was a raven-sized bird that lived 120 million years ago, among the earliest examples of dinosaurs evolving into birds, in what's now China. The fossils that have been found are finely preserved but smashed flat, the result of layers of sediment being deposited over the years. That means that no one's been able to get a good look at Jeholornis's head. But in a new study, researchers digitally reconstructed a Jeholornis skull, revealing details about its eyes and brain that shed light on its vision and sense of smell.

A warm, dry winter is in store for much of California as La Niña conditions are slated to persist through at least January, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Aquaculture is fast becoming integral to global food security, and to feed the world's growing population, it is expected to continue expanding rapidly in the coming years.

The last time world leaders got together for a climate summit, the backdrop was thoroughly menacing. A pandemic had decimated national budgets. Poor countries were up in arms over the hoarding of COVID-19 vaccines by the same wealthy nations whose fossil fuel consumption did most to warm the planet. Relations between the two largest emitters, the U.S. and China, had devolved into zero sum skirmishes over everything from trade to Taiwan.

A joint study by TAU and the Hebrew University, involving 20 researchers from different countries and disciplines, has accurately dated 21 destruction layers at 17 archaeological sites in Israel by reconstructing the direction and/or intensity of the earth's magnetic field recorded in burnt remnants. The new data verify the Biblical accounts of the Egyptian, Aramean, Assyrian, and Babylonian military campaigns against the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

Research co-led by The University of Queensland has found sharing real-time air quality readings in developing countries can reduce air pollution and lead to lower mortality rates.

While air quality has improved dramatically over the past 50 years thanks in part to the Clean Air Act, people of color at every income level in the United States are still exposed to higher-than-average levels of air pollution.

New research analyzing pieces of the most ancient rocks on the planet adds some of the sharpest evidence yet that Earth's crust was pushing and pulling in a manner similar to modern plate tectonics at least 3.25 billion years ago. The study also provides the earliest proof of when the planet's magnetic north and south poles swapped places.

In 2012 CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) revolutionized particle physics when it was announced that the Higgs boson had been created and detected by the world's most powerful particle accelerator.

Scientists from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw and the Polish Academy of Sciences used photons to create a spiking neuron, the basic element of the future photonic neural network processor. The results of their work are published in the latest Laser and Photonics Review.

On a hilltop about 95 miles west of Chicago grow plant species that have been there for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The soil is sandy, so when the surrounding lowlands were used for agriculture, the hill remained untouched. From that vantage point, Nachusa Grasslands sprawls below with sections of savanna, a pond frequented by blue herons, patchy spots where bison have grazed, and a red barn to the far north that marks the volunteer and scientist headquarters.

While cattle production has historically focused on increasing the feed efficiency of steers to produce a marketable beef product, researchers at the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture are studying the feed efficiency of heifers, whose health and pregnancies set production up for success.

For a researcher who studies wildfire, University of Montana graduate student Kyra Clark-Wolf couldn't have had better timing.

The research team from Hunan University has proposed a facile and industrially applicable method to fabricate an extreme wettability surface on an Al-based superhydrophobic surface by a composite process of electrochemical mask etching and micro-milling, and achieved the controlled evaporation, directional bouncing and transport of droplets on this surface over a wide temperature range for the first time.

America was unprepared for the magnitude of the pandemic, which overwhelmed many counties and filled some hospitals to capacity. A new paper in PNAS suggests there may have been a mathematical method, of sorts, to the madness of those early COVID days.

International efforts to avoid dangerous climate change by reaching the global 1.5°C target are unlikely to be achieved in "emerging emitter" countries without substantial further decreases in the costs of non-emitting energy deployment or economic support and low-carbon technology transfer from historically high-emitting countries.

Research at the University of Gothenburg has shown that the Skaftö wreck had probably taken on cargo in Gdańsk in Poland and was heading towards Belgium when it foundered in the Lysekil archipelago around 1440. Modern methods of analysis of the cargo are now providing completely new answers about the way trade was conducted in the Middle Ages.

Small structures made out of carbons are a useful and versatile tool that can be used across industries, including in water and wastewater treatment, gas and oil, and energy storage. In order to create these nanostructures, synthetic and natural polymers have traditionally been used as a starting point to initiate the chemical reaction necessary to create the nanostructured carbons. This is called a precursor.

In a recent study, researchers systematically introduced excited-state multiple proton transfers (ESMPTs) in organic molecules. Although great advances have been achieved, there is still much controversy regarding the mechanism of ESMPT in organic molecules. From a large number of experimental studies conducted so far, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about the origin of spectral features, the occurrence and mechanism of ESMPT using only one method.

In a new study, North Carolina State University researchers found more people shifted blame for shark bites away from the animals after watching positive YouTube videos about them. They also saw greater support on average for non-lethal strategies for responding to incidents in which a shark has bitten a person.

Coral reef halos, also known as grazing halos or sand halos, are bands of bare, sandy seafloor that surround coral patch reefs. These features, clearly-visible from satellite imagery, may provide a window into reef health around the world, according to a recently published study by researchers at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST).

Mercury is a unique element that has found a myriad of scientific and practical applications throughout the centuries. Besides its well-known role in commercial thermometers, mercury is widely used in artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) because it forms a liquid amalgam with gold. By heating the mixture, mercury evaporates, leaving behind gold. The problem with this style of ASGM is that mercury vapors, and mercury in general, are extremely dangerous to human health and the environment.