Новости за 01.11.2022

Working in teeny tiny worms, scientists can now test the effects of thousands of genetic mutations in one fell swoop.

When people talk about adapting to climate change, they often refer to innovations—a new crop variety that can withstand more extreme heat or building underwater pumps to cool coral reefs. But Gary Lyn, an assistant professor who specializes in international trade and economic geography at Iowa State University, says trade, migration and job options will also affect how individual states and countries fare over the next 100 years.

Polymers are lightweight, durable, and easily processed into fabricated parts, features that promoted polymers to become the most relevant class of engineering materials by volume. However, recycling polymers is a challenge that materials scientists have been researching for decades.

When it comes to the biological imperatives of survival and reproduction, nature often finds a way—sometimes more than one way. For a species of flycatcher in the remote Solomon Islands, scientists have so far found at least two genetic pathways leading to the same physical outcome: all-black feathers. This change was no random accident. It was a result of nature specifically selecting for this trait.

A significant reduction in childhood poverty could cut criminal convictions by almost a quarter, according to a study conducted in Brazil. An article on the study is published in Scientific Reports. The researchers used an innovative approach involving an analysis of 22 risk factors that affect human development and interviews with 1,905 children at two points—a first interview to form a baseline (mean age 10.3) and a follow-up interview seven years later (mean age 17.8).

Nature seems to have an inexhaustible supply of inspiration when it comes to butterflies. With over 18,000 species, each with a unique geometry and color combination, butterflies look as though they're trying their best to imitate a sunbeam that crossed paths with a prism.

Bats help keep forests growing. Without bats to hold their populations in check, insects that munch on tree seedlings go wild, doing three to nine times more damage than when bats are on the scene. That's according to a new study from the University of Illinois. The article, "Bats reduce insect density and defoliation in temperate forests: an exclusion experiment," is published inEcology.

In science, no matter what the field, expertise often intersects. At the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), this is especially true for many areas of study where faculty members collaborate to push the limits of a specific field that much farther. And it's equally true for a team led by Professor Andreas Ruediger, which has brought together specialists from several different backgrounds. Together, the team studied a catalytic problem and advanced our knowledge of catalytic applications.

As Hurricane Fiona made landfall as a Category 1 storm in Puerto Rico on Sept. 18, 2022, some areas of the island were inundated with nearly 30 inches of rain, and power to hundreds of thousands of homes was knocked out. Only 10 days later, Hurricane Ian, a Category 4 storm and one of the strongest and most damaging storms on record, landed in Lee County, Florida, leveling homes and flooding cities before moving up the coast and making landfall again as a Category 1 storm in South Carolina.

For many decades, it's been known that communities of color are exposed to more air pollution than their predominantly white counterparts.

Inside tiny cellular machines called ribosomes, chains of genetic material called messenger RNAs (mRNAs) are matched with the corresponding transfer RNAs (tRNAs) to create sequences of amino acids that exit the ribosome as proteins. Unfinished proteins are called nascent chains, and they are left attached to the ribosome.

Scientists have made a significant step towards building the world's first digital plant by developing a sophisticated computational model which has also solved one of the most enduring plant science mysteries—the role of the biological clock.

Microorganisms are essential for normal social development in zebrafish via their influence on pruning of neural connections in the developing brain, according to a study publishing November 1st in the open access journal PLOS Biology by Joseph Bruckner at the University of Oregon, US, and colleagues.

Reproduction permanently alters females' bones in ways not previously known, a team of anthropologists has found. Its discovery, based on an analysis of primates, sheds new light on how giving birth can permanently change the body.

Two newly developed, low-cost tests that use nanoparticles to detect chemicals can accurately measure tiny amounts of two potentially harmful herbicides in fruits, vegetables and their products.

This year has been an extraordinary one for the Earth's climate, for all the wrong reasons: Hurricane Ian devastated southwestern Florida, Hurricane Fiona hammered Nova Scotia, a third of Pakistan was impacted by massive flooding, record heats baked the west coast of North America from British Columbia to California. Europe's heat wave shattered all existing records.

The noble saguaro cactus may take the cake for the most globally iconic desert plant in the Southwest, but it would be impossible for a Southern Californian to imagine a desert landscape without Joshua trees on the horizon.

Subalpine larch (Larix chinensis) is an endemic coniferous tree distributed above 3,100 m above sea level and forms treeline ecotone at the elevation of 3,450 m above sea level in the Qinling Mountains of north-central China. However, two prevailing but competing hypotheses (i.e., the carbon limitation hypothesis and the growth limitation hypothesis) based on carbon supply/demand balance cannot yet provide a broad explanation for the formation of alpine treeline.

A new method has been developed for the rapid detection of microbes from cancer patients. It was developed by a collaborated research team led by Prof. Gu Hongcang from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

When measuring with light, the lateral extent of the structures that can be resolved by an optical imaging system is fundamentally diffraction limited. Overcoming this limitation is a topic of great interest in recent research, and several approaches have been published in this area.

On September 26, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft crashed into Dimorphos, a moonlet of the near-Earth asteroid Didymos, at 14,000 miles per hour. Prior to the impact, Southwest Research Institute engineers and scientists performed an experiment to study the cratering process that produces the mass of ejected materials and measures the subsequent momentum enhancement of the impact.

The largest animals ever known to have lived on Earth ingest the tiniest specks of plastic in colossal amounts, Stanford University scientists have found.

The weak nuclear force is currently not entirely understood, despite being one of the four fundamental forces of nature. In a pair of Physical Review Letters articles, a multi-institutional team, including theorists and experimentalists from Louisiana State University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory and other institutions worked closely together to test physics beyond the "Standard Model" through high-precision measurements of nuclear beta decay.

Data gathered by habitat mapping programs can make important contributions to biodiversity research. They provide insight into changes of the local flora since the 1980s—a period that is not well covered by other sources of information. A team from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and the Hamburg Authorities for the Environment, Climate, Energy and Agriculture has now shown how research can benefit from this historic habitat mapping data using habitat maps of the city and federal state of Hamburg as an example. Читать дальше...

Notable minorities of the U.K. public say they believe conspiracy theories about terror attacks including the Manchester Arena bombing, the 7/7 attacks in London, 9/11, and school shootings in the U.S., with belief particularly high among younger people and those who get much of their news from social media and messaging platforms, according to new research.