Новости за 19.12.2022

Mercury pollution is a global threat to human health, especially to unborn babies and young children. Exposure to methylmercury, a type that forms when mercury washes into lakes and streams, can harm children's brain development and cause symptoms including speech impairment and muscle weakness in adults who consume seafood as their main food source. Methylmercury also threatens health and reproduction in fish and other wildlife.

Novelist Charlotte Brontë was devastated when her sister Emily died from tuberculosis on December 19, 1848.

The North Pole is not what it once was. The Arctic is the area on the globe where temperatures are rising the fastest. On Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, this entails extended periods of mild weather. Precipitation comes as rain, snow melts, and then freezes again in colder periods. These alternations between hot and cold result in the ground being covered in ice. That is a problem for the Svalbard reindeer: when ice covers the ground, food becomes unavailable.

The 196 countries meeting for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity conference (COP15) in Montreal, Canada, are negotiating a new set of targets for reversing the loss of Earth's biodiversity. They have set themselves a formidable challenge: ensuring humanity is "living in harmony with nature" by 2050.

A group of researchers measuring carbon emissions in a large university hospital with a research center in central Japan found that its overall carbon footprint increased over a decade. However, they also found that carbon emissions from gas and electricity decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic. They published their findings in the journal Globalization and Health.

Without phosphorus food cannot be produced, since all plants and animals need it to grow. Put simply: if there is no phosphorus, there is no life. As such, phosphorus-based fertilisers—it is the "P" in "NPK" fertiliser—have become critical to the global food system.

When the COVID-19 pandemic first emerged, many wildlife disease researchers like me were not too surprised. Some were intrigued it hadn't happened sooner; after all, it is our job to observe, describe and study pandemic dynamics in animals.

A team of Oakland University researchers has published the first complete mitochondrial genome of Diadema antillarum, commonly known as the long-spined sea urchin. The invertebrate marine herbivore inhabits the shallow waters of the Western Atlantic and Caribbean and serves a crucial ecological function: grazing on algae along the region's coral reefs, preventing overgrowth that can threaten the reefs and the biodiversity they support.

Researchers at ETH Zurich and the Carnegie Institution for Science have shown how nitrogen fertilizer could be produced more sustainably. This is necessary not only to protect the climate, but also to reduce dependence on imported natural gas and to increase food security.

A team of scientists has uncovered the physical principles—a series of forces and hydrodynamic flows—that help ensure the proper functioning of life's blueprint. Its discovery provides new insights into the genome while potentially offering a new means to spot genomic aberrations linked to developmental disorders and human diseases.

If plants were a bit more ambulatory, Peter Adler and Michael Stemkovski might find their work to be a bit less urgent. If whenever the weather got too hot or dry, crested wheatgrass, yellow rabbitbrush and silvery groves of quaking aspen could choose to wriggle their extremities out of the soil and wander upslope to more hospitable environments, plants like these might have a better chance at surviving climate change. But, of course, they can't.

The future of electric aircraft and deep space missions will rely on our ability to develop electrical and electronic components that can operate at the very low temperatures of the upper atmosphere and the cryogenic temperatures of space. A review of such technology is presented in the International Journal of Powertrains. The review looks specifically at semiconductor devices, passive components, and superconducting devices that operate at very low temperatures.

Researchers from Cal Poly, Washington State University, and Claremont-McKenna Graduate School published a new Journal of Public Policy & Marketing (JPP&M) article finding that companies who engage in political advocacy experience lower sentiment on social media, lower brand attitudes and purchase intentions overall, and that these effects are driven by consumers lower in political efficacy, who lack faith in political institutions to represent them effectively.

A new study from Iowa State indicates more education increases entrepreneurship in the U.S., especially for women.

A National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) research team has identified the mechanism by which microscopic fatigue cracks grow in metals, solving a half-century-old mystery. The team found that these cracks grow along the slip planes of metallic crystals through three-dimensional imaging of large-volume samples. Most cracks were found to be caused by a shearing force rather than the tensile forces previously thought to be responsible.

Although increasing attention is being paid to participatory research methods, they still remain underused in research addressing older people's learning, according to a new scoping review conducted at the University of Eastern Finland.

Scientists in the STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)—an atom smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory—have published a comprehensive analysis aimed at determining which factors most influence fluctuations in the flow of particles from heavy ion collisions. The results, published in Physical Review Letters, will help the scientists zero in on key properties of a unique form of matter that mimics the early universe.

Based partly on data from generations of NASA missions, including NASA's Voyager and Cassini, the work could help scientists determine how to predict weather on Jupiter.

The study of concentrated poverty and its effects on kids and social mobility has been a sociological topic for a long time, but new research published in Science Advances is among the first to explore neighborhood effects on cognitive development that considers the mediating role of neurotoxic air pollution exposure in early life.

Astronomers are keenly interested in red dwarfs and the planets that orbit them. Up to 85% of the stars in the Milky Way could be red dwarfs, and 40% of them might host Earth-like exoplanets in their habitable zones, according to some research.

Can our planet recover from climate change? Commissioning Editor, Kofoworola Belo-Osagie, asked scientists to share the reasons they believe there is hope.

In 2017, the Scottish philosopher William MacAskill coined the name "longtermism" to describe the idea "that positively affecting the long-run future is a key moral priority of our time." The label took off among like-minded philosophers and members of the "effective altruism" movement, which sets out to use evidence and reason to determine how individuals can best help the world.

Hanukkah, the Jewish "festival of lights," commemorates a story of a miracle, when oil meant to last for one day lasted for eight. Today, Jews light the menorah, a candelabra with eight candles—and one "helper" candle, called a shamas—to remember the Hanukkah oil, which kept the Jerusalem temple's everlasting lamp burning brightly. Each year, the holiday starts with just the shamas and one of the eight candles and ends, on the last night, with the entire menorah lit up.

University of Queensland scientists have developed an environmentally friendly RNA-based spray to help combat myrtle rust, which has wiped out many Australian plants.

At this time of the year, the mention of Lapland conjures up visions of Santa getting his gift-laden sleigh and nine reindeer ready to take to the skies for the most important deliveries of all. However, the skies of Lapland have witnessed something rather different recently—a big white balloon, which may not provide the immediate gratification of a much-wanted Christmas present, but nonetheless plays a role in helping to safeguard our children's future.