Новости за 27.12.2022

On Dec. 30, 2021, one of the most destructive wildfires on record in Colorado swept through neighborhoods just a few miles from our offices at the University of Colorado Boulder. The flames destroyed over 1,000 buildings, yet when we drove through the affected neighborhoods, some houses were still completely intact right next to homes where nothing was left to burn.

Driving home recently, I encountered a familiar sight: four dining chairs on the kerb waiting for some sucker to rescue them. Loading them into the car (sucker!) I wondered: how long were these chairs in shed limbo-land before finally getting kicked to the kerb?

Each December, Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, among others, take over our thoughts and our wallets as we participate in ceremonies our ancestors have practiced for as long as we can remember. These are all example of traditions. And in most cases, traditions are accompanied by rituals.

For Australians, memories of childhood Christmas often include gifts, prawns and shooing uninvited buzzing guests away from the pavlova.

The year 2022 was a tough one for the growing number of people living in food insecurity and energy poverty around the world, and the beginning of 2023 is looking bleak.

Global warming has increased the number of extreme weather events around the world by 400% since the 1980s. Countries know how to stop the damage from worsening: stop burning fossil fuels and shift to renewable energy, electrify transportation and industry, and reduce the carbon intensity of agriculture.

The bookmaker (nearly) always wins, as the adage goes. But if you want to tip the balance in your favor, look to female riders.

Drinking alcohol has been part of Australian culture for at least 240 years, and perhaps millennia prior.

Beachgoers could be safer thanks to a new technology with the potential to give real-time updates of rip currents.

Integrated photonics extensively uses on-chip optical elements such as sources, splitters, modulators, and high-confinement waveguides embedded in a planar platform to efficiently process and route optical signals. There is a growing interest in integrated Mid-IR and THz photonics for telecommunications and sensing. In the THz frequency range, a prominent candidate for source integration is the THz quantum cascade laser.

University of Adelaide researchers have built a comprehensive profile of homelessness and associated health issues in Adelaide. Their work is published in the Australian Journal of Social Issues.

Imagine a virtual human body, rich in complexity and detail, that enables scientists to simulate experiments that can't be conducted in vivo or in vitro. A team of Chinese researchers brought this vision closer to reality by developing a framework for seamless cell-centric data assembly and built the human Ensemble Cell Atlas (hECA) using data collected from scattered public datasets.

Over a single day, in the placid waters of a single pond, a million virus particles might enter a single-celled organism known for the minuscule hairs, or cilia, that propel it through those waters.

Researchers at Nagoya University, Japan, have discovered a mechanism for the selective transportation of sugar and hormones in plants. The results also clarify that sugar transportation is necessary for male fertility in plants, which means pollen production. The findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Coal tar, once considered waste, has become a huge treasure trove because hundreds of compounds can be isolated from it. Most of these compounds tend to be aromatic hydrocarbons, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and heterocyclic compounds.

Genetic information encoded in genomic DNA is transcribed to mRNAs and then the codons on mRNA are decoded by transfer RNAs (tRNAs) during protein synthesis. tRNAs deliver amino acids to ribosomes and proteins are synthesized from the amino acids on the ribosomes according to the decoded genetic information. Therefore, tRNA plays a key role during the translation of genetic information.

There's an old adage in the engineering field—what gets funded gets built. So it's sure to be a happy time over at the Planetary Society, as NEO Surveyor, the project the organization has primarily supported over the past few years, has made it through NASA's grueling budgetary process to reach the "development" stage, with an eye for a launch of the system in 2028.

In a recent study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, an international team of researchers led by the University of Cologne in Germany examined how solar flares erupted by the TRAPPIST-1 star could affect the interior heating of its orbiting exoplanets.

Traditional mining has been subject to a negative stigma for some time. People, especially in developed countries, have a relatively negative view of this necessary economic activity. Primarily that is due to its environmental impacts—greenhouse gas emissions and habitat destruction are some of the effects that give the industry its negative image.

Studying the large-scale structure of our galaxy isn't easy. We don't have a clear view of the Milky Way's shape and features like we do of other galaxies, largely because we live within it. But we do have some advantages. From within, we're able to carry out close-up surveys of the Milky Way's stellar population and its chemical compositions. That gives researchers the tools they need to compare our own galaxy to the many millions of others in the universe.

A team of researchers at the University of Rhode Island, working with a colleague at the University of Richmond, has found that despite laws banning the sale of hatchling turtles, there is a thriving online market for them in the U.S. In their paper published in the open-access journal PLOS One, the group describes their survey of online sites selling turtles and whether such sites were adhering to federal regulations.

Nudging—the idea that simple changes to how a choice is presented can lead people to make better decisions—has been one of the most popular ideas to emerge from economics in the past two decades.

In a recent article, Associate Professor Nevin Cohen discusses the opportunities presented by COVID-19 to address not only the symptoms of food insecurity, but the root causes as well.

In 2019, Shinshu University Special Contract Professor Domen Kazunari and colleagues developed the powdered oxysulfide photocatalyst Y2Ti2O5S2 that absorbs sunlight of wavelengths below 650 nm and splits water into hydrogen and oxygen.

Detailed predictions about how an approaching tsunami will impact the northeastern coastline in Japan can be made in fractions of a second rather than half an hour or so—buying precious time for people to take appropriate action. This potentially life-saving technology exploits the power of machine learning.