Новости за 06.03.2024

Greg Rouse, a marine biologist at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and other researchers have discovered a new species of deep-sea worm living near a methane seep some 50 kilometers (30 miles) off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Rouse, curator of the Scripps Benthic Invertebrate Collection, co-authored a study describing the new species in the journal PLOS ONE.

For years, controversy has swirled around how a Cretaceous-era, sail-backed dinosaur—the giant Spinosaurus aegyptiacus—hunted its prey. Spinosaurus was among the largest predators ever to prowl the Earth and one of the most adapted to water, but was it an aquatic denizen of the seas, diving deep to chase down its meals, or a semiaquatic wader that snatched prey from the shallows close to shore?

A group of Tallinn University researchers has published an innovative study that sheds light on the intricate dynamics of the global film festival circuit, revealing insights into diversity and public value creation within the industry. The research demonstrates that festival programming has become more thematically diverse, and the inclusion of films by women creatives has increased between 2012–2021.

Many vaccines, including vaccines for hepatitis B and whooping cough, consist of fragments of viral or bacterial proteins. These vaccines often include other molecules called adjuvants, which help to boost the immune system's response to the protein.

A computational model of the more than 26 million atoms in a DNA-packed viral capsid expands our understanding of virus structure and DNA dynamics, insights that could provide new research avenues and drug targets, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers report in the journal Nature.

Whereas humans have one receptor on their tongues that can detect all sorts of sweet things, from real sugar to artificial sweeteners like aspartame, insects have many receptors that each detect specific types of sugars. Yale researchers have now uncovered one way insect receptors are able to be so selective, an insight they say will help us understand how animals decipher the chemical world and how we might mimic that ability in the future.

University of Queensland research has revealed that protecting smaller but more strategic parcels of land will result in better and more cost-effective biodiversity conservation outcomes globally.

Text-to-image generative AI systems like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E can produce images based on text prompts that, had they been produced by humans, would plausibly be judged as "creative." Some artists have argued that these programs are a threat to human creativity. If AI comes to be relied on to produce most new visual works, drawing on what has been done before, creative progress could stagnate.

The idea of objects seamlessly disappearing, not just in controlled laboratory environments but also in real-world scenarios, has long captured the popular imagination. This concept epitomizes the trajectory of human civilization, from primitive camouflage techniques to the sophisticated metamaterial-based cloaks of today.

The corn leafhopper Dalbulus maidis has become a serious problem for farmers. This tiny insect is now widely distributed in the Americas, from the south of the United States to the north of Argentina. In Brazil, it uses only corn plants as hosts, and little is known about its survival mechanisms in the absence of these plants. In corn, it causes damage directly by sucking sap from the phloem, the vascular tissue that conducts sugar and other metabolic products downward from the leaves.

More than 6,000 people died and at least 11,000 reportedly disappeared in the aftermath of the destructive flood that hit Libya on September 10 2023.

A Special Issue of the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology co-edited by Yale School of Public Health Associate Professor Dr. Nicole Deziel, Ph.D., presents the latest research on exposure, health, and justice issues surrounding chemical contamination in drinking water. This Special Issue includes 17 articles authored by experts from around the globe and across multiple disciplines including environmental engineering, hydrology, exposure science, epidemiology, toxicology, and climate science.

The Kepler mission enabled the discovery of thousands of exoplanets, revealing a deep truth about our place in the cosmos: There are more planets than stars in the Milky Way galaxy. The road to this fundamental change in our understanding of the universe, however, required almost 20 years of persistence before the mission became a reality with its selection in 2001.

Hate speech incidents are widespread in all areas of society and are often unchallenged by uninvolved bystanders. LMU researchers have investigated what significance the reactions of bystanders to verbal hate attacks have for the formation of social norms.

Stem cells are the body's wellspring of renewal. They can turn into any kind of cell the body needs, from liver to skin to bone. But the well would run dry if all the stem cells transformed.

A research team led by the Paul Scherrer Institute has spectroscopically observed the fractionalization of electronic charge in an iron-based metallic ferromagnet. Experimental observation of the phenomenon is not only of fundamental importance. Since it appears in an alloy of common metals at accessible temperatures, it holds potential for future exploitation in electronic devices. The discovery is published in the journal Nature.

Entropy is often associated with disorder and chaos, but in biology it is related to energy efficiency and is closely linked to metabolism, the set of chemical reactions that sustain life.

Evaporation is a natural process so ubiquitous that most of us take it for granted. In fact, roughly half of the solar energy that reaches the Earth drives evaporative processes. Since 2017, researchers have been working to harness the energy potential of evaporation via the hydrovoltaic (HV) effect, which allows electricity to be harvested when fluid is passed over the charged surface of a nanoscale device.

Collaborative research that combined experiments at Yale University and molecular dynamics simulations at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory provides new insights into solving a major technical obstacle to efficient and sustainable industrial operations.

Researchers from the Bhogaraju Group at EMBL Grenoble have gained new insights into how a cancer-relevant family of proteins bind their targets. The results of the study, published in The EMBO Journal, could potentially help in the development of drugs against certain chemotherapy- and radiotherapy-resistant cancers.

A team of chemists led by Prof. Albert Heck puts a new spin on analyzing and understanding molecules. By ingeniously improving current measuring equipment, the team was able to trap and observe individual molecules for a much longer period—up to 25 seconds. This extended observation time enabled them to see the finer details of molecules, enhancing their understanding.

The consulting firm Spencer Stuart recently published a study of top management at Fortune 500 companies, the 500 richest companies in the United States.

April in the Florida Panhandle. It was hot, humid, and a thunderstorm was lurking. But as a fresh graduate student, I was relieved for the escape from my first brutal Minnesota winter. I was accompanying my adviser, Paloma Gonzalez-Bellido, on a project that would end up dominating my Ph.D. work. Out in the scrubland, my eyes darted at every movement, on the alert for an insect that likes shiny beads.

Two physicists at the University of Konstanz are developing a method that could enable the stable exchange of information in quantum computers. In the leading role: photons that make quantum bits "fly."

Early experiences in an animal's life can have a significant impact on its capacity to thrive, even years or decades later, and DNA methylation may help record their effects.