Новости за 21.03.2024

Everyone loves a two-for-one deal—even physicists looking to tackle unanswered questions about the cosmos. Now, scientists at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are getting just such a twofer: Particle detectors originally developed to look for dark matter are now in a position to be included aboard the Line Emission Mapper (LEM), a space-based X-ray probe mission proposed for the 2030s.

A researcher from The University of Queensland has discovered a remarkable new genus of fluffy longhorn beetle while camping within a rainforest in the Gold Coast hinterland.

Dubai's famous Palm Jumeirah is not the only man-made island to have emerged from the sea this century. Over the past 20 years, many islands have been built to accommodate both tourists and well-heeled residents—especially in the Arabian Gulf states and China.

In 1960, Lewis Fry Richardson famously observed that the severity of a wartime event is described by a simple power law distribution that scales according to the size of the conflict. Statisticians have since proposed various modifications, but they continue to agree that the casualty count in a violent conflict tends to scale with the size of the insurgent group that caused the conflict.

Young people are reportedly being priced out of rural communities by soaring housing costs. Official statistics for England show that affordability in rural parts of the country is worse than in towns and cities, excluding London. In 2021, even the cheapest houses in rural areas cost around 9.2 times more than the earnings of the lowest paid workers. In urban areas, it was eight times more.

There's almost no warning. A dark shape appears on the side of the road, then you feel a jolt as something goes under the car. Or worse, the shape rears up, hits the front of your vehicle, then slams into the windscreen. You have just experienced a wildlife-vehicle collision.

Autoimmune diseases are mysterious. It wasn't until the 1950s that scientists realized that the immune system could harm the organs of its own body. Even today, the fundamental causes and inner workings of most autoimmune diseases remain poorly understood, limiting the treatment options for many of these conditions.

I have been researching the psychology of conspiracy beliefs for seven years now and people often ask me why people believe in them. This is not a simple question.

There has been an outpouring of grief in New York City ever since the beloved Eurasian eagle-owl Flaco died on Feb. 23, 2024, after striking a building. In 2023, after escaping from Central Park Zoo, Flaco survived for over a year on his own, captivating New Yorkers.

Whether in the form of frost or a smooth, transparent ice cube, ice adheres spontaneously and even quite strongly to many solid surfaces. However, as any careless person who has skidded on a winter sidewalk can testify, ice can also be very slippery. In fact, ice can be both sticky and slippery.

What maintains stability within an ecosystem and prevents a single best competitor from displacing other species from a community? Does ecosystem stability depend upon the presence of a wide variety of species, as early ecologists believed, or does diversity do the exact opposite, and lead to instability, as modern theory predicts?

Understanding how a thermonuclear flame spreads across the surface of a neutron star—and what that spreading can tell us about the relationship between the neutron star's mass and its radius—can also reveal a lot about the star's composition.

Captive chimpanzees are one of the most popular species kept in zoos because of their charismatic appeal and similarity to humans. They are the closest living relatives of humans because of the shared genes and behavioral and psychological similarities.

An artificial intelligence (AI) model could improve the accuracy of flood forecasting, according to a new study published in Nature. The system is shown to be as accurate as, or an improvement on, current leading methods and could provide earlier warnings of large flooding events.

New Zealand's rivers are not in a good shape. The Ministry for the Environment's latest freshwater report shows an estimated 45% of total river length is no longer suitable for swimming and 48% is partially inaccessible to endangered migratory fish.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump has faced dozens of sexual misconduct allegations over the decades. He's the first president to be held liable for sexual assault, and in January, he was ordered to pay over US$80 million to E. Jean Carroll for defamatory statements related to her sexual assault claims.

Freshwater will be an increasingly scarce resource as we head into spring and summer in Western Canada with implications for the livelihoods and economic prosperity of humans, and non-humans alike, in southern Alberta and the downstream Prairie provinces.

The oldest Scandinavian bedrock was "born" in Greenland according to a new geological study from the University of Copenhagen. The study helps us understand the origin of continents and why Earth is possibly the only planet in our solar system with life.

In order for plants to grow, they absorb water and nutrients through their roots. In doing so, they rely on tiny helpers: bacteria and fungi in particular are found in a thin layer around the roots. These microbes also ward off organisms that are harmful to the plant, just as the "microbiome" in the human gut helps determine whether we fall ill or stay healthy.

For the first time, a team of researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF and the University of New Mexico have succeeded in cooling silica glass by 67 Kelvin through optical laser cooling. The researchers from Jena and Albuquerque have published the results in the journal Optics Express.

Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), have developed a coin-sized chip that can directly isolate blood plasma from a tube of blood in just 30 minutes, which is more convenient and user-friendly as compared to the current gold standard, multi-step centrifugation process.

Scientists have uncovered the fossilized skull of a 270-million-year-old ancient amphibian ancestor in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. In a paper published today, March 21, in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, the team of researchers described the fossil as a new species of proto-amphibian, which they named Kermitops gratus in honor of the iconic muppet, Kermit the Frog.

In a study published in Geophysical Research Letters on March 13, researchers from the Institute of Earth Environment of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Northwest University showed that land snails are very sensitive to climate and environmental changes, and they can record high-resolution terrestrial climate changes.

Researchers are using new, experimental techniques like Shear Assisted Processing and Extrusion (ShAPE) and friction stir welding to produce metal components that are lighter, stronger, and more precise than ever before. But as we enter those new frontiers of metalworking, it's crucial to understand the performance and properties of the resulting metals and the bonds between them.

Candida albicans is a fungus that occurs naturally in the digestive tract of most people. However, the fungus is not always harmless. It can cause mild to severe infections throughout the body. A toxin, candidalysin, is involved in these infections. It appears to be of central importance in vaginal infections in particular.