203 articles from TUESDAY 21.1.2020

Florida creates task force on sea-level rise

After years of mostly ignoring climate change, Florida lawmakers waded deeper into the matter on Tuesday , advancing a proposal that would create a statewide Office of Resiliency and establish a task force to begin looking into how best to protect the state's 1350 miles (2,173 kilometers) of coastline from rising oceans. It's a marked change from just a few years ago, when the issue of climate...

Why These Australia Fires Are Like Nothing We've Seen Before

SYDNEY -- In late October, lightning struck brittle earth on Gospers Mountain in New South Wales. The remains of trees bone dry from consecutive winters with little to no rain were ignited, and the fire quickly spread.Three months later, it is still burning.The Gospers Mountain fire, which became Australia's largest "megablaze" as it grew to link several separate fires, offers a...

Transformative 'green' accelerator achieves world's first 8-pass full energy recovery

Scientists from Cornell University and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) have successfully demonstrated the world's first capture and reuse of energy in a multi-turn particle accelerator, where electrons are accelerated and decelerated in multiple stages and transported at different energies through a single beamline. This advance paves the way for...

A model ecosystem fish story

Have I got a fish story for you. Any angler beginning a yarn like that usually ends up spinning a tall tale, an exaggeration or bald-faced lie.

New study examines mortality costs of air pollution in US

A team of University of Illinois researchers estimated the mortality costs associated with air pollution in the U.S. by developing and applying a novel machine learning-based method to estimate the life-years lost and cost associated with air pollution exposure.

NASA Determines Australian Meteor Crater is the Oldest Known

Portal origin URL: NASA Determines Australian Meteor Crater is the Oldest KnownPortal origin nid: 457435Published: Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - 14:05Featured (stick to top of list): noPortal text teaser: The Earth is pocked with roughly 190 major meteor craters, yet scientists only know the age of just a few. Recently, A NASA scientist analyzed the age of the Yarrabubba...

NASA Sounding Rocket Observing Nitric Oxide in Polar Night

Portal origin URL: NASA Sounding Rocket Observing Nitric Oxide in Polar NightPortal origin nid: 457436Published: Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - 14:05Featured (stick to top of list): noPortal text teaser: The northern lights may be beautiful, but the nitric oxide they leave behind can impact Earth's ozone supply. To understand this abundance of nitric oxide in the polar...

Determining the atomic structure of natural products more rapidly and accurately

Many drugs are derived from natural products. But before natural products can be exploited, chemists must first determine their structure and stereochemistry. This can be a major challenge, particularly when the molecules cannot be crystallized and contain only few hydrogen atoms. A new NMR-based method now simplifies the analysis and produces more accurate results.

New species of antibiotic-resistant bacteria found in infected wound

A hitherto unknown antibiotic-resistant bacteria species, in the same family as E. coli and Salmonella spp., has been found and classified in Sweden. The proposed taxonomic name of the species -- the first of the new genus -- is Scandinavium goeteborgense, after the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, where the bacterium was isolated and the research was done.

To reverse engineer dynamics of microbial communities, researchers construct their own

Scientific and public appreciation for microbes -- and the key role their communal actions play in environmental health, food production, and human wellness -- has grown in recent years. While initially considered to be static, uniform entities, microbial communities are highly complex and contain internal chemical swapfests that are in constant flux. Researchers have demonstrated that the...

A model ecosystem fish story

Have I got a fish story for you. Any angler beginning a yarn like that usually ends up spinning a tall tale, an exaggeration or bald-faced lie. Researchers, however, have demonstrated that anglers can produce accurate and complex environmental models similar to those of trained scientists.

Concussion risk in youth football

For decades, there's been a widespread assumption among people with an interest in sports-related injury that youth football players are more vulnerable to concussion and other head injuries than their older, bigger counterparts.

How raising a glass can make you an ass | Brief letters

Sea eagles in England | Loneliness and churches | Circumcision and Shakespeare | English usage | Sperm donationsSo a sea eagle has chosen to live in Oxfordshire (Report, 18 January). It is not the first time. Archaeologists digging near Oxford have discovered sea eagle bones on bronze age and Anglo-Saxon sites. And the name of the village Earley, on the Thames near Reading, means “eagle wood”...

New image analysis method for time-lapse microscopy shows how giant viruses infect amoeba

Viruses are probably the most peculiar "life forms" known to us, with each species having unique characteristics. One thing common to all viruses is that they attack a "host" cell and hijack its machinery, using it for its own replication. A type of large virus, called "giant virus," has interesting ways of attacking its host organism—an amoeba. Virologists have been trying to understand what...

Advancing the application of genomic sequences through 'Kmasker plants'

The development of next-generation-sequencing (NGS) has enabled researchers to investigate genomes that might previously have been considered too complex or too expensive. Nevertheless, the analysis of complex plant genomes, which often have an enormous amount of repetitive sequences, is still a challenge. Therefore, bioinformatics researchers from Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop...

Measuring the world of social phenomena

Economists working with Professor Marko Sarstedt from Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg are demanding that the same scientific standards be applied to economics and the behavioral sciences in general as are used in the natural sciences. They believe that the inherent uncertainties in measured values must be described and quantified in order to enhance the reproducibility of measurement...