210 articles from FRIDAY 7.8.2020

Canada’s Last Remaining Ice Shelf Crumbles Due to Global Warming

Much of Canada’s remaining intact ice shelf has broken apart into hulking iceberg islands thanks to a hot summer and global warming, scientists said. Canada’s 4,000-year-old Milne Ice Shelf on the northwestern edge of Ellesmere Island had been the country’s last intact ice shelf until the end of July when ice analyst Adrienne White of the Canadian Ice Service noticed that...

Deep-sea misconceptions cause underestimation of seabed-mining impacts

A new publication on the impacts of deep-seabed mining by 13 prominent deep-sea biologists, led by University of Hawai'i at Mānoa oceanography professor Craig Smith, seeks to dispel scientific misconceptions that have led to miscalculations of the likely effects of commercial operations to extract minerals from the seabed.

Highly sensitive dopamine detector uses 2-D materials

A supersensitive dopamine detector can help in the early diagnosis of several disorders that result in too much or too little dopamine, according to a group led by Penn State and including Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and universities in China and Japan.

Programmable synthetic materials

Artificial molecules could one day form the information unit of a new type of computer or be the basis for programmable substances. The information would be encoded in the spatial arrangement of the individual atoms—similar to how the sequence of base pairs determines the information content of DNA, or sequences of zeros and ones form the memory of computers.

Advance in programmable synthetic materials

DNA information is stored in a sequence of chemical building blocks; computers store information as sequences of zeros and ones. Researchers want to transfer this concept to artificial molecules. Researchers have taken another step toward encoding information in the sequence of metal atoms in metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), showing how to read the sequence. Multivariate MOFs could encode digital...

Mars may not have been the warm, wet planet we thought it was

Mars today is a cold, dry wasteland—but things were likely much different billions of years ago. Since we started launching robotic missions to Mars in the 1970s, scientists have collected evidence that points to a warmer, wetter past for the Red Planet, where the surface was teeming with lakes and oceans that could have been home to life of some kind. It’s part of the reason NASA built and...

Covid-19 spread may be levelling off in England, say experts

Latest ONS figures appear to show better picture, even as more lockdown measures relaxedCoronavirus – latest updatesSee all our coronavirus coverageCommunity spread of Covid-19 in England may be levelling off even as some lockdown measures are relaxed, experts said following the release of official data. Related: Preston added to areas with bans on households mixing due to Covid-19 Continue...

Scientists develop principles for the creation of an 'acoustic diode'

In research published in Science Advances, a group led by scientists from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) have used the principle of magneto-rotation coupling to suppress the transmission of sound waves on the surface of a film in one direction while allowing them to travel in the other. This could lead to the development of acoustic rectifiers—devices that allow waves to...

Why do so many refugees move after arrival? Opportunity and community

What do you think of when you hear the word "refugee"? For many people, what comes to mind is vulnerability—you might imagine the grim conditions of a refugee camp or the dangers of the desperate journey to safety. So perhaps it's unsurprising that refugees are widely perceived to be especially needy or dependent on public assistance.