256 articles from MONDAY 10.8.2020

Electronic components join forces to take up 10 times less space on computer chips

Electronic filters are essential to the inner workings of our phones and other wireless devices. They eliminate or enhance specific input signals to achieve the desired output signals. They are essential, but take up space on the chips that researchers are on a constant quest to make smaller. A new study demonstrates the successful integration of the individual elements that make up electronic...

Biology blurs line between sexes, behaviors

Biological sex is typically understood in binary terms: male and female. However, there are many examples of animals that are able to modify sex-typical biological and behavioral features and even change sex. A new study, which appears in the journal Current Biology, identifies a genetic switch in brain cells that can toggle between sex-specific states when necessary, findings that question the...

Planet Ceres is an 'ocean world' with sea water beneath surface, mission finds

Dwarf planet, believed to be a barren space rock, has an ‘extensive reservoir’ of brine beneath its surface, images showThe dwarf planet Ceres – long believed to be a barren space rock – is an ocean world with reservoirs of sea water beneath its surface, the results of a major exploration mission showed on Monday.Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and...

Algal blue light switch control of electrical excitation in plants

Optogenetics denotes the manipulation of cellular processes by light-based biological techniques. An international research team led by the Würzburg plant scientists Rainer Hedrich, Georg Nagel and Dirk Becker has succeeded in applying this method to higher plants: Light impulses can now be used to trigger electrical excitation in plants.

Indigenous property rights protect the Amazon rainforest

One way to cut back on deforestation in the Amazon rainforest—and help in the global fight against climate change—is to grant more of Brazil's indigenous communities full property rights to tribal lands. This policy focus is suggested by a new University California of San Diego study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Poverty alleviation efforts are shaping the success of environmental targets

Social protection programs can facilitate progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) but can also create trade-offs across divergent social and environmental goals that can undermine their effectiveness, say the authors of new research published in the journal PNAS. This is one of the largest studies on the sustainability implications of social protection, funded by the Grantham...

Air pollution impacts the health of wild pollinators

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), nine of the world's 10 most polluted cities are in India. Yet, researchers have almost no idea how air pollution is affecting non-human organisms. In some of the first research to address the physiological and molecular impacts of air pollution on wild plants and animals, scientists from the Bangalore Life Science Cluster show that air pollution...

Schooling is critical for cognitive health throughout life

New research suggests that education provides little to no protection against the onset of cognitive declines later in life. It can, however, boost the cognitive skills people develop earlier in life, pushing back the point at which age-related dementia begins to impact a person's ability to care for themselves.