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56 articles from PhysOrg

Supernova surprise creates elemental mystery

Michigan State University (MSU) researchers have discovered that one of the most important reactions in the universe can get a huge and unexpected boost inside exploding stars known as supernovae.

New Yorkers believe pandemic will persist, but express hope in wake of election

As COVID-19 surges nationwide, 78% of New York City residents believe it is likely or very likely the city will again experience a resurgence of cases similar to that seen last April. However, the November Presidential election appears to have triggered an optimism among New Yorkers: more than half feel "more hopeful" about the country's economic recovery (55%) and the government's ability to...

Climate change as a catalyst in Greater Cahokia

Water and air are highly mutable resources that exist in a myriad of physical states and dimensions, and due to their affectivity, these entities participate in a multitude of interactions capable of sustaining life, transforming environments, and shaping human behavior. As air and water circulate between the atmosphere and the landscape through the process of evapotranspiration, humans interact...

A combined strategy in catalyst design for Suzuki cross-couplings

The Suzuki cross-coupling reaction is a widely used technique for combining organic compounds and synthesizing complex chemicals for industrial or pharmaceutical applications. The process requires the use of palladium (Pd) catalysts and, as of today, two main types of Pd-based materials are used in practice as heterogeneous catalysts.

New platform generates hybrid light-matter excitations in highly charged graphene

Graphene, an atomically thin carbon layer through which electrons can travel virtually unimpeded, has been extensively studied since its first successful isolation more than 15 years ago. Among its many unique properties is the ability to support highly confined electromagnetic waves coupled to oscillations of electronic charge—plasmon polaritons—that have potentially broad applications in...

Flightless birds more common globally before human-driven extinctions

There would be at least four times as many flightless bird species on Earth today if it were not for human influences, finds a study led by UCL researchers.The study, published in Science Advances, finds that flightlessness evolved much more frequently among birds than would be expected if you only looked at current species.

African trade routes sketched out by mediaeval beads

The chemical composition of glass beads and their morphological characteristics can reveal where they come from. Archaeologists from the University of Geneva analyzed glass beads found at rural sites in Mali and Senegal from between the 7th and 13th centuries AD. The scientists demonstrate that the glass they are made of probably came from Egypt, the Levantine coast and the Middle East. The...

The making of mysterious mazes: How animals got their complex colorations

Why do leopards have spots and zebras have stripes? Many biologists have tried to answer these questions and have provided interesting hypotheses, including camouflage, thermoregulation, and insect repellent. But how did animals get these skin patterns? It is still difficult to answer this question. Evolutionary mechanisms underlying the diversity of animal colorations, especially complex and...

Ozone breaks down THC deposited on surfaces from thirdhand cannabis smoke

Second- and thirdhand tobacco smoke have received lots of attention, but much less is known about the compounds deposited on surfaces from cannabis smoke. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology have discovered that ozone—a component of outdoor and indoor air—can react with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive component of cannabis, on glass or cotton...

Greenland ice sheet faces irreversible melting

In a study published this week in The Cryosphere, researchers from the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and University of Reading demonstrate how climate change could lead to irreversible sea level rise as temperatures continue to rise and the Greenland ice sheet continues to decline.

Plant-inspired alkaloids protect rice, kiwi and citrus from harmful bacteria

Plants get bacterial infections, just as humans do. When food crops and trees are infected, their yield and quality can suffer. Although some compounds have been developed to protect plants, few of them work on a wide variety of crops, and bacteria are developing resistance. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have modified natural plant alkaloids into new...

Researchers determine how the SARS-CoV-2 virus hijacks and rapidly causes damage to human lung cells

In a multi-group collaborative involving the National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratories (NEIDL), the Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM), and the Center for Network Systems Biology (CNSB), scientists have reported the first map of the molecular responses of human lung cells to infection by SARS-CoV-2. By combining bioengineered human alveolar cells with sophisticated, highly precise...

An archaeological project analyzes informal commerce in the colonial Caribbean

The historical archaeologist Konrad A. Antczak, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie researcher with the UPF Department of Humanities and member of the Research Group on Colonialism, Gender and Materialities (CGyM), has recently returned from archaeological fieldwork in the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Bonaire, in the southern Caribbean. He has conducted excavations in this region locating a camp with a...

Researchers develop new class of plant nanobionic sensor to monitor arsenic levels in soil

Scientists from Disruptive & Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP), an Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT's research enterprise in Singapore, have engineered a novel type of plant nanobionic optical sensor that can detect and monitor, in real-time, levels of the highly toxic heavy metal arsenic in the...

Carbon dioxide converted to ethylene—the 'rice of the industry'

In recent times, electrochemical conversion (e-chemical) technology—which converts carbon dioxide to high-value-added compounds using renewable electricity—has gained research attention as a carbon capture utilization (CCU) technology. This green carbon resource technology employs electrochemical reactions using carbon dioxide and water as the only feedstock chemical to synthesize various...

A machine learning solution for designing materials with desired optical properties

Understanding how matter interacts with light—its optical properties—is critical in a myriad of energy and biomedical technologies, such as targeted drug delivery, quantum dots, fuel combustion, and cracking of biomass. But calculating these properties is computationally intensive, and the inverse problem—designing a structure with desired optical properties—is even harder.