309 articles from WEDNESDAY 13.1.2021

Limits of atomic nuclei predicted: Scientists simulate large region of the chart of nuclides

Novel calculations have enabled the study of nearly 700 isotopes between helium and iron, showing which nuclei can exist and which cannot. In an article published in Physical Review Letters, scientists from TU Darmstadt, the University of Washington, the Canadian laboratory TRIUMF, and the University of Mainz report how they simulated for the first time using innovative theoretical methods a large...

Compound from medicinal herb kills brain-eating amoebae in lab studies

Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), a deadly disease caused by the "brain-eating amoeba" Naegleria fowleri, is becoming more common in some areas of the world, and it has no effective treatment. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Chemical Neuroscience have found that a compound isolated from the leaves of a traditional medicinal plant, Inula viscosa or "false yellowhead," kills the amoebae...

Astronomers find signature of magnetar outbursts in nearby galaxies

Apart from black holes, magnetars may be the most extreme stars in the universe. With a diameter less than the length of Manhattan, they pack more mass than that of our sun, wield the largest magnetic field of any known object—more than 10 trillion times stronger than a refrigerator magnet—and spin on their axes every few seconds.

Study looks at how land acquisitions affect climate change

In 2007, an increase in world food prices led to a global rush for land in the form of land grabs or large-scale land acquisitions. Over the last two decades, such acquisitions have resulted in millions of hectares of land changing hands in developing nations. Although such changeover can increase the cultivation of crops needed to feed the world's growing population and spark new agricultural...

Superheroes, foods and apps bring a modern twist to the periodic table

Many students, especially non-science majors, dread chemistry. The first lesson in an introductory chemistry course typically deals with how to interpret the periodic table of elements, but its complexity can be overwhelming to students with little or no previous exposure. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Chemical Education introduce an innovative way to make learning about the...

Mathematics explains how giant whirlpools form in developing egg cells

Egg cells are among the largest cells in the animal kingdom. If moved only by the random jostlings of water molecules, a protein could take hours or even days to drift from one side of a forming egg cell to the other. Luckily, nature has developed a faster way: cell-spanning whirlpools in the immature egg cells of animals such as mice, zebrafish and fruit flies. These vortices enable cross-cell...

Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover to Capture Sounds From the Red Planet

Portal origin URL: Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover to Capture Sounds From the Red PlanetPortal origin nid: 467565Published: Wednesday, January 13, 2021 - 12:22Featured (stick to top of list): noPortal text teaser: Audio gathered by the mission may not sound quite the same on Mars as it would to our ears on Earth. A new interactive online experience lets you sample the...

Rethinking urban planning for sub-Saharan African cities

For his thesis project at EPFL, Armel Kemajou studied the peri-urban areas of Lomé, Togo, and Yaoundé, Cameroon, where populations are expected to double in 20 years. He observed construction strategies that reflected coherent individual and collective approaches to planning, although they lay outside existing legal frameworks. Kemajou gives proposals for incorporating such an approach to...

Spilling the beans on coffee's true identity

People worldwide want their coffee to be both satisfying and reasonably priced. To meet these standards, roasters typically use a blend of two types of beans, arabica and robusta. But, some use more of the cheaper robusta than they acknowledge, as the bean composition is difficult to determine after roasting. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have...

NASA Missions Unmask Magnetar Eruptions in Nearby Galaxies

Portal origin URL: NASA Missions Unmask Magnetar Eruptions in Nearby GalaxiesPortal origin nid: 467546Published: Wednesday, January 13, 2021 - 12:15Featured (stick to top of list): noPortal text teaser: On April 15, 2020, a brief burst of high-energy light swept through the solar system, triggering instruments on many NASA spacecraft. Scientists think the blast came from a...

Error-protected quantum bits entangled for the first time

For the first time, physicists from the University of Innsbruck have entangled two quantum bits distributed over several quantum objects and successfully transmitted their quantum properties. This marks an important milestone in the development of fault-tolerant quantum computers. The researchers published their report in Nature.

Scientists study salmonella swimming behavior as clues to infection

Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium bacteria (S. Typhimurium) commonly cause human gastroenteritis, inflammation of the lining of the intestines. The bacteria live inside the gut and can infect the epithelial cells that line its surface. Many studies have shown that Salmonella use a 'run-and-tumble' method of short swimming periods (runs) punctuated by tumbles when they randomly change...

The cancer microbiome reveals which bacteria live in tumors

Biomedical engineers have devised an algorithm to remove contaminated microbial genetic information from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). With a clearer picture of the microbiota living in various organs in both healthy and cancerous states, researchers will now be able to find new biomarkers of disease and better understand how numerous cancers affect the human body.

Northern lakes at risk of losing ice cover permanently, impacting drinking water

Close to 5,700 lakes in the Northern Hemisphere may permanently lose ice cover this century, 179 of them in the next decade, at current greenhouse gas emissions, despite a possible polar vortex this year, researchers have found. Those lakes include large bays in some of the deepest of the Great Lakes, such as Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, which could permanently become ice free by 2055.

A fly's eye view of evolution

The fascinating compound eyes of insects consist of hundreds of individual eyes known as 'facets'. In the course of evolution, an enormous variety of sizes and shapes has emerged, often adaptations to different environmental conditions. Scientists have now shown that these differences can be caused by very different changes in the genome of fruit flies.

Pollinators not getting the 'buzz' they need in news coverage

A dramatic decline in pollinating insects threatens the global food supply, yet it's getting 'vanishingly low levels of attention' in mainstream news, even compared to coverage of climate change. Researchers analyzed nearly 25 million news items from six prominent U.S. and global news sources using the university's massive Global News Index.