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102 articles from PhysOrg

Polymer film protects from electromagnetic radiation, signal interference

As electronic devices saturate all corners of public and personal life, engineers are scrambling to find lightweight, mechanically stable, flexible, and easily manufactured materials that can shield humans from excessive electromagnetic radiation as well as prevent electronic devices from interfering with each other.

Graphene oxide membranes could reduce paper industry energy costs

The U.S. pulp and paper industry uses large quantities of water to produce cellulose pulp from trees. The water leaving the pulping process contains a number of organic byproducts and inorganic chemicals. To reuse the water and the chemicals, paper mills rely on steam-fed evaporators that boil up the water and separate it from the chemicals.

How outdoor pollution affects indoor air quality

Just when you thought you could head indoors to be safe from the air pollution that plagues the Salt Lake Valley, new research shows that elevated air pollution events, like horror movie villains, claw their way into indoor spaces. The research, conducted in conjunction with the Utah Division of Facilities Construction and Management, is published in Science of the Total Environment.

Stem cells provide hope for dwindling wildlife populations

A paper recently published in the scientific journal Stem Cells and Development shares an important advancement in conservation—one that may make the difference between survival and extinction for wildlife species that have been reduced to very small population sizes. Using fibroblast cells that have been preserved in San Diego Zoo Global's Frozen Zoo, scientists have been able to generate...

Lack of symmetry in qubits can't fix errors in quantum computing, might explain matter/antimatter

A team of quantum theorists seeking to cure a basic problem with quantum annealing computers—they have to run at a relatively slow pace to operate properly—found something intriguing instead. While probing how quantum annealers perform when operated faster than desired, the team unexpectedly discovered a new effect that may account for the imbalanced distribution of matter and antimatter in...

Unfortunate timing and rate of change may be enough to tip a climate system

Imagine abrupt shifts of the tropical monsoons, reductions in Northern Hemisphere rainfall, and strengthening of North Atlantic storm tracks within decades. These are some of the impacts that climate scientists expect if the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which redistributes heat from equatorial regions to the Northern Hemisphere, suddenly tips into a dormant state as a result...

Traditional hydrologic models may misidentify snow as rain, new citizen science data shows

Normally, we think of the freezing point of water as 32°F—but in the world of weather forecasting and hydrologic prediction, that isn't always the case. In the Lake Tahoe region of the Sierra Nevada, the shift from snow to rain during winter storms may actually occur at temperatures closer to 39.5°F, according to new research from the Desert Research Institute (DRI), Lynker Technologies, and...

Potential regional declines in species richness of tomato pollinators under climate

About 70% of the world's main crops depend on insect pollination. Climate change is already affecting the abundance and distribution of insects, which could cause geographical mismatches between crops and their pollinators. Crops that rely primarily on wild pollinators (e.g., crops that cannot be effectively pollinated by commercial colonies of honey bees) could be particularly in jeopardy.

Electrophotocatalytic diamination of vicinal C–H bonds

In organic chemistry, the conversion of inactivated carbon-hydrogen (C-H) bonds to carbon-nitrogen (C-N) bonds is a highly valued transformation. Scientists can accomplish such reactions at only a single C-H site since the first derivatization can diminish the reactivity of the surrounding C-H bonds. In a new report now published in Science, Tao Shen and Tristan H. Lambert at the department of...

Scientists image a bright meteoroid explosion in Jupiter's atmosphere

From aboard the Juno spacecraft, a Southwest Research Institute-led instrument observing auroras serendipitously spotted a bright flash above Jupiter's clouds last spring. The Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) team studied the data and determined that they had captured a bolide, an extremely bright meteoroid explosion in the gas giant's upper atmosphere.