134 articles from TUESDAY 23.11.2021

NFL hall of famer Michael Strahan going to space with Bezos’s Blue Origin

Super Bowl champ will join daughter of astronaut Alan ShepardDuo will join four paying customers on flightNFL hall of famer Michael Strahan is going to space next month.Strahan, who turned 50 on Sunday and won Super Bowl XLII during his 15-year career with the New York Giants, will join Laura Shepard Churchley, the eldest daughter of astronaut Alan Shepard, on the 9 December mission aboard the New...

Optoelectrode changes reduce injuries to brain tissue, improve nerve research

Researchers have developed a technique for assembling optoelectrodes that looks to offer the best of silicon-based electrodes and polymer-based electrodes. The scientists demonstrated it is possible to efficiently create a semiflexible light-emitting electrode by removing the stiff silicon material from underneath the tip of the probe. The resulting device can study deep brain tissues with high...

Origami, kirigami inspire mechanical metamaterials designs

Researchers categorize origami- and kirigami-based mechanical metamaterials, artificially engineered materials with unusual mechanical properties, and subdivided them into rigid or deformable categories based on the elastic energy landscape. The researchers want to discover new designs, especially curved origami designs, hybrid origami-kirigami designs, modular designs, and hierarchical designs;...

Can we perceive gender from children's voices?

Researchers report developing a database of speech samples from children ages 5 to 18 to explore two questions: What types of changes occur in children's voices as they become adults, and how do listeners adjust to the enormous variability in acoustic patterns across speakers? When they presented listeners with both syllables and sentences from different speakers, gender identification improved...

Ancient human relative, Australopithecus sediba, 'walked like a human, but climbed like an ape'

The recovery of new lumbar vertebrae from the lower back of a single individual of the human relative, Australopithecus sediba, and portions of other vertebrae of the same female from Malapa, South Africa, together with previously discovered vertebrae, form one of the most complete lower backs ever discovered in the early hominid record and give insight into how this ancient human relative walked...

New species of green microalga identified in São Paulo

A group led by researchers affiliated with the Phycology Laboratory at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, have discovered a new species of green microalga in a reservoir located in the northwest of the state. As a result of the discovery, microalgae of the genus Nephrocytium have been moved to an order belonging to a different taxonomic class and...

Dopamine plays key role in songbird mating

In humans, the dopamine system has been tied to rewards and pleasurable sensations. As well as to memory and learning. A recent study from McGill University, published in Current Biology, suggests that dopamine may also play a key role in shaping what songs female songbirds enjoy, which may ultimately affect mating as females choose (and then remember) their mates based on the songs they prefer.

The Riemann conjecture unveiled by physics

A mystery of mathematics that has remained unsolved for more than 150 years can be unraveled thanks to a completely unexpected approach coming from statistical physics. This is the important conclusion of Giuseppe Mussardo, professor of Theoretical Physics at SISSA, and Andrè Leclair of Cornell University reported in an article just published in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics (JSTAT). The...

Virtual reality tool to be used in the fight against disease

Science has the technology to measure the activity of every gene within a single individual cell, and just one experiment can generate thousands of cells worth of data. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have now revolutionized the way this data is analyzed—by using 3D video gaming technology. The study is published in the journal iScience.

Analysis of Mars's wind-induced vibrations sheds light on the planet's subsurface properties

Seismic data collected in Elysium Planitia, the second largest volcanic region on Mars, suggest the presence of a shallow sedimentary layer sandwiched between lava flows beneath the planet's surface. These findings were gained in the framework of NASA's InSight mission (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport), in which several international research partners,...

Finding the perfect employee

There is an eternal question when hiring: "Is this person really the right fit?" Even if a candidate has the skills for the job, does their personality fit the company culture? Do their goals align with those of the organization? In the very short span of a selection process, it is very difficult to get to know the person behind the mask and find the answers to these questions. A new paper...

An exploration of tipping in complex systems

Complex systems can be found in a diverse array of real-world scenarios, but are unified by their ability to suddenly transition between drastically different patterns of behavior. Known as 'tipping,' this type of transformation is generally triggered by small changes in the parameters of individual systems—whose effects can rapidly cascade to alter entire networks of interacting subsystems. In...

First moth species on Alpenrose discovered

An Austrian-Swiss research team was able to find a previously unknown glacial relic in the Alps, the Alpine rose leaf-miner moth. It is the first known species to have its caterpillars specializing on the rust-red alpine rose, a very poisonous, widely distributed plant that most animals, including moths and butterflies, strictly avoid. The extraordinary record was just published in the...

Study predicts the behavior of a Kondo cloud in a superconductor

In recent years, many physicists worldwide have been investigating the behavior of hybrid nanostructures. These are systems that are typically made up of two or more materials. Special attention in this class of structures is paid to magnetic impurities interacting with superconducting and normal metallic contacts.