- PhysOrg
- 21/12/2 23:20
A tabletop covered in miniature Lego minifigures. There is a whooshing sound, a pause, and then a single minifigure in the center of the table topples over, leaving the remaining minifigures standing.
183 articles from THURSDAY 2.12.2021
A tabletop covered in miniature Lego minifigures. There is a whooshing sound, a pause, and then a single minifigure in the center of the table topples over, leaving the remaining minifigures standing.
The oil giant said the economic case for investment in the controversial project was "not strong enough".
The Styrofoam container that holds your takeout cheeseburger may contribute to the population's growing resistance to antibiotics.
Researchers have identified 187 individual North Atlantic right whales—about 40 percent of the catalogued population—in Canada's Gulf of St. Lawrence during the summer. They used photographs of North Atlantic right whales collected during surveys conducted between 2015 and 2019. Many of the right whales remain in the area through the summer and autumn, feeding and socializing primarily in...
Dog breeds are often recognized for distinctive traits—the short legs of a dachshund, wrinkled face of a pug, spotted coat of a Dalmatian. Unfortunately, the genetics that give various breeds their particular attributes are often the result of inbreeding.
Mathematicians created a statistical model that can be used to detect misinformation in social posts.
The majority of dog breeds are highly inbred, contributing to an increase in disease and health care costs throughout their lifespan, according to new research.
Scientists around the world have been working in earnest to improve understanding of an increasingly virulent superbug, Clostridium difficile. The highly contagious hospital-acquired pathogen, designated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as one of the five most urgent threats to the U.S. healthcare system, causes more than 500,000 infections and 29,000 deaths each year at a total...
While trying out a new device that injects powder to clean up the walls of the world's largest stellarator, a twisty fusion device known as Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) in Greifswald, Germany, scientists were pleased to find that the bits of atoms confined by magnetic fields within the device got temporarily hotter after each injection. Researchers led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's...
Biomedical Engineering Professor Corey Neu and Ph. D. student Benjamin Seelbinder of the University of Colorado at Boulder wanted to answer two fundamental questions. How do cells adapt to their environment and how does a mechanical environment influence a cell?
The climate crisis is limiting the availability of krill—small crustaceans that are vital in the marine food chain—during summer in some areas of the Antarctica. This involves a decrease in the food abundance for female Antarctic fur seals in summer and a decrease in their reproductive success. Moreover, the predation of pups by the leopard seal has also increased due to a lower abundance of...
While the number of qubits and the stability of quantum states are still limiting current quantum computing devices, there are questions where these processors are already able to leverage their enormous computing power. Scientists used a quantum processor to simulate the ground state of a so-called toric code Hamiltonian -- an archetypical model system in modern condensed matter physics, which...
A new study confirms that the Gulf of St. Lawrence is an important habitat for a large proportion of the endangered North Atlantic right whale population.
Researchers describe a 'genetic architecture' for developmental stuttering and report the discovery of new genetic variations associated with the condition.
Researchers find new issue complicating fast charging.
When two superconducting regions are separated by a strip of non-superconducting material, a special quantum effect can occur, coupling both regions: The Josephson effect. If the spacer material is a half-metal ferromagnet, novel implications for spintronic applications arise. An international team has now, for the first time, designed a material system that exhibits an unusually long-range...
Since 1978 when the first test tube baby was born, in vitro fertilization (IVF) has become a reasonable option for couples that have trouble getting pregnant. Originally developed to help women with obstructed tubes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that as of 2018, assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) such as IVF account for as many as four million births each year,...
By promoting better representation of women in engineering and keeping the fight against climate change at the heart of her goals, Willow Dew was awarded the seventh edition of Polytechnique Montréal's Order of the White Rose...
A new research report from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations' AIinPR Panel, which has been co-authored by the University's Emeritus Professor of Corporate Communication Anne Gregory, has found that practitioners see the huge potential that artificial intelligence (AI) and Big Data offers the profession but possess limited knowledge on technical aspects of both.
What would it be like if we lived in a flat two-dimensional world? Physicists predict that quantum mechanics would be even stranger in that case, resulting in exotic particles—so-called "anyons"— that cannot exist in the three-dimensional world we live in. This unfamiliar world is not just a curiosity but may be key to unlocking quantum materials and technologies of the future.
Anne S. Meyer, an associate professor of biology at the University of Rochester, and her collaborators at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands recently developed a 3D printing technique to engineer and study biofilms—three-dimensional communities of microorganisms, such as bacteria, that adhere to surfaces. The research provides important information for creating synthetic materials...
Light is an electromagnetic wave: It consists of oscillating electric and magnetic fields propagating through space. Every wave is characterized by its frequency, which refers to the number of oscillations per second, measured in Hertz (Hz). Our eyes can detect frequencies between 400 and 750 trillion Hz (or terahertz, THz), which define the visible spectrum. Light sensors in cell phone cameras...
Thermoelectric materials have the ability to generate electricity when a temperature difference is applied to them. Conversely, they can also generate a temperature gradient when current is applied to them. Therefore, these materials are expected to find use as power generators of electronic devices and coolers or heaters of temperature control devices. To develop these applications, a...
In this week's issue of our environment newsletter, we explore how Indigenous resistance is keeping carbon emissions out of the atmosphere and learn that there is a pecking order among birds when it comes to being...
Biologists are studying how engineered biofilms closely mimic natural ones. Their research may aid in developing drugs to fight the negative effects of these microorganisms that adhere to surfaces.
How can we understand the activity of wild bats? Mostly soundless, flying in the dark, bats feed at night and evade our senses. Now, an international research team has developed a new non-invasive method 'bat point counts' by combining modern sensing technologies -- thermal, ultrasonic and near-infrared -- to detect, identify and count all bats flying around in a certain range.
Astronomers have detected a newborn star and the surrounding cocoon of complex organic molecules at the edge of our Galaxy, which is known as the extreme outer Galaxy. The observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array reveal the hidden chemical complexity of our Universe.
An innovative herbicide delivery system could revolutionize the way agricultural and environmental managers battle invasive weeds.
Researchers have discovered that diverse root-colonizing fungi can benefit plants, but only when they are kept in check by the host innate immune system and the bacteria residing in roots.
Light not only plays a key role as an information carrier for optical computer chips, but also in particular for the next generation of quantum computers. Its lossless guidance around sharp corners on tiny chips and the precise control of its interaction with other light are the focus of research worldwide. Scientists have now demonstrated the spatial confinement of a light wave to a point smaller...
The expansion of renewable energies is placing increasing demands on the power grids. Precise forecasts of the amount of solar power that will be fed into the grid is key to effective energy management. In addition to clouds, aerosol particles also strongly influence the amount of electricity generated by photovoltaic systems. Current air quality models are a good basis for estimating the...
Physicists have developed a theory describing how space reflection and time reversal symmetries can be exploited, allowing for greater control of transport and correlations within quantum materials.
Scientists have developed a new method to determine how proteins are organized on the surface of cells. Insights gained with the technology could lead to the development of novel drugs to fight cancer.
A global study into causes of stroke has found that one in 11 survivors experienced a period of anger or upset in the one hour leading up to it. One in 20 patients had engaged in heavy physical exertion. The suspected triggers have been identified as part of the global INTERSTROKE study, which analyzed 13,462 cases of acute stroke, involving patients with a range of ethnic backgrounds in 32...
A floating, robotic film could be trained to hoover oil spills at sea or remove contaminants from drinking water.
A research survey of primary school teachers in England has emphasized the importance of the relationship between parents and primary schools during lockdown school closures. 84% of teachers said they felt some pupils were disadvantaged by their home circumstances.
Researchers have developed a novel method to fabricate lead halide perovskite solar cells with record efficiency.
A new study sheds light on the way salty water acts in deep-sea aquifers, paving the way for further research into carbon storage deep beneath the seabed.
Researchers have been able to document and visualize hearing loss-associated genes in the human inner ear, in a unique collaboration study between otosurgeons and geneticists. The findings illustrate that discrete subcellular structures in the human organ of hearing, the cochlea, are involved in the variation of risk of age-related hearing loss in the population.
Scientists have collaborated to build a structurally-motivated deep learning method built from recent advances in neural language modeling. The team's deep-learning model, called D-SCRIPT, was able to predict protein-protein interactions (PPIs) from primary amino acid sequences.
Researchers have found that blocking the action of a protein called interleukin 6 (IL-6), part of the immune system, could resolve the delirium that often accompanies urinary tract infection (UTI) in elderly patients. Their study could pave the way for clinical trials of IL-6 inhibitors as a treatment for UTI-associated delirium in humans.
A new study uses novel single-cell profiling techniques to reveal how plants add new cell layers that help them resist climate stressors like drought or flooding. The research focuses on corn -- a critically important crop around the world -- in an effort to create a cell-by-cell map of the plant's root system, which mediates drought stress and absorbs nutrients and fertilizer from the soil.
The Southern Ocean is indeed a significant carbon sink -- absorbing a large amount of the excess carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere by human activities -- according to a new study.
Researchers offer a phylogenetic and ontogenetic overview of the primitive streak and its role in mediating amniote (vertebrate animals that develop on land) gastrulation, and discuss the implications of embryonic stem cell-based models of early mammalian embryogenesis on the function of this structure.
Physicists said they have finally experimentally documented quantum spin liquids, a long sought-after exotic state of matter. The work marks a big step toward being able to produce this elusive state on demand and to gain a novel understanding of its mysterious nature.
By trapping light into tiny crevices of gold, researchers have coaxed molecules to convert invisible infrared into visible light, creating new low-cost detectors for sensing.
The TESS mission has discovered an ultra-short-period planet (USP) that is also super light. The planet is named GJ 367 b, and it orbits its star in just eight hours. The planet is about the size of Mars, and half as massive as the Earth, making it one of the lightest planets discovered to date.