174 articles from WEDNESDAY 15.6.2022

Dead Star Caught Ripping Up Planetary System

Portal origin URL: Dead Star Caught Ripping Up Planetary SystemPortal origin nid: 480650Published: Wednesday, June 15, 2022 - 17:15Featured (stick to top of list): noPortal text teaser: Both rocky and icy bodies were identified among the debris on the surface of a white dwarf starPortal image: Bright white dwarf star at center of the image, a disk of dust and rocks...

Giving metal to microbes could reduce greenhouse gas

Like you and me, microbes need some metals in their diet to stay healthy. The metals help the microbes fully "digest" food. After a good meal, the microbes that gain energy by chemically reducing nitrate release a harmless byproduct: nitrogen, the gas that makes up 78% of Earth's atmosphere.

Deadly heatwaves threaten economies too

More frequent and intense heatwaves are the most deadly form of extreme weather made worse by global warming, with death tolls sometimes in the thousands, but they can also have devastating economic impacts too, experts say.

NASA’s ECOSTRESS Sees Las Vegas Streets Turn Up the Heat

Portal origin URL: NASA’s ECOSTRESS Sees Las Vegas Streets Turn Up the HeatPortal origin nid: 480720Published: Wednesday, June 15, 2022 - 16:49Featured (stick to top of list): noPortal text teaser: An instrument on the space station documented how built and natural surfaces responded to record heat in Las Vegas.Portal image: NASA’s ECOSTRESS instrument recorded...

The signals that make cells self-destruct

Most human hearts look nearly identical—muscle cells in the same places, blood vessel structures in the same orientations. Organs such as hearts or stomachs look alike and function the same across individual organisms in a species because cells follow rigorous processes during development that get them precisely where they need to go.

Diffuse optics for medical diagnostics: Progress toward standardization

Among the various optics-based tools used in diagnostics, diffuse optics (DO) is rapidly emerging as one of the most attractive technologies. The technique is based on analyzing how light is absorbed and scattered by biological tissues, which relates to the tissue chemical composition and structure. One of the key advantages of DO is that it is non-invasive (it uses low-power near-infrared light)....

NASA’s Chandra Catches Pulsar in X-ray Speed Trap

Portal origin URL: NASA’s Chandra Catches Pulsar in X-ray Speed TrapPortal origin nid: 480699Published: Wednesday, June 15, 2022 - 16:00Featured (stick to top of list): noPortal text teaser: A young pulsar is blazing through the Milky Way at a speed of over a million miles per hour. This stellar speedster, witnessed by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, is one of the...

Co-existing mangrove-coral habitats have a new global classification system

On any given day between 2016 and 2019, Heather Stewart could be found snorkeling in between mangroves in the Bocas del Toro archipelago along Panama's Caribbean coast. For years she visited these forests at the interface between land and sea, trying to understand what drove corals to grow inside them. Corals and mangroves often grow near each other in tropical coastal environments, but finding...

Trade the chair for fresh air: Sitting time and cardio health

New research is adding further weight to the argument that prolonged sitting may be hazardous to your health. An international study surveying more than 100,000 individuals in 21 countries found that people who sat for six to eight hours a day had a 12-13 per cent increased risk for early death and heart disease, while those who sat for more than eight hours daily increased that to a sobering 20...

Quantum electrodynamics tested 100 times more accurately than ever

Using a newly developed technique, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) in Heidelberg have measured the very small difference in the magnetic properties of two isotopes of highly charged neon in an ion trap with previously inaccessible accuracy. Comparison with equally extremely precise theoretical calculations of this difference allows a record-level test of quantum...

Research shows that weekly markets in Catalonia are a space for creativity and diversity

As part of the European project Moving Marketplaces, the postdoctoral researcher Maria Lindmäe, a member of the Culture and Socio-Ecological Dynamics Research Group (CaSEs) of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra—Barcelona (UPF) Department of Humanities, is the author of an article that investigates the soundscape of different weekly markets in Catalonia. In the study, the author examines the acoustic...

Did democracy have a separate origin in the Americas?

Democracy is widely understood to have arisen in the Mediterranean world about 2,500 years ago before spreading through cultural contact to other parts of the globe. But new research from the University of Georgia Laboratory of Archaeology, together with its partners in the Muscogee Nation, indicates that inhabitants of the Americas may have been practicing democratic-style collective governance...

2010 Deepwater Horizon accident did not harm BP's long-term stock market returns

A new analysis of the aftermath of the deadly 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident suggests that, while the reputation of BP—the oil and gas company responsible for the event—declined through 2017, its stock market returns were not significantly affected in the mid- to long-term. William McGuire of the University of Washington in Tacoma and colleagues present these findings in the open-access...

Dog-owner relationship appears similar for dogs born in Canada versus imported there

Contrary to some beliefs about internationally sourced dogs, a new survey analysis has found no evidence for a poorer relationship between Canadian dog owners and dogs born outside of Canada versus in Canada. Kai von Rentzell of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on June 15, 2022.

All-optical switching on a nanometer scale

Ultrafast light-driven control of magnetization on the nanometer length scale is key to achieve competitive bit sizes in next generation data storage technology. Researchers at Max Born Institute in Berlin and of the large scale facility Elettra in Trieste, Italy, have successfully demonstrated the ultrafast emergence of all-optical switching by generating a nanometer scale grating by interference...

Helping middle school students achieve more

A new study of intermediate school students in urban California and New York shows promise for underachievers. Researchers found that early intervention with teachers, training students that achievement is malleable and achievable, caused struggling students to flourish and improve their grades.

AI reveals scale of eelgrass vulnerability to warming, disease

A combination of ecological field methods and cutting-edge artificial intelligence has helped an interdisciplinary research group detect eelgrass wasting disease at nearly three dozen sites along a 1,700-mile stretch of the West Coast, from San Diego to southern Alaska.

Orchestrating workforce ecosystems

Leaders and managers agree that effective management of external contributors, such as freelancers, contract workers, and app developers, is critical to their organization’s success, but not all believe their organization is sufficiently prepared to manage a workforce that will rely more on external workers. The question now is: How can organizations orchestrate this extended workforce?…

Some countries still struggle to win EU funding despite programs to give them a leg up

The European Union has had some success leveling the playing field for countries that struggle to attract research funding, but certain countries still lag behind, according to an EU auditing body’s assessment. The “widening measures” aimed at giving stragglers a leg up can only go so far without matching efforts from those countries, says the report from the European Court of...

A $100 genome? New DNA sequencers could be a ‘game changer’ for biology, medicine

For DNA sequencing, this “is the year of the big shake-up,” says Michael Snyder, a systems biologist at Stanford University. Sequencing is crucial to fields from basic biology to virology to human evolution, and its importance keeps growing. Clinicians are clamoring to harness it for early detection of cancer and other diseases, and biologists are finding ever more ways...

ALMA observes ongoing star-formation standoff in the Large Magellanic Cloud

While using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to observe large star-forming regions in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), scientists discovered a turbulent push-and-pull dynamic in the star-forming region, 30 Doradus. Observations revealed that despite intense stellar feedback, gravity is shaping the molecular cloud, and against scientific odds, is driving the ongoing...

New perspective on RNA function: RNA regulates proteins and thereby can control cell growth, study shows

Scientists gained new insights into RNA-mediated regulation of proteins (riboregulation) and its role in controlling cell growth, and most importantly how undifferentiated cells (embryonic stem cells) transform into specialised cells (e.g., liver cells). They discovered this while studying how mRNA molecules bind to and regulate ENO1, an enzyme involved in glucose metabolism. This contrasts to...