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86 articles from PhysOrg

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.

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)....

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...

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...

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.

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...