127 articles from FRIDAY 17.6.2022

From dry to deluge, how heavy snow, rain flooded Yellowstone

Just three months ago, the Yellowstone region like most of the West was dragging through an extended drought with little snow in the mountains and wildfire scars in Red Lodge from a year ago when the area was hit by 105-degree Fahrenheit (40.5 Celsius) heat and fire.

Electrons take the fast and slow lanes at the same time

Imagine a road with two lanes in each direction. One lane is for slow cars, and the other is for fast ones. For electrons moving along a quantum wire, researchers in Cambridge and Frankfurt have discovered that there are also two "lanes," but electrons can take both at the same time!

Electrocuted birds are sparking wildfires

In 2014, a wildfire ripped through central Chile, destroying 2500 homes and killing at least 13 people . A year later, a blaze in Idaho burned more than 4000 hectares, an area nearly 12 times the size of New York City’s Central Park. Both conflagrations had one thing in common: Experts believe they were started by birds. Our feathered friends love to perch on...

Gaia space telescope rocks the science of asteroids

The European Gaia space mission has produced an unprecedented amount of new, improved, and detailed data for almost two billion objects in the Milky Way galaxy and the surrounding cosmos. The Gaia Data Release 3 on Monday revolutionizes our knowledge of the Solar System and the Milky Way and its satellite galaxies.

NASA Insists All Is Well as the Webb Telescope’s Mirror Gets Dinged

In some ways, the last place you’d want to put the James Webb Space Telescope is, well, in space. If you owned a $10 billion car, you wouldn’t leave it out in a hail storm, and while there’s no hail in space, there are plenty of micrometeoroids—high speed debris no bigger than a dust grain but moving so fast they can pack a true destructive wallop. Every day, millions of...

Scientists serendipitously discover rare cluster compound

Scientists at Kyoto University's Institute for Cell-Material Sciences have discovered a novel cluster compound that could prove useful as a catalyst. Compounds, called polyoxometalates, contain a large metal-oxide cluster carry a negative charge. They are found everywhere, from anti-viral medicines to rechargeable batteries and flash memory devices.

Rethinking the rabies vaccine

Researchers may have discovered the path to better rabies vaccine design. Researchers share one of the first high-resolution looks at the rabies virus glycoprotein in its vulnerable 'trimeric' form.

Scientists serendipitously discover rare cluster compound

Scientists at Kyoto University's Institute for Cell-Material Sciences have discovered a novel cluster compound that could prove useful as a catalyst. Compounds, called polyoxometalates, that contain a large metal-oxide cluster carry a negative charge. They are found everywhere, from anti-viral medicines to rechargeable batteries and flash memory devices.

Softening tough tissue in aging ovaries may help fight infertility

Would-be parents hoping to get pregnant face a ticking clock: The older potential mothers get, the more their fertility drops. A new study in mice may help explain why. Ovaries accumulate “stiff” tissue as they age, and researchers have found that reducing the amount of this tissue—“softening” the ovaries, as it were—restored fertility in the animals, raising the possibility...

Examining the impact of herbicide-resistant crops on weed management

Herbicide-resistant crops are now commonplace in the U.S. and Canada. With proper stewardship, these same crop-trait technologies can also play a key role in integrated weed management—reducing the intensity of herbicide use and the selection pressure on weed populations. But does this weed management potential match the reality in the field?

How Climate Change and Air Pollution Affect Kids’ Health

Climate change affects everyone, but especially children. Their small bodies—and the fact that they grow so rapidly, starting from the time they’re in utero—make them more vulnerable to toxins, pollution, and other climate-change fallout. Over their lifetimes, kids also face greater exposure to the damage of climate change than adults. A new scientific review article published...

How keeping trees when clearing pastures could reduce climate consequences

Land use change, like cutting down a forest to make way for agriculture, can be a major contributor to climate change by releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Researchers at the University of New Hampshire studied a practice known as silvopasture which intentionally preserves trees in pastures where livestock graze. They found that compared to a completely cleared, tree-less, open...