174 articles from TUESDAY 28.6.2022

Billionaires Are Racing to Space—and the Climate is Paying the Price

There’s a spectator sport quality to the billionaire space race. Pick your favorite rich guy and your favorite rocket—Elon Musk’s Falcon 9, Richard Branson’s VSS Unity, Jeff Bezos’s New Shepard—and start your own cheering section. And while it’s not always easy to root for the fabulously rich to get even more fabulous, there’s something in the...

Exploring nature's own assembly line

Today the raw ingredients for virtually all industrial products, ranging from medicines to car tires, come from non-renewable chemical feedstocks. They are produced in fossil fuel refineries that emit greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide. However, future chemical factories might invert this dynamic, manufacturing some compounds using plants that naturally construct complex chemicals by drawing...

California's Dixie Fire shows impact of legacy effects, prescribed burns

The 2021 Dixie Fire burned over nearly 1 million acres in California and cost $637 million to suppress, making it the largest and most expensive wildfire to contain in state history. Fire history largely determined how severely the wildfire burned, and low-severity fire treatments had the largest impact on reducing the worst effects of the fire, according to a Penn State-led research team.

Help NASA Scientists Find Clouds on Mars

Portal origin URL: Help NASA Scientists Find Clouds on MarsPortal origin nid: 480945Published: Tuesday, June 28, 2022 - 11:05Featured (stick to top of list): noPortal text teaser: By identifying clouds in data collected by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the public can increase scientists’ understanding of the Red Planet’s atmosphere.Portal image: NASA’s...

Update noise regulations to protect seals, porpoises: study

Noise produced by pile drivers building offshore wind turbines can damage the hearing of porpoises, seals, and other marine life. Regulations are in place, but guidance on this difficult topic requires regular revisits to incorporate results from new experiments.

School-based intervention aims to reduce behavioral health impact for LGBTQ+ youth

An estimated 83% of the 20 million LGBTQ+ people in the United States have experienced abuse or significant adverse childhood experiences (ACE) that have significantly impacted their mental health as adults compared to their heteronormative peers. This is associated with significantly higher rates of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and suicidal ideation and attempt, making the social and...

Exploiting symmetries: Speeding up the computational study of solid solutions

Symmetry is a prevalent feature of nature at all scales. For example, our naked eyes can easily identify symmetries in the bodily shape of countless organisms. Symmetry is also very important in the fields of physics and chemistry, especially in the microscopic realm of atoms and molecules. Crystals, which are highly ordered materials, can even have multiple types of symmetry at the same time,...

Exotic carbon microcrystals in meteorite dust

Unusually shaped microcrystals formed of pure, graphite-like carbon were discovered in the dust of the 21st-century's largest meteorite. They are likely to have grown in layers from complex carbon nuclei such as fullerene.

Insights into Cenozoic environmental change and ecosystem evolution

The growth of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) during the Cenozoic drove dramatic climate and environmental change in this region. However, there has been a limited amount of research on long-term climate change on QTP. Therefore, the long-term paleoclimatic evolution of the Tibetan Plateau and its main driving mechanisms are poorly understood.

Climate protection: CO2 turned into methanol

For reasons of climate protection, carbon dioxide must not be released into the atmosphere. Wherever the formation of carbon dioxide cannot be prevented, it should be captured and converted into other substances.

Increasing heat waves affect up to half a billion people

Climate change is a reality and extremely high temperatures have been reported by India and Pakistan in the spring. In a new scientific journal article, researchers from the University of Gothenburg, amongst others, paint a gloomy picture for the rest of the century. Heat waves are expected to increase, affecting up to half a billion people every year. In turn, they can lead to food shortages,...

Determining the structure of small RNAs could inform future therapeutics

A new method allows researchers to determine the structure and abundance of "transfer RNAs" (tRNA)—small, highly structured and chemically modified RNAs involved in protein production—in living cells. Misfolding of tRNAs has been linked to human diseases ranging from cancer to type 2 diabetes and neurological disorders. The new method, which also shows how tRNA structure can change when the...

Unprecedented drought conditions projected to be more frequent and consecutive in certain regions

A new study presents the future periods for which aberrant drought conditions will become more frequent, thereby creating a new normal. The projected warming impacts show significant regional disparities in their intensity and the pace of their growth over time. In approximately 30–50 years, unprecedented drought conditions are projected to be more frequent and consecutive in certain regions...

A pro-China online influence campaign is targeting the rare-earths industry

An online influence campaign carried out by a group that promotes China’s political interests is targeting Western companies that mine and process rare-earth elements, according to a new report from cybersecurity firm Mandiant. The campaign, which is playing out in Facebook groups and micro-targeted tweets, is trying to stoke environmentalist protests against the companies in the US. ...

AI’s progress isn’t the same as creating human intelligence in machines

The term “artificial intelligence” really has two meanings. AI refers both to the fundamental scientific quest to build human intelligence into computers and to the work of modeling massive amounts of data. These two endeavors are very different, both in their ambitions and in the amount of progress they have made in recent years. Scientific AI, the quest to both construct and understand...