161 articles from WEDNESDAY 6.7.2022

Shedding new light on coral's Black Band Disease

UNC-Chapel Hill biologists examine the links between microbial mats and a type of coral disease that has become an urgent conservation concern, and they suggest mitigation strategies to help reduce its spread. Coral reefs are valuable to marine ecosystems and the global economy. We talked with Sophie McCoy, assistant professor of biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Ph.D. candidate...

Sizing up special light to downsize particle accelerators

Researchers have developed a new technique to better measure special "terahertz" light. This light travels in waves longer than the infrared light that is beyond what the human eye perceives. The new sampling technique preserves the correlations between position and time in a pulse of terahertz light. The technique allows researchers to measure the shape of terahertz "light bullets," focused...

Capturing California's biodiversity for the future of conservation

When UC Santa Cruz postdoctoral scholar Merly Escalona assembled the first-ever reference genome for the Stephen Colbert Trapdoor Spider, she was shocked by the dataset's unexpectedly large size. For a small invertebrate, this California native spider's genetic code was very fragmented and consisted of about four billion bases (four gigabases)—larger than the human genome's size of a little more...

Testing the effect of multicolor lighting on improving people's psychological state

As missions for deep space exploration and space habitats are put on the agenda, astronauts need to withstand being tested by multiple stressors in confined and isolated conditions during such long flights, especially because in deep space exploration, problems such as signal delays make astronauts feel the anxiety of being far away from Earth and the psychological fear of deep space.

A new role of autophagy in plant cell differentiation revealed

A midlife career change is hard to pull off, because it can involve reinventing yourself and adopting a completely new professional role. Now, researchers from Japan show that some plant cells get a helping hand from autophagy when they switch primary functions partway through their lifespan.

Novel imaging method developed for fast-moving objects

A research team from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has proposed a new anti-motion blur single-pixel imaging method for fast-moving objects. This method takes advantage of the wide spectrum and high sensitivity of a single-pixel detector and contributes to breaking through the bottleneck of single-pixel imaging of fast-moving objects.

What's Up: July 2022 Skywatching Tips from NASA

What are some skywatching highlights in July 2022? The naked-eye planets of dawn – Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn – dominate the sky, appearing more spread out each morning. Next, if you're feeling the July heat, note the origin of "the dog days" of summer has to do with the bright star Sirius. Finally, if you can find a certain teapot-shaped pattern of stars in the evening, you'll...

Better estimating the risk of coastal flooding for nuclear power plants

Coastal facilities around the world must be designed to be protected against extreme sea levels. However, according to a team of Quebecois and French researchers from the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), the Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN), and the Université Gustave Eiffel, current estimates of coastal flood risks contain biases. The scientists...

A four-stroke engine for atoms

If you switch a bit in the memory of a computer and then switch it back again, you have restored the original state. There are only two states that can be called "0 and 1."

Evidence found that insects are possibly able to feel pain

A trio of researchers, two from Queen Mary University of London, the other from the University of Tehran, has found evidence that suggests insects might be able to feel pain. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Matilda Gibbons, Lars Chittka and Sajedeh Sarlak, describe issues they encountered in attempting to find out whether insects feel pain, and the logic they used...

Circular RNA found to promote progression of small cell lung cancer

Researchers led by Prof. Lin Wenchu from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have proposed a mechanism by which circular RNA (circRNA) can promote the progression of small cell lung cancer (SCLC) in vitro and in vivo. Results were published in Molecular Cancer.