155 articles from THURSDAY 4.8.2022

Sponge-like electrodes inspired by sugar cubes could improve medical monitoring

To monitor heart rhythms and muscle function, doctors often attach electrodes to a patient's skin, detecting the electrical signals that lie beneath. These impulses are vital to the early diagnosis and treatment of many disorders, but currently available electrodes have limited function or are expensive to manufacture. Researchers reporting in ACS Nano, however, have now developed a low-cost,...

Surveys commissioned by 16th century Spanish king provide unprecedented ecological snapshot

In the 1570s, when King Philip II of Spain sent emissaries to survey the flora and fauna of villages in central and southern Spain, he wasn’t thinking about ecological networks or extinction. He just wanted to know exactly what he owned. So, he asked at least two people in each village to describe the land, flora, and fauna of their territory to his surveyors. Now, 450 years later,...

NASA Data on Plant ‘Sweating’ Could Help Predict Wildfire Severity

Portal origin URL: NASA Data on Plant ‘Sweating’ Could Help Predict Wildfire Severity Portal origin nid: 481832Published: Thursday, August 4, 2022 - 12:23Featured (stick to top of list): noPortal text teaser: A new study uses data from the ECOSTRESS instrument aboard the space station to better understand why some parts of a wildfire burn more intensely than...

SAM’s Top Five Discoveries aboard NASA’s Curiosity Rover at Mars

Portal origin URL: SAM’s Top Five Discoveries aboard NASA’s Curiosity Rover at MarsPortal origin nid: 481555Published: Thursday, August 4, 2022 - 12:00Featured (stick to top of list): noPortal text teaser: To mark the occasion of the NASA Curiosity rover’s decade on Mars, here is a list of five of the most significant discoveries made using its Sample Analysis at...

Scientists Learn More About the History of Stars in Latest Webb Telescope Images

The world was gobsmacked last month when the James Webb Space Telescope released its first clutch of images, showing nebulae, galactic clusters, binary stars, and more. Things have quieted down a bit since, as the telescope team begins to set about the 25 or so years of work the Webb is thought to have ahead of it. But, as Space.com reports, the telescope made news again this week, when...

Europa Clipper High-Gain Antenna Undergoes Precision Testing at NASA Langley

Portal origin URL: Europa Clipper High-Gain Antenna Undergoes Precision Testing at NASA LangleyPortal origin nid: 481828Published: Thursday, August 4, 2022 - 11:38Featured (stick to top of list): noPortal text teaser: A piece of space hardware set to make the long journey to begin orbiting around a water world in the outer Solar System recently finished its second round of...

Revealed: how climate breakdown is supercharging toll of extreme weather

Guardian analysis shows human-caused global heating is driving more frequent and deadly disasters across the planet, in most comprehensive compilation to dateThe devastating intensification of extreme weather is laid bare today in a Guardian analysis that shows how people across the world are losing their lives and livelihoods due to more deadly and more frequent heatwaves, floods, wildfires and...

This startup wants to copy you into an embryo for organ harvesting

In a search for novel forms of longevity medicine, a biotech company based in Israel says it intends to create embryo-stage versions of people in order to harvest tissues for use in transplant treatments. The company, Renewal Bio, is pursuing recent advances in stem-cell technology and artificial wombs demonstrated by Jacob Hanna, a biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot....

Ultrathin 2D cuprate with active periodic copper single sites, a new catalyst for Chan-lam coupling

This study is led by Dr. Lu Jiong from National University of Singapore (NUS), in collaboration with Dr. Koh Ming Joo (NUS), Dr. Chun Zhang (NUS) and Dr. Honghan Fei from (Tongji University). This team has devised a ligand exchange strategy to exfoliate bulk cuprate crystals into atomically thin 2D cuprate layers whose basal plane contains periodic arrays of accessible unsaturated Cu(II) single...

Ziggy Stardust and the 54 Spiders: New spider genus named after David Bowie

Senckenberg arachnologist Dr. Peter Jäger named a new genus from the wandering spider family in honor of the late pop musician David Bowie—on the occasion of the music legend's 75th birthday. Within the genus Bowie gen. nov. originating in Asia, he described 54 new species of spiders and named them after Bowie's musical work. By naming the spiders after a celebrity, the spider researcher from...

In search of universal laws of diffusion with resetting

The manner in which animals penetrate a neighborhood searching for food shows similarities to the movements of liquid particles in plant capillaries or gas molecules near an absorbing wall. These phenomena—and many others in nature—can be thought of as processes called anomalous diffusion with resetting. Recent research suggests that they have properties of a very universal nature.

Microbes emit nitrogen oxides—perhaps more than you think

Microbes emit nitrogen oxides, or NOx. This is important because it involves surface-earth nitrogen (N) cycle, which strongly interacts with environmental quality, food production, biosphere and climate changes. A study led by Drs. Wei Song and Xue-Yan Liu from Tianjin University, China, shows that NOx emissions from the microbial N cycle account for about 24%, 58%, and 31% of the total NOx...

How do plants regulate their sugar metabolism?

To carry out their functions in the cell, many proteins require the chemical properties of bound metals such as copper. If this nutrient is in short supply, plants respond by enhancing its uptake and by replacing some copper-utilizing proteins by copper-independent proteins. Squamosa promoter binding protein-like 7 (SPL7) mediates this response. Researchers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have...

Access to services is often worst in suburban areas

The world we live in is often divided using a binary urban-rural distinction, despite a huge gradient of settlement patterns in and around cities—ranging from urban to the most remote rural areas. New research led through a joint U.K.-India research project and published in Nature Sustainability, considers urbanization by looking at shifts in natural, engineered and institutional infrastructure....

Optimizing SWAP networks for quantum computing

A research partnership at the Advanced Quantum Testbed (AQT) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Chicago-based Super.tech (acquired by ColdQuanta in May 2022) demonstrated how to optimize the execution of the ZZ SWAP network protocol, important to quantum computing. The team also introduced a new technique for quantum error mitigation that will improve the network...

Early-life acquisition of antimicrobial resistance in newborn children from low- and middle-income countries

Every year, almost 7 million potentially serious bacterial infections are estimated to occur in newborns, resulting in more than 550,000 annual neonatal deaths. Most of these infections and deaths happen in LMICs, where often scarce resources can limit the capacity to diagnose and treat sepsis. These problems are further complicated by the global rise of antimicrobial resistance (AMR),...

Researchers create flow-driven rotors at the nanoscale

Researchers from TU Delft have constructed the smallest flow-driven motors in the world. Inspired by iconic Dutch windmills and biological motor proteins, they created a self-configuring, flow-driven rotor from DNA that converts energy from an electrical or salt gradient into useful mechanical work. The results open new perspectives for engineering active robotics at the nanoscale. The article is...

E. coli engineered from stool samples can survive the hostile gut environment long enough to treat disease

Scientists have long tried to introduce genetically engineered bacteria into the gut to treat diseases. In the past, these attempts have focused on engineering common lab strains of E. coli, which cannot compete with the native gut bacteria that are well adapted to their host. Now, a group of researchers from the University of California, San Diego, successfully engineered E. coli collected from...

Sterile mice produce rat sperm

Researchers generated rat sperm cells inside sterile mice using a technique called blastocyst complementation. The advance appears August 4 in the journal Stem Cell Reports.