127 articles from FRIDAY 2.9.2022

Fur traps fingered as source of grizzly injuries

In 2016, wildlife biologist Clayton Lamb was securing a GPS collar to a tranquilized grizzly bear in southeastern British Columbia when he noticed one of its paws was missing three toes. Weird, he remembers thinking, but not surprising for the rough-and-tumble animals. Then, three more grizzlies popped up sporting similarly mangled paws. Anxious to solve the mystery behind this grisly...

Exoplanets Have Been Impossible to Photograph Directly—Until Now

There’s nothing terribly special about the exoplanet known as HIP 65426 b. It’s a gas giant nine times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting its host star 385 light years from Earth. Just one of at least 5,000 exoplanets astronomers have detected, it could easily go overlooked. But, as NASA announced yesterday, HIP 65426 b is all at once very big news—becoming the first exoplanet...

Making nanodiamonds out of bottle plastic

What goes on inside planets like Neptune and Uranus? To find out, an international team conducted a novel experiment. They fired a laser at a thin film of simple PET plastic and investigated what happened using intensive laser flashes. One result was that the researchers were able to confirm their earlier thesis that it really does rain diamonds inside the ice giants at the periphery of our solar...

Artificial intelligence can be used to better monitor Maine's forests

Researchers have developed a novel method of using artificial intelligence and machine learning to make monitoring soil moisture more energy and cost efficient. The software learns over time how to make the best use of available network resources, which helps produce power efficient systems at a lower cost for large scale monitoring compared to the existing industry standards.

Conflictive home-host country relations have a strong, negative effect on policy risk

Policy risk negatively affects acquisition completion, but the strength of the effect is dependent on home-host country relations, according to new research published in Global Strategy Journal. The relationship between policy risk and cross-border acquisition completion is negative and strong under conflictive relations, weaker under cooperative relations, and weakest under ambivalent relations,...

Investigating magnetic excitation-induced spin current in chromium trihalides

An ingenious approach toward developing low-power, high-speed, and high-density memory devices is based on spintronics, an emerging frontier in technology that harnesses a degree of freedom of electrons known as spin. Put simply, electrons, along with their negative charge, possess a spin whose orientation can be controlled using magnetic fields. This is particularly relevant for magnetic...

New report on impact of pandemic on learning experiences of young people with disabilities

The first report to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the learning experiences of young people with disabilities has been published. Researchers at University College Cork (UCC) examined how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected young people with disabilities' experience of learning and vocational training, and what we can learn from this about future education and employment practices...

What's the future of work from home?

With rapidly evolving technology, the COVID-19 pandemic and shifting priorities, there have been major changes in recent years in how employers and employees think about work.

EP-WXT pathfinder catches first wide-field snapshots of X-ray universe

EP-WXT Pathfinder, the experimental version of a module that will eventually be part of the wide-field X-ray telescope (WXT) aboard the astronomical satellite Einstein Probe (EP), released its first results Aug. 27 from an earlier test flight. These include an 800-second X-ray time-lapse photograph of a region of the Galactic center, a dense area at the core of our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

Sexual harassment plagues Antarctic research

The U.S. Antarctic research program is rife with sexual harassment and assault, according to a report released last week . Commissioned by the National Science Foundation (NSF), which manages the program, and written by an external firm, the report also found that those working in Antarctica largely don’t trust their employers to take harassment complaints seriously, to...

Dual-polarization two-dimensional valley photonic crystals

The introduction of topology in photonic systems has attracted considerable attention not only for the elaborate molding of light but also for its practical applications in novel photonic devices. Originally, the quantum Hall effect of light was realized in photonic crystals (PCs) by introducing external electric or magnetic fields to break the time-reversal symmetry (TRS).

Boy's discovery reveals highly complex plant-insect interaction

When eight-year-old Hugo Deans discovered a handful of BB-sized objects lying near an ant nest beneath a log in his backyard, he thought they were a type of seed. His father, Andrew Deans, professor of entomology at Penn State, however, knew immediately what they were—oak galls, or plant growths triggered by insects. What he didn't realize right away was that the galls were part of an elaborate...

EU guidelines for procurement during the COVID-19 crisis may lead to increased corruption

Shouldn't common provisions for procurement within the EU lead to increased central control and better coordination? Yes, but the guidelines introduced during the COVID-19 crisis were at the same time so flexible that they can also result in increased corruption and reduced legitimacy. This is shown by Brigitte Pircher, associate professor of political science, in a new research article.

Largest database on mammals in Portugal now available

The research team of the Red List of Mammals in Portugal, which is working on reviewing the threat and conservation status of these species in this country, carried out an "unprecedented compilation" of data on georeferenced occurrences of mammals in mainland Portugal and the Azores and Madeira.

Researchers study how urban trees affect environment

Everyone knows that trees provide shade. What may be less obvious are their contributions to evaporative cooling. Think of tree roots drawing water from the ground and pumping it to their leaves, which effectively sweat H2O, cooling the air around them in the process.

Motion of DNA linked to its damage response, ability to repair itself

A multidisciplinary team of Indiana University researchers have discovered that the motion of chromatin, the material that DNA is made of, can help facilitate effective repair of DNA damage in the human nucleus—a finding that could lead to improved cancer diagnosis and treatment. Their findings were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Putting the food system in context

Innovations that make the food supply chain more "responsible"—eco-friendly, good for public health, fairer to farmers—will come faster if the contexts that set the stage for them are better understood, according to a new Université de Montréal study.

How historical precedents impeded recognition of airborne COVID-19 transmission

A comprehensive historical assessment of knowledge and beliefs about disease transmission sheds light on why influential institutions worldwide took too long to recognize that COVID-19 is primarily airborne. The authors trace this deadly resistance one hundred years back in history, to the rejection of sickly air called 'miasma,' the rise of germ theory and our own stubborn tendency to retain...

Second monkeypox strain found in the UK

Individual hospitalised with the virus had recently travelled to west Africa, say public health officialsA second monkeypox strain has been identified in the UK, linked with travel to west Africa, public health officials have said.According to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), an individual who had recently travelled to west Africa has been admitted to the high consequence infectious diseases...

Hidden acid-base clusters drive rapid formation of atmospheric ultrafine particles

A joint research team led by Dr. Jingkun Jiang from Tsinghua University and Dr. Markku Kulmala from the University of Helsinki has reported an efficient mechanism for gaseous sulfuric acid and bases to form atmospheric ultrafine particles. The findings explain the rapid formation of secondary ultrafine particles, which could further influence air quality and the climate.

Physicists develop a linear response theory for open systems having exceptional points

Linear analysis plays a central role in science and engineering. Even when dealing with nonlinear systems, understanding the linear response is often crucial for gaining insight into the underlying complex dynamics. In recent years, there has been a great interest in studying open systems that exchange energy with a surrounding reservoir. In particular, it has been demonstrated that open systems...

Resolving the evolutionary history of the closest algal relatives of land plants

An international team of scientists led jointly by the Universities of Göttingen and Cologne has deciphered the evolutionary history of zygnematophytes. Their results reveal the internal relationships in this group of algae using state-of-the-art phylogenomic analyses and pinpoint the emergences of algal multicellularity. The results have been published in the article "A phylogenomically informed...

Research unlocks secrets of native rodents' rat race to new lands

New research from The Australian National University (ANU) has mapped the DNA from more than 150 species of native rodents from across Australia, New Guinea and Melanesian islands, painting a clearer picture of how they're related and how they ended up spreading across the Pacific.

A new catalyst to slow down global warming

Russian scientists have developed a new, highly efficient catalyst for carbon dioxide industrial processing that makes the process simple and inexpensive. Scientists from MISIS University, Lomonosov Moscow State University and Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry took part in the study. The results have been published in Materials.

'Plug-and-play' plasmonic metafibers for ultrafast fiber lasers

Integrating plasmonic metasurfaces on optical fiber tips forming so-called metafibers enriches the functionalities of an ordinary optical fiber, yielding a variety of advanced applications such as planar waveshaping, super-resolution imaging, and ultracompact sensing. However, to date, plasmonic metafibers have predominantly explored separate bare fibers, and little attention has been paid to...

From wound healing to regeneration

The phenomenon of regeneration was discovered over 200 years ago in the freshwater polyp Hydra. Until now, however, it was largely unclear how the orderly regeneration of lost tissues or organs is activated after injury. In its investigations of Hydra, an interdisciplinary research team at Heidelberg University was able to show how wound healing signals released upon injury are converted into...