137 articles from MONDAY 7.11.2022
How to see tonight’s blood moon total lunar eclipse from Australia and New Zealand
Moon will take on a red hue as light reaching it passes through dust in the Earth’s atmosphereHow to take a good photograph of the November 2022 full blood moon with a phone or cameraGet our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcastOn Tuesday evening people across Australia and New Zealand will be treated to a total lunar eclipse, weather permitting. It’s an opportunity...
Environmentally friendly 'biofoam' could address plastic pollution crisis
A new biodegradable packing foam developed at UBC not only potentially addresses the world's plastic pollution crisis but also serves as an equal and true partnership example of working with First Nations.
Maryland sites are among the most polluting coal ash waste dumps in the nation, study finds
A coal ash waste dump in Prince George's County is among the most polluting in the nation, according to a new report from environmental groups.
Designing next-generation metals, one atom at a time
How can studying metals manufacturing lead to longer-lasting batteries and lighter vehicles? It all comes down to physics.
Should maize farmers in sub-Saharan Africa store or sell their grain?
Many maize farmers in sub-Saharan Africa sell their crop at harvest, often because they need funds to pay expenses. Development agencies often support or sponsor harvest-time loans that encourage farmers to store some of their grain for later sale, on an assumption that its market value will increase in months to come. But that's not a sure bet, as a new University of Illinois study reveals. The...
Rare fossil clam discovered alive
Discovering a new species is always exciting, but so is finding one alive that everyone assumed had been lost to the passage of time. A small clam, previously known only from fossils, has recently been found living at Naples Point, just up the coast from UC Santa Barbara. The discovery appears in the journal Zookeys.
Anthology explores racial inequities during COVID-19 pandemic
Professor Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor and associate professor of ethics and society at Vanderbilt, has edited and published "Religion, Race, and COVID-19: Confronting White Supremacy in the Pandemic" (New York University Press, 2022), an anthology exploring the countless challenges, racially charged acts, setbacks, triumphs and newfound hope through the eyes...
Artificial intelligence deciphers detector 'clouds' to accelerate materials research
X-rays can be used like a superfast, atomic-resolution camera, and if researchers shoot a pair of X-ray pulses just moments apart, they get atomic-resolution snapshots of a system at two points in time. Comparing these snapshots shows how a material fluctuates within a tiny fraction of a second, which could help scientists design future generations of super-fast computers, communications, and...
Experiments to study gravity's impact on bone cells are heading to the International Space Station
A pair of experiments exploring bone density, designed by engineers at the University of Michigan, has left the Wallops Island, Virginia launchpad aboard a Northrop Grumman Corp. Antares rocket for the International Space Station (ISS).
Study finds that Americans are more likely than others to share COVID-19 misinformation online
People living in the United States are more than three times more likely to share misinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 than people in four other English-speaking countries, including Canada, a Simon Fraser University study has found.
Researchers find that education intervention doesn't live up to its promise
New research suggests the "growth mindset" strategy favored by some educators to improve student performance hasn't lived up to its promise—resulting in time and effort dedicated to growth mindsets in the classroom without meaningful gains in grades or test scores.
Silicon photonic microelectromechanical systems take a step forward
In recent years, global digitalization has seen unprecedented acceleration. Video streaming and video conferencing in home office and remote learning settings has resulted in a spike in residential broadband usage. Emerging applications such as artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles will further accelerate the need for data communication in the future. Today's internet infrastructure is...
Sea urchins keep on trucking while other marine life languishes in the Florida Keys
In the summer of 2020, Florida Museum researchers Tobias Grun and Michał Kowalewski dove into the shallow waters off the coast of the Florida Keys and scoured the ocean floor for sea urchins. Telltale tracks and dimples in the sediment alerted them to the presence of sand dollars, sea biscuits and heart urchins concealed just beneath the surface.
Neuron function is altered by widely used anesthetic propofol
Propofol is the most commonly used drug to induce general anesthesia. Despite its frequent clinical application, exactly how propofol causes anesthesia is poorly understood.
‘Perennial’ rice saves time and money, but comes with risks
Grains that grow year after year without having to be replanted could save money, help the environment, and reduce the need for back-breaking labor. Now, the largest real-world test of such a crop—a perennial rice grown in China—is showing promise. Perennial rice can yield harvests as plentiful as the conventional, annually planted crop while benefiting the soil and saving smallholder...
Affirmative action critics paint Asian Americans as the 'model minority.' Why that's false
Asian Americans are widely stereotyped as studious, smart and hard-working. As minorities who have managed to overcome racial obstacles to success. As evidence that affirmative action is no longer necessary—or, even, that it hurts the very types of students it's meant to protect.
Climate summit talks begin with breakthrough on loss and damage from extreme weather
U.N. climate talks began in Egypt with a breakthrough agreement to discuss who pays for damages caused by increasingly extreme weather events—an issue that had exposed splits between rich and poor nations.
'Death in the family': California tribe anguished as water, sacred fish vanish from rivers
Carrying a pair of 20-foot wooden poles with a net strung between them, Ron Reed shimmied above the Klamath River across wooden boards perched between slippery boulders.
Sea turtle nesting deaths are on the rise as hot dry summer comes to an end
The South Florida heat is causing more sea turtles to die in their nests, with this year's dry scorching summer prompting embryo deaths to more than double, researchers say.
Earth's oldest stromatolites and the search for life on Mars
The earliest morphological traces of life on Earth are often highly controversial, both because non-biological processes can produce relatively similar structures and because such fossils have often been subjected to advanced alteration and metamorphism.
Shedding light on the superconductivity of newly-discovered kagome metals
Already used in computers and MRI machines, superconductors—materials that can transmit electricity without resistance—hold promise for the development of even more advanced technologies, like hover trains and quantum computing. Yet, how superconductivity works in many materials remains a mystery that limits its applications.
Glucose-starved yeast poisons neighboring microorganisms as well as its own clones
Yeast is not the simple single-celled microorganism we once thought, but a competitive killer. When starved of glucose, yeast releases a toxin that will poison other microorganisms that have entered its surrounding habitat, even its own clones. This venomous phenomenon was previously unknown and contributes to our understanding of unicellular microorganism behavior and the evolution of unicellular...
The charge dynamics of a non-centrosymmetric magnetic Weyl semimetal
In work published in npj Quantum Materials, a team led by Prof. Leonardo Degiorgi in the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich has studied the broadband charge dynamics (i.e., longitudinal optical conductivity) of the ferromagnetic (FM), non-centrosymmmetric PrAlGe material. They reveal its electronic environment, based on correlated Weyl states, which favors an unusually large anomalous Hall...
Rewire financial system to aid climate-hit nations: UN chief
The world needs to rethink the international financial system to provide debt relief to countries battered by devastating and costly climate impacts like Pakistan, UN chief Antonio Guterres said Monday.