- PhysOrg
- 20/9/2 22:37
Giant balloons launched into the stratosphere to beam internet service to Earth have helped scientists measure tiny ripples in our upper atmosphere, uncovering patterns that could improve weather forecasts and climate models.
Giant balloons launched into the stratosphere to beam internet service to Earth have helped scientists measure tiny ripples in our upper atmosphere, uncovering patterns that could improve weather forecasts and climate models.
Climate change could deliver more silt, sand and pollution to the San Francisco Bay-Delta, along with a mixed bag of other potential consequences and benefits, according to a new study in the AGU journal Water Resources Research, which publishes research articles and commentaries providing a broad understanding of the role of water in Earth's natural systems.
Microscopic crystals in tantalum disulfide have a starring role in what could become a hit for 3-D displays, virtual reality and even self-driving vehicles.
Typhoon Maysak was moving north through the East China Sea early on Sept. 2 when NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite passed overhead and captured a visible image of the storm approaching landfall in South Korea.
Seaport footprints will need to expand by up to 3,689 square kilometers (1,424 square miles) worldwide in the next three decades to cope with the combination of sea-level rise and rising demand, according to a new study published in Earth's Future, a peer-reviewed scientific journal focusing on climate change and future sustainability.
When NASA's Terra satellite passed over the Northwestern Pacific Ocean, it gathered water vapor data on recently developed Typhoon Haishen and found powerful storms in two locations.
You might need a microscope to witness the next agricultural revolution. New research, published in the journal Science Advances, demonstrates how microfluidic technologies can be used to identify, isolate and propagate specific single photosynthetically active cells for fundamental industry applications and improved ecosystem understanding.
Every four years, U.S. presidential campaigns collectively spend billions of dollars flooding TV screens across the country with political ads. But a new study co-authored by Yale political scientist Alexander Coppock shows that, regardless of content, context, or audience, those pricey commercials do little to persuade voters.
To the surprise of many planetary scientists, the oxidized iron mineral hematite has been discovered at high latitudes on the Moon, according to a study published today in Science Advances led by Shuai Li, assistant researcher at the Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology (HIGP) in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST).
Grade 3 students who watch more than two hours of TV daily or spend more than one hour a day on a computer experience a decline in academic results two years later, a new study has found.
Asphalt is a near-ubiquitous substance—it's found in roads, on roofs and in driveways—but its chemical emissions rarely figure into urban air quality management plans.
The world is one step closer to having a totally secure internet and an answer to the growing threat of cyber-attacks, thanks to a team of international scientists who have created a unique prototype which could transform how we communicate online.
Through the analysis of vegetation from a Bering Sea island, researchers have determined that the extent of sea ice in the region is lower than it's been for thousands of years.
Purdue University researchers have passed another significant milestone as they work to take a new two-dimensional nanomaterial to market for use in nanoelectronics, quantum devices and infrared technology used in national defense tools and biochemical sensors.
What if impact craters, long seen as harbingers of death, turned out to be the cradle of life?
Like humans, bacteria live together in communities, sometimes lending a hand—or in the case of bacteria, a metabolite or two—to help their neighbors thrive. Understanding how bacteria interact is critical to solving growing problems such as antibiotic resistance, in which infectious bacteria form defenses to thwart the medicines used to fight them.
House sparrows can be found on nearly every continent including North America, South America, Africa and Australia, where they are not native but an invasive species. New research into these highly social songbirds reveals that they can learn from each other and adapt their behavior.
The storm was a potential tropical depression on Sept. 1, but by Sept. 2, the area of low pressure in the Caribbean Sea strengthened into a tropical storm and was named Nana.
Sudden death syndrome (SDS) is one of the most destructive diseases of soybean, with losses of nearly 1.7 million metric tons in 2014. The disease is especially severe in the Midwest and North-Central regions, where conditions of high soil humidity and cold weather help the disease grow. SDS is difficult to control as current management practices, which include using fungicide seed treatments and...
As introduced species spread around the world, the complex networks of interactions between plants and animals within ecosystems are becoming increasingly similar, a process likely to reinforce globalization's imprint on nature and increase risks of sweeping ecological disruption.
Black holes can expel a thousand times more matter than they capture. The mechanism that governs both ejection and capture is the accretion disk, a vast mass of gas and dust spiraling around the black hole at extremely high speeds. The disk is hot and emits light as well as other forms of electromagnetic radiation. Part of the orbiting matter is pulled toward the center and disappears behind the...
Tropical Depression 15 strengthened into a tropical storm late on Sept. 1 and was renamed Omar. Visible imagery from NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite was compiled into an animation that showed the system's formation and strengthening. NASA's Terra satellite also provided temperature data on Omar that revealed wind shear was affecting the storm.
Theoretical frameworks of chiroptical properties of electromagnetic materials and fields are reviewed. Based on these fundamentals, chiroptical systems can be understood, and complicated chiroptical phenomena can be described.
Our gut microbiota can crucially influence our behavior and neurodevelopment. New research from the Ethology Department at the Faculty of Science at Eötvös Loránd University indicates that dogs' aging mechanism and memory performance are also linked to their gut microbiome composition. According to the study, dogs and humans may have similar mechanisms in cognitive aging.
Radiocarbon dating of five large and potentially old sessile oaks from Aspromonte National Parks has revealed a long lifespan ranging from 934 ± 65 to 570 ± 45 years. For a long time, majestic oaks have been considered a symbol of longevity, and this study proves that a millennium age horizon is attainable longevity in angiosperms growing at high-elevation belt in Mediterranean mountains of...
University of Alberta graduate student Scott Melnyk made an intriguing fossil find during a graduate level course—and ended up identifying the fossilized tracks of a newly discovered wood-boring organism in a new study.
Freshwater—which falls to the earth as precipitation or exists beneath the surface as groundwater—is desperately needed to sustain people, plants and animals. With an ever-increasing human population, water shortages are already occurring in many areas are only expected to get worse. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology have estimated the freshwater supply and...
With just over two months before the 2020 election, three professors at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business offer a comprehensive review of how other nations are seeking to protect their democratic institutions and presents how a multifaceted, targeted approach is needed to achieve that goal in the U.S., where intelligence officials have warned that Russia and other rivals are again...
Water molecules undergo ultrafast dithering motions at room temperature and generate extremely strong electric fields in their environment. New experiments demonstrate how in presence of such fields free electrons are generated and manipulated in the liquid with the help of an external terahertz field.
Scientists are looking at luminescent transparent films for use in energy-efficient displays (such as LED screens) and other applications, and the possibilities it opens up for advancing methodologies in several fields of biological and electronics research. However, although multicolor-emitting transparent solid films have been developed, finding efficient ways to tune the color and intensity of...
Every teacher knows and dreads it: the look of a bored student. This school year, with a sea of new faces he's never seen before, sixth-grade teacher Zac Hansel is more worried than usual.
An international team of researchers led by Kyushu University and Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has demonstrated stable, continuous lasing at room temperature for over an hour from a class of low-cost materials called perovskites, finally overcoming a phenomenon that has so far prevented such long operation.
As you drift into unconsciousness before a surgery, general anesthetic drugs flowing through your blood are putting you to sleep by binding mainly to a protein in the brain called the γ-aminobutyric acid type A (GABAA) receptor. Now UT Southwestern scientists have shown exactly how anesthetics attach to the GABAA receptor and alter its three-dimensional structure, and how the brain can tell the...
Since antiquity, cultures on nearly every continent have discovered that certain plant leaves, when chewed or brewed or rubbed on the body, could relieve diverse ailments, inspire hallucinations or, in higher dosages, even cause death. Today, pharmaceutical companies import these once-rare plants from specialized farms and extract their active chemical compounds to make drugs like scopolamine for...
Researchers from McGill University have revealed the steps by which two very distinct organisms—bacteria and carpenter ants—have come to depend on one another for survival to become a single complex life form. The study, published today in Nature, shows that the two species have collaborated to radically alter the development of the ant embryo to allow this integration to happen. Understanding...
Cosmologists have zoomed in on the smallest clumps of dark matter in a virtual universe—which could help us to find the real thing in space.
The organization of cells into specific compartments is critical for their function. For instance, by separating the nucleus from the cytoplasm, the nuclear envelope prevents premature translation of immature RNAs.
Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) in Japan have discovered a link between defensive responses in plants and the beautiful but devastating crop parasite witchweed. Published in Nature, the new study shows that both parasitic and non-parasitic plants can detect and react to a class of organic compounds called quinones. While parasitic plants sense quinones in...
The bacterium Helicobacter pylori is linked to increased risk of stomach cancer, and is genetically highly variable. A new study by researchers of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich explores the role played by this diversity in the early phase of infection in adult humans.
The scaffolds that help hold together the world's tropical reefs are at risk from acidification due to increased carbon dioxide in the world's oceans, according to geoscientists at the University of Sydney.
A new and quicker method of diagnosing diseases in patients has been created by researchers at the University of Leeds.
Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have demonstrated the spin-galvanic effect, which allows for the conversion of non-equilibrium spin density into a charge current. Here, by combining graphene with a topological insulator, the authors realize a gate-tunable spin-galvanic effect at room temperature. The findings were published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.
Cannabidiol (CBD) is an increasingly popular wellness trend. The compound, which occurs naturally in cannabis plants, is added to many products that claim to reduce anxiety, alleviate pain and more, without the intoxication of its cousin tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). While CBD products are largely unregulated and unproven, companies are working to create CBD-like molecules to develop pharmaceutical...
Scalable nanoparticle-based computing architectures have several limitations that can severely compromise the use of nanoparticles to manipulate and process information through molecular computing schemes. The von Neumann architecture (VNA) underlies the operations of multiple arbitrary molecular logic operations in a single chip without rewiring the device. In a new report, Sungi Kim and a team...
Viruses are often thought of as a human problem, however they are the most abundant biological entities on the planet. There are millions of viruses in every teaspoon of river, lake or seawater, they are found everywhere there is life and probably infect all living organisms. Most are completely harmless to humans and infect microscopic animals, plants and bacteria, which they hijack and reprogram...
Chinese people have been paying more and more attention to water safety, especially since the Wuxi "water crisis" in Lake Taihu in 2007. However, more than 10 years after the crisis, how healthy are Chinese lakes now?
The technology behind the quantum computers of the future is fast developing, with several different approaches in progress. Many of the strategies, or "blueprints," for quantum computers rely on atoms or artificial atom-like electrical circuits. In a new theoretical study in the journal Physical Review X, a group of physicists at Caltech demonstrates the benefits of a lesser-studied approach that...
Newspaper coverage of COVID-19 is at least as politicized and polarized as climate change coverage, say University of Michigan researchers.
British sheep farmers could profit from allowing their land to naturally regenerate into forest, according to new research from the University of Sheffield.
Researchers and conservationists who have been tracking turtle migration for over a decade believe a new study highlights the need for investment and conservation of vital marine habitats which play a key role in turtle's formative years.