Новости за 08.04.2024

If you've ever been taught about how Earth orbits around the sun, you might well think our planet travels along an oval-shaped path that brings it much closer to the sun at some times of the year than at others. You'd have a good reason to think that, too: it's how most textbooks show things.

U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) researchers have developed a patent-pending Continuous 3D-Cooled Atom Beam Interferometer derived from a patented cold and continuous beam of atoms to explore atom-interferometry-based inertial measurement systems as a path to reduce drift in Naval navigation systems.

Occurring in tandem with the COVID-19 pandemic, another crisis was quietly escalating and unnoticed by many—an infodemic characterized by an overload of information, much of it misleading or false. Though concerns of an infodemic started before this time, and can occur with any issue or event, the phenomenon has become so widespread that the term was included into Merriam-Webster's 2020 list of "words we are watching."

Researchers from the University of Portsmouth's Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG) have helped to detect a remarkable gravitational-wave signal, which could hold the key to solving a cosmic mystery.

Gossip flows through the offices and lunchrooms of our workplaces, seemingly filling idle time. But perhaps, through these ubiquitous and intriguing conversations, we are influencing our workplace relationships more than we realize.

Sure, cooking our food can make it safer to eat and more digestible. But let's be honest. We mainly cook to create something we enjoy—something delicious.

The mayor of Colombia's capital Bogota on Monday announced water restrictions as reservoirs in the sprawling Andean city hit "critical" levels.

A team of environmental engineers and city planners from University College London, the University of Sydney, and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne has discovered that cities grow in ways similar to the development of cancerous tumors. In their paper published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the group used mathematical models to explain how the city of London grew into its current state, and then applied the models to Sydney, Australia.

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features Arp 72, a very selective galaxy group that only includes two galaxies interacting due to gravity: NGC 5996 (the large spiral galaxy) and NGC 5994 (its smaller companion, in the lower left of the image).

NASA's LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter), which has been circling and studying the moon for 15 years, captured several images of Korea Aerospace Research Institute's Danuri lunar orbiter last month. The two spacecraft, traveling in nearly parallel orbits, zipped past each other in opposite directions between March 5 and 6, 2024.

New research at Åbo Akademi University, Finland, has managed to circumvent previous challenges in finding out how microalgae adapt to global warming by studying up to 60-year-old microalgae cells from the Archipelago Sea. Some microalgae form resting cells that sink to the seabed after the blooming is over. Researchers have now managed to awaken these dormant cells from sediment cores with different chronological layers that geological methods can date.

Using artificial intelligence, satellite observations, and climate model projections, a team of researchers from Switzerland and Belgium calculate that for every tenth of a degree of increase in global air temperature, an average of nearly 9,000 meteorites disappear from the surface of the ice sheet. This loss has major implications, as meteorites are unique samples of extraterrestrial bodies that provide insights into the origin of life on Earth and the formation of the moon.

A team of Department of Energy scientists led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory has released the first-ever dataset bridging molecular information about the poplar tree microbiome to ecosystem-level processes. The project aims to inform research regarding how natural systems function, their vulnerability to a changing climate, and, ultimately, how plants might be engineered for better performance as sources of bioenergy and natural carbon storage.

Researchers at The University of Manchester have developed a new catalyst which has been shown to have a wide variety of uses and the potential to streamline optimization processes in industry and support new scientific discoveries.

Since the 1950s, the surge in global plastic production has paralleled a concerning rise in plastic waste. In the United States alone, a staggering 35 million tons of plastic waste were generated in 2017, with only a fraction being recycled or combusted, leaving the majority to languish in landfills. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a key contributor to plastic waste, particularly from food packaging, poses significant environmental challenges due to its slow decomposition and pollution.

Cells intake substances from the outside world by encapsulating them in vesicles called endosomes, which are subsequently transported throughout the cell. During the transport process, vesicles fuse with other intracellular organelles. However, observing this process is challenging in many cells due to their small size and the complexity of underlying regulatory mechanisms.

The diffraction of light is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature where waves spread out as they propagate. This spreading of light beams during propagation limits the efficient transmission of energy and information. Therefore, scientists have endeavored to suppress diffraction effects to better maintain the shape and direction of light beams.

Recent reductions in emissions of tiny particles, the major cause of air pollution globally, have led to more heat in the Earth's climate system. This is shown in a new international study led by CICERO and published in Communications Earth & Environment.

For millions of years, underground fungi have lived in symbiosis with plant roots. Plants provide photosynthesized carbon, while fungi deliver water and nutrients. In order to do so, these organisms share space at the cellular scale: fungi stretch a network of tendrils called arbuscules into a plant's root cells, and both organisms rearrange their cells around this structure to facilitate sharing.

About 4.5 billion years ago, a small planet smashed into the young Earth, flinging molten rock into space. Slowly, the debris coalesced, cooled and solidified, forming our moon. This scenario of how the Earth's moon came to be is the one largely agreed upon by most scientists. But the details of how exactly that happened are "more of a choose-your-own-adventure novel," according to researchers in the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory who published a paper in Nature Geoscience.

Per-and poly-fluoroalkyl substances—commonly known as PFAS—are a group of over 14,000 human-made chemicals that have been popular since the 1950s for their diverse skills in resisting heat, water, grease and stains.

Photosynthesis is the central process by which plants build up biomass using light, water, and carbon dioxide from the air. Gaining a detailed understanding of this process makes it possible to modify and thus optimize it—for example, with a view to increasing food production or stress tolerance.

Lysosomes are surrounded by a lipid bilayer that separates the acidic environment and the digestive enzymes of the organelle from the cytoplasm. Damage to this layer—lysosomal membrane permeabilization, or LMP for short—can trigger inflammation and even lead to cell death.

Enhanced rock weathering—a nature-based carbon dioxide removal process that accelerates natural weathering—results in significantly higher first year crop yields, improved soil pH, and higher nutrient uptake, according to a paper, published in PLOS ONE on 27 March.

When Monday's solar eclipse casts its shadow, Colorado-based scientists will chase it in a jet flying faster than 500 mph and aim a coffin-shaped instrument straight at the sun's corona, taking measurements that eventually could help weather forecasters predict space storms.