Desiccation of tree foliage is a key factor in the spread of fires. However, during droughts, changes in the water content of forest canopies remain poorly understood. Scientists from INRAE and the CNRS have developed the first model to predict canopy water content during drought and heat waves. Their results, published in the journal New Phytologist, could enable the development of fire danger forecasting models that include the role of vegetation in their calculations. Climate change and increasing drought are…
New method lets researchers detect proteins in close proximity in single cells. Today, most methods to determine the proteins inside a cell rely on a crude census—scientists usually grind a large group of cells up before characterizing their genetic material. But just as a population of 100 single people differs in many ways from a population of 20 five-person households, this kind of description fails to capture information about how proteins are interacting and clumping together into functional groups. Now,…
How the current Southwestern North American megadrought is affecting Earth’s upper atmosphere. New research, based on two decades’ worth of data, shows that in the ten years after its onset in 2000, the Southwestern North American (SWNA) megadrought caused a 30% change in gravity wave activity in Earth’s upper atmosphere. More than 30 years ago, Chester Gardner of UIUC’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Chiao-Yao She of Colorado State University’s Department of Physics teamed up to study Earth’s middle…
… when aquatic environments change abruptly. A closed copper mine on the Baltic Sea coast just south of Västervik has helped researchers study the capacity of coastal diatoms to survive when the environmental conditions change. A thesis from the University of Gothenburg shows that diatom species survived discharges of copper into the sea due to their great genetic diversity. By having and retaining strains with broad genetic diversity across the generations, a species can cope with rapid environmental changes without…
When cancer is detected at an early stage, the rates of survival increase drastically, but today only a few cancer types are screened for. An international study led by researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, shows that a new, previously untested method can easily find multiple types of newly formed cancers at the same time – including cancer types that are difficult to detect with comparable methods. Cancer is one of the deadliest diseases in the world and is…
A research team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has, for the first time, produced dark-field X-ray images of patients infected with the corona virus. In contrast to conventional X-ray images, dark-field images visualize the microstructure of the lung tissue, thereby providing additional information. This approach has the potential to provide an alternative to computed tomography (CT), which requires a significantly higher radiation dose. The lungs of Covid-19 patients are normally visualized using computed tomography (CT). CT technology uses…
Contactless manipulation method could be used in industries such as robotics and manufacturing. University of Minnesota Twin Cities researchers have discovered a new method to move objects using ultrasound waves. The research opens the door for using contactless manipulation in industries such as manufacturing and robotics, where devices wouldn’t need a built-in power source in order to move. The study is published in Nature Communications, a peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal. While it’s been demonstrated before that light and sound waves…
Telehaptics, which deliver remote and virtual tactile sensations, increase immersion by attaching them to fingers. Place a 1mm micro haptic device on an ultra-thin flexible substrate 1/20 of a human hair. Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) has developed a telehaptic device that remotely transmits tactile sensations in real time by attaching it to the fingertip like a sticker. It is expected to add a sense of immersion to the metaverse and real tactile experience with world-class performance and usability…
The NASA Quesst mission will fly a supersonic aircraft over various communities to test noise-mitigating technology. Supersonic aircraft generate a series of shock waves that merge into two distinct booms. The planes drag these incredibly loud sounds along their flight path, creating unacceptable noise levels over land. So far, sonic booms have prevented commercial supersonic flight over land, but fixing the noise could cut flight times in half. At the 183rd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Gautam Shah…
Orbital observations unveil the presence of an enormous mantle plume pushing the surface of Mars upward and driving intense volcanic and seismic activity. On Earth, shifting tectonic plates reshuffle the planet’s surface and make for a dynamic interior, so the absence of such processes on Mars led many to think of it as a dead planet, where not much happened in the past 3 billion years. In the current issue of Nature Astronomy, scientists from the University of Arizona challenge…
Studying an atomic clock on-board a spacecraft inside the orbit of Mercury and very near to the Sun might be the trick to uncovering the nature of dark matter, suggests a new study published in Nature Astronomy. Dark matter makes up more than 80 per cent of mass in the universe, but it has so far evaded detection on Earth, despite decades of experimental efforts. A key component of these searches is an assumption about the local density of dark…
New method harnesses image scanning superresolution for enhanced photon efficiency in light-sheet microscopy. In biological imaging, researchers aim to achieve 3D, high-speed, and high-resolution, with low photobleaching and phototoxicity. The light-sheet fluorescence microscope (LSFM) helps meet that aim. Based on a unique excitation and detection scheme, the LSFM can image live specimens with high spatiotemporal resolution and low photobleaching. It has shown great potential for 3D imaging of biological samples. The principle of LSFM technology is to illuminate the sample…
Largest spatial assessment to date underscores need for enhanced management practices and coral restoration efforts in Florida. A new study found that 70 percent of Florida’s reefs are eroding and experiencing net loss of reef habitat. The research, conducted by an interdisciplinary group of scientists through the NOAA Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Science, provides new information on the state of Florida’s world-famous coral reefs. “This…
An almost limitless supply of fresh water exists in the form of water vapor above Earth’s oceans, yet remains untapped, researchers said. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is the first to suggest an investment in new infrastructure capable of harvesting oceanic water vapor as a solution to limited supplies of fresh water in various locations around the world. The study, led by civil and environmental engineering professor and Prairie Research Institute executive director Praveen Kumar, evaluated…
Demonstration of a free-electron laser driven by plasma accelerated electron beams. Extremely intense light pulses generated by free-electron lasers (FELs) are versatile tools in research. Particularly in the X-ray range, they can be deployed to analyze the details of atomic structures of a wide variety of materials. Until now, FELs such as the European XFEL in Germany are based on conventional electron accelerators, which make them long and expensive. An international team led by Synchrotron SOLEIL, France, and Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf…
Radar scans of the Greenland ice sheet reveal the shutdown and reconfiguration of ice streams in the span of a few thousand years. Major ice streams can shut down, shifting rapid ice transport to other parts of the ice sheet, within a few thousand years. This was determined in reconstructions of two ice streams, based on ice-penetrating radar scans of the Greenland ice sheet, that a team of researchers led by the Alfred Wegener Institute have just presented in the…
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