… climate change will impact Antarctic seals differently. A New Zealand-led international study published today in Global Change Biology, reveals how climate change may impact seals in one of the most remote ocean regions in the world, the Weddell Sea. With funding from Pew Charitable Trusts, the University of Canterbury-based team engaged thousands of citizen scientists over a few years to search for Southern Ocean seals– crabeater and Weddell seals – using satellite images. “We found that Weddell and crabeater…
Surviving corals from past underwater heatwaves may be more tolerant of rising ocean temperatures, providing hope for conservation and restoration of reefs. Some coral communities are becoming more heat tolerant as ocean temperatures rise, offering hope for corals in a changing climate. After a series of marine heatwaves hit the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA) in the central Pacific Ocean, a new study finds the impact of heat stress on the coral communities lessened over time. While a 2002-2003 heatwave devastated coral…
Migrating birds choose routes with the best wind and uplift conditions, helping them to fly nonstop for hundreds of kilometers over the sea. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and University of Konstanz in Germany have identified how large land birds fly nonstop for hundreds of kilometers over the open ocean—without taking a break for food or rest. Using GPS tracking technology, the team monitored the global migration of five species of large land birds that complete…
…homogeneously containing 14 elements. Realization of omnipotent catalysts expected A research group in Japan has successfully developed a “nanoporous super multi-element catalyst” (1) that contains 14 elements (2) which are mixed uniformly at the atomic level and used as a catalyst. A high-entropy alloy composed of 10 or more elements may act as a catalyst to exhibit” omnipotency and versatility” being able to freely modify its morphology and become active according to the reaction field. However, so far, it has…
Study with participation from Heidelberg shows that supervolcanoes remain dangerous long after erupting. Besides cosmic impacts, supervolcanic eruptions rank among the worst catastrophes in the Earth’s history, like that of the Toba volcano on Sumatra (Indonesia) approximately 75,000 years ago, which affected all of Southeast Asia and beyond. Eruptions of a similar magnitude are known worldwide only from Yellowstone (USA) and a few other volcanoes that were active within the current geological period of the Quaternary. Until now, scientists assumed…
… important for developing future treatments. A previously undiscovered pathway for the transport of cell waste can be important for future treatments of cancer and dementia. The researchers behind the study have discovered a new pathway used by cells to remove cellular waste that otherwise would damage the cell’s genes. The new transport pathway passes through the cell nucleus’s membrane, which normally protects our DNA. In the study, the researchers stressed the cells to increase the traffic of small envelopes…
Risk from solar flares to planes is real but not worth costly mitigation. “Don’t fly too close to the sun,” said Daedalus to Icarus. Flying too high would melt the wax in his wings, while going too low would cause the sea’s moisture to create drag. Commercial flight crews do not usually appear in Greek mythology, but they have to work with the occupational hazard of aviation radiation exposure. Aviation guidelines aim to mitigate the effects of radiation, mainly caused…
With the increasingly serious global energy crisis caused by the excessive consumption of fossil fuels, developing clean, efficient, and sustainable energy conversion technologies is highly desirable. Electrocatalysis is one of the most promising methods to produce clean energy. However, the wide commercial applications of electrocatalysis have been severely hindered by the sluggish kinetics in electrochemical reactions, as well as the high cost and low stability of electrocatalysts. Therefore, rational design and preparation of the highly efficient and stable electrocatalysts have…
A scientific study published in Nature Communications Biology shows that geckos are capable of gliding. In the publication titled Tails stabilize landing of gliding geckos crashing head-first into tree trunks, the authors present footage showing that geckos with no major specializations for flight are in fact capable gliders. Experiments with a gecko-inspired robot confirm the reptile’s locomotion abilities are not entirely down to its feet. The tail plays just as much a pivotal role, the team from the Max Planck…
The prevalent view of white dwarfs as inert, slowly cooling stars has been challenged by observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. An international group of astronomers have discovered the first evidence that white dwarfs can slow down their rate of ageing by burning hydrogen on their surface. “We have found the first observational evidence that white dwarfs can still undergo stable thermonuclear activity,” explained Jianxing Chen of the Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna and the Italian National Institute…
Reconfigurable device can simplify semiconductor circuit design and enhance computational power and speed. Many electronic devices today are dependent on semiconductor logic circuits based on switches hard-wired to perform predefined logic functions. Physicists from the National University of Singapore (NUS), together with an international team of researchers, have developed a novel molecular memristor, or an electronic memory device, that has exceptional memory reconfigurability. Unlike hard-wired standard circuits, the molecular device can be reconfigured using voltage to embed different computational tasks….
An electronic “nose” is capable of detecting with 86% accuracy when a lung transplant is beginning to fail, according to research presented at the ‘virtual’ European Respiratory Society International Congress today. Ms Nynke Wijbenga, a PhD student and technical physician at Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, told the congress that the finding could enable doctors to spot at an early stage when a lung transplant is failing, known as chronic allograft dysfunction (CLAD), so that they could provide…
In June, the W-Cube nanosatellite began its journey aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral to polar orbit. About a month later, it was placed in its orbit at an altitude of 500 kilometers and has now been successfully transmitting test signals to Earth in the Q and W band since August. It collects important data for the development of new frequency ranges for future satellite communication systems. The development of the W-Cube took place in the course of…
The COgITOR project has been funded by the European Union with approximately 3.5 million euros for the next 4 years. The COgITOR project is aimed at formulating a new concept of artificial cybernetic system, taking its name from Descartes’s maxim “Cogito, ergo sum” and drawing inspiration from the new frontier of robotics that aims to reduce, if not completely cancel, system rigidity. The goal of COgITOR, in fact, is to create a liquid cybernetic system inspired by the cellular world…
A polysaccharide from flax seeds attracts crop-infecting nematodes. A research collaboration based in Kumamoto University, Japan has become the first to successfully purify and identify an attractant for crop-infecting root-knot nematodes from flaxseeds. Their experiments revealed that rhamnogalacturonan-I (RG-I), a flaxseed cell wall component, can attract root-knot nematodes. The linkages between rhamnose and L-galactose are essential for the attraction. Plant-parasitic nematodes are one of many known agricultural pests. They are parasites that infect plant roots and form feeding sites known…
Metamaterials and metasurfaces have attracted great interests in recent years for their versatile possibilities in manipulating electromagnetic (EM) waves. Embedded tunable devices such as positive-intrinsic-negative (PIN) diodes and varactors enable digital representations of metasurfaces and programmability of functions in real time, and hence provide new avenues to tailor the EM waves and digital information dynamically. Based on the programmable metasurface, the concept of time-domain digital coding metasurface (TDCM) was proposed to manipulate the frequency harmonics by changing the external biasing…
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