… using archive at NSF’s NOIRLab. Amateur astronomer delves into archival data at the Community Science and Data Center to discover 34 ultracool dwarfs accompanying low-mass stars or white dwarfs. How often do stars live alone? For brown dwarfs — objects that straddle the boundary between the most massive planets and the smallest stars — astronomers need to uncover more examples of their companions to find out. Ace citizen scientist Frank Kiwy has done just that by using the Astro…

High carrier mobility in cubic boron arsenide offers promise for next-gen electronics. Researchers have for the first time experimentally discovered that a cubic boron arsenide crystal offers high carrier mobility for both electrons and holes – the two ways in which a charge is carried in a semiconducting material – suggesting a major advance for next-generation electronics. While earlier predictions had theorized that the crystal could exhibit simultaneously high electron and hole mobility, one of two papers published July 22…

Chemists at the University of Münster present new method for β-amino acid derivatives from alkenes or (hetero)arenes. Chemists at the University of Münster have developed a novel and straightforward way to produce complex organic molecules. Mild reaction conditions, simple operation, scalability and the use of an inexpensive and commercially available photosensitizer make the method interesting for industrial applications. The results of the study are currently (Aug. 1) published in Nature Chemistry. “Visible light has proven to be a powerful tool…

The disappearance of forests will have consequences for water quality in reservoirs. Heat waves, drought, floods, forest fires – the consequences of climate change are increasing and are changing our environment. A prime example is the countryside in the catchment area for the Rappbode reservoir in the eastern Harz region. This is the largest drinking water reservoir in Germany and provides drinking water for roughly one million people. Long periods of drought over the years from 2015 to 2020 have…

Biosynthetic pathway of the light-harvesting carotenoid fucoxanthin is surprisingly complex / Photoprotective pigments serve as precursors. Diatoms are microscopic unicellular algae occurring in natural waters worldwide. During photosynthesis, they take up large quantities of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas emitted through human activities, and convert it into biomass. The carotenoid fucoxanthin enables diatoms to efficiently harvest the blue-green part of the sunlight for photosynthesis. In collaboration with an international research team, researchers of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in…

A research team from Münster and Pittsburgh first examined chiral oxide catalysts. The results are to help in the future production of spin-selective catalytic oxide materials, thus improving the efficiency of chemical reactions. Controlling the spin of electrons opens up future scenarios for applications in spin-based electronics (spintronics), for example in data processing. It also presents new opportunities for controlling the selectivity and efficiency of chemical reactions. Researchers recently presented first successes with the example of water splitting for producing…

Scientists drive oil accumulation in rapidly growing aquatic plants. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have engineered duckweed to produce high yields of oil. The team added genes to one of nature’s fastest growing aquatic plants to “push” the synthesis of fatty acids, “pull” those fatty acids into oils, and “protect” the oil from degradation. As the scientists explain in a paper published in Plant Biotechnology Journal, such oil-rich…

Photosystem I in plants shows a hitherto unknown face / Molecular examination with maximum precision. Researchers from Münster and Stockholm show for the first time that photosystem I in plants can also occur as dimers. They have examined this protein complex in a previously unseen degree of precision. Photosynthesis is the most important basis of life on Earth. In it, plants and single-cell algae use the energy of sunlight and convert this energy into sugar and biomass. In this process,…

A KIT team has analyzed the extraction of lithium from thermal water resources in Germany – feasible extraction volumes and time horizon limit the potential. Pumping up thermal water, separating lithium, and using it to produce batteries for electric mobility – the idea of lithium as an environmentally compatible and regionally available by-product of geothermal energy plants appears highly promising. However, it has not been clear so far whether domestic lithium extraction is really worthwhile. A team of researchers from…

KIT researchers and partners suspect that much more plastic is transported in flowing waters than previously assumed and are developing new modelling approaches. Rivers play a key role in the transport of plastic in the environment. “As soon as plastic enters a river, it is transported rapidly and can spread throughout the environment,” says Dr Daniel Valero from the Institute of Water and River Basin Management at KIT and lead author of a new study on plastic transport. “But, depending…

Successful approval of the 2nd funding period of the DFG Research Training Group 2430. Researchers based in Dresden are going to develop a completely new class of materials in which actuators and sensors are integrated directly into flexible fibre composites – contrary to the state of the art. To this end, the German Research Foundation (DFG) approved the 2nd phase of Research Training Group 2430 “Interactive Fibre-Elastomer Composites” at TU Dresden in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research…

Gadgets that emit small electrical pulses can drastically cut the number of sharks and stingrays caught accidentally on fishing lines, new research shows. A new device called SharkGuard attaches to longline fishing rigs to scare off sharks and rays. In the study, carried out on French boats fishing for tuna, lines fitted with SharkGuard reduced bycatch (accidental catching) of blue sharks by 91% and stingrays by 71%. Catch of the target species, bluefin tuna, also appeared to decline, but further…

When our immune system runs it sets in motion antibodies, white blood cells and phagocytes. But how this works is not yet understood in all details – specifically, in the lymph nodes, which are important elements of the immune system. It was unclear, for example, how the blood supply to and within the nodes works in detail. This question has now been unravelled by an interdisciplinary research team with the participation of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon, 3D images have been obtained…

New Collaborative Research Center combines life sciences and polymer research. German Research Foundation has approved new CRC 1551 “Polymer Concepts in Cellular Function” under the aegis of Mainz University. The researchers of the new Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1551, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), intend to apply findings of polymer research to molecular processes in order to better understand what happens in body cells. The CRC entitled “Polymer Concepts in Cellular Function” will be initiated in January 2023…

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…

… due to surrounding farmland. Insect decline is also progressing in German nature reserves. One reason for this is the intensification of agriculture. In a study recently published in the journal “Biodiversity and Conservation”, a team of authors led by biodiversity researchers Florian Dirk Schneider of ISOE – Institute for Social-Ecological Research and Sebastian Köthe of NABU – Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union Germany shows that farmland in the vicinity of protected areas can have a negative impact on insect…

Researchers recommend more vertical measurements for follow-up mission. ESA’s novel Aeolus satellite reliably measures wind speed also in higher air layers and thus in a region of the atmosphere where other direct global wind measurements are relatively sparse. This is the result of a study for which data from the satellite were compared with wind observations from stratospheric balloons. Stratospheric balloons would provide highly accurate data on the horizontal wind speed and are therefore also suitable for the validation of…

Method offers approach to shift laser colors for applications in science, industry, and medicine. Lasers are intense beams of colored light. Depending on their color and other properties, they can scan your groceries, cut through metal, eradicate tumors, and even trigger nuclear fusion. But not every laser color is available with the right properties for a specific job. To fix that, scientists have found a variety of ways to convert one color of laser light into another. In a study just…

The structure of two-dimensional titanium oxide brakes-up at high temperatures by adding barium; instead of regular hexagons, rings of four, seven and ten atoms are created that order aperiodically. A team at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) made this discovery in colaboration with researchers from the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Microstructure Physics, the Université Grenoble Alpes and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (Gaithersburg, USA), thereby solving the riddle of two-dimensional quasicrystal formation from metal oxides. Their findings…

European team of autonomous robots explores lava cave in Lanzarote. As potential locations for future base camps, the lava caves on the moon are of great interest. But how can they be reached and explored? This has been investigated by a European consortium coordinated by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in the project CoRob-X funded by the European Commission. In a final analog mission on Lanzarote, the project partners have now succeeded in proving the feasibility of…