Earth
Thousands of our daily activities, from making coffee to taking a walk to saying hello to a neighbor, are made possible through an ancient collection of brain structures tucked away near the center of the cranium.
The diffraction limit, also known as Abbe diffraction limit in optics, poses a great challenge in many systems that involve wave dynamics, such as imaging, astronomy, and photolithography. For example, the best optical microscope only possesses resolution around 200 nm, but the physical size of the photolithography process with an excimer laser is around tens of nanometers. Meanwhile, physical sizes in current research and applications in biology and the semiconductor industry have scaled down to several nanometers, which is far beyond the ability of optical waves.
EAST LANSING, Mich. - Nine of the hottest years in human history have occurred in the past decade. Without a major shift in this climate trajectory, the future of life on Earth is in question, which poses a new question: Should humans, whose fossil fueled society is driving climate change, use technology to put the brakes on global warming?
DURHAM, N.C. - A devastating itching of the skin driven by severe liver disease turns out to have a surprising cause. Its discovery points toward possible new therapies for itching, and shows that the outer layer of the skin is so much more than insulation.
The finding, which appears April 2 in Gastroenterology, indicates that the keratinocyte cells of the skin surface are acting as what lead researcher Wolfgang Liedtke, MD PhD, calls 'pre-neurons.'
Palmer Amaranth is a high-impact agronomic weed species that has cost the United States agriculture industry billions of dollars since its discovery outside of its native range in the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico. Over the last 20 years, it has moved further north, and now poses a major threat to corn, soybean, and cotton growers across the south and Midwest regions of the United States.
How do we become a complex, integrated multicellular organism from a single cell?
While developmental biologists have long researched this fundamental question, Stanford University biologist and HHMI investigator Dominique Bergmann's recent work on the plant Arabidopsis thaliana has uncovered surprising answers.
New research shows the permanent rise of oxygen in our atmosphere, which set the stage for life as we know it, happened 100 million years later than previously thought.
A significant rise in oxygen occurred about 2.43 billion years ago, marking the start of the Great Oxidation Episode -- a pivotal moment in Earth's history.
WASHINGTON, April 5, 2021 -- Forever chemicals are known for being water-, heat- and oil-resistant, which makes them useful in everything from rain jackets to firefighting foams. But the chemistry that makes them so useful also makes them stick around in the environment and in us -- and that could be a bad thing: https://youtu.be/tqKEG5LxPiY.
A lot of people think regret must be a good thing because it helps you not repeat a mistake, right?
But that turns out not to be the case. Not even when it comes to casual sex, according to new research from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Department of Psychology.
"For the most part, people continue with the same sexual behaviour and the same level of regret," says Professor Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair.
So, we repeat what we thought was a mistake, and we regret it just as much the next time around.
Piping plover breeding groups in the Northern Great Plains are notably connected through movements between habitats and show lower reproductive rates than previously thought, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey study. These new findings point to a need for further studies and suggest the species may show a higher extinction risk than currently presumed.
A new study shows a correlation between the end of solar cycles and a switch from El Nino to La Nina conditions in the Pacific Ocean, suggesting that solar variability can drive seasonal weather variability on Earth.
The current method of manufacturing carbon nanotubes--in essence rolled up sheets of graphene--is unable to allow complete control over their diameter, length and type. This problem has recently been solved for two of the three different types of nanotubes, but the third type, known as 'zigzag' nanotubes, had remained out of reach. Researchers with Japan's National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) have now figured out how to synthesize the zigzag variety.
Their method is described in the journal Nature Chemistry, published on January 25.
A study led by Queen Mary University of London researchers has compared the performance and acceptability of a urine test and four different vaginal self-sampling collection devices to detect high risk Human Papilloma Virus (HPV).
Corresponding author Professor Jack Cuzick from Queen Mary University of London said: "Uptake of cervical screening has been declining in the UK in recent years, and self-sampling is an attractive alternative to clinician collected samples, initially in non-attenders but potentially for all women as the primary option.
Many slopes in the Campania region are covered with layers of volcanic soil, the result of repeated eruptions over the course of millennia. As the impacts of climate change worsen, including the occurrence of very intense and short rainfall in localized areas, there is a growing need, especially in this and other Italian regions that are vulnerable to landslides, to understand the dynamics that induce such events more precisely and develop models that can predict them.
In the 1960s, a national focus on hunger was essential to address major problems of undernutrition after World War II. In the 1990s, the nation shifted away from hunger toward "food insecurity" to better capture and address the challenges of food access and affordability.