Tech
One of the most comprehensive statistical analyses of drivers of food insecurity across 65 countries has concluded that household income consistently explains more discrepancy in food security than any other factor, including agricultural land resources and production.
Faced with the tragic loss of the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico and the often prohibitive cost of satellite missions, astronomers are searching for savvy alternatives to continue answering fundamental questions in physics.
At a press conference during the 2021 APS April Meeting, they will reveal new tactics across both hemispheres for illuminating gravitational waves and dark matter.
Shining the oldest light in the universe on dark matter
AMES, Iowa - A lot is riding on the continued advancement of plant sciences.
Take the food supply, for starters. Climate change and population growth will continue to pose challenges in the future, and crop production will require innovation and progress by plant scientists in order to keep pace. It isn't an overstatement to say that populations around the world will go hungry if plant science stagnates, said Gustavo MacIntosh, a professor in the Roy J. Carver Department of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology at Iowa State University.
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., April 16, 2021 -- Large-scale supercomputer simulations at the atomic level show that the dominant G form variant of the COVID-19-causing virus is more infectious partly because of its greater ability to readily bind to its target host receptor in the body, compared to other variants. These research results from a Los Alamos National Laboratory-led team illuminate the mechanism of both infection by the G form and antibody resistance against it, which could help in future vaccine development.
A team of researchers, affiliated with UNIST has proposed a satellite-aided drought monitoring method that can adequately represent the complex drought conditions into a single integrated drought index. The newly-proposed drought index has attracted considerable attention as a new method for monitoring and forecasting drought hazards due to its accuracy with no space-time constraints.
Researchers at UniSA have developed a cost-effective technique that could deliver safe drinking water to millions of vulnerable people using cheap, sustainable materials and sunlight.
Less than 3 per cent of the world's water is fresh, and due to the pressures of climate change, pollution, and shifting population patterns, in many areas this already scarce resource is becoming scarcer.
Currently, 1.42 billion people - including 450 million children - live in areas of high, or extremely high, water vulnerability, and that figure is expected to grow in coming decades.
EUGENE, Ore. -- April 16, 2021 -- University of Oregon physicists have developed a new method to manipulate sound -- stop it, reverse it, store it and even use it later -- in synthetic composite structures known as metamaterials.
The discovery was made using theoretical and computational analysis of the mechanical vibrations of thin elastic plates, which serve as the building blocks for the proposed design. The physicists, Pragalv Karki and Jayson Paulose, also developed a simpler minimal model consisting of springs and masses demonstrating the same signal manipulation ability.
Encoding information into light, and transmitting it through optical fibers lies at the core of optical communications. With an incredibly low loss of 0.2 dB/km, optical fibers made from silica have laid the foundations of today's global telecommunication networks and our information society.
Researchers at Aalto University have developed a new device for spintronics. The results have been published in the journal Nature Communications, and mark a step towards the goal of using spintronics to make computer chips and devices for data processing and communication technology that are small and powerful.
Older adults are more willing to make an effort to help others than younger adults, according to new research from the University of Birmingham.
The study, led by researchers in the University's School of Psychology, is the first to show how effortful 'prosocial' behaviour - intended to benefit others - changes as people get older. In particular, it focused on people's willingness to exert physical effort, rather than to give money or time, since attitudes to both these are known to change with age. The research results are published in Psychological Science.
Thermoelectrics directly convert heat into electricity and power a wide array of items -- from NASA's Perseverance rover currently exploring Mars to travel coolers that chill beverages.
A Clemson University physicist has joined forces with collaborators from China and Denmark to create a new and potentially paradigm-shifting high-performance thermoelectric compound.
The first photosynthetic oxygen-producing organisms on Earth were cyanobacteria. Their evolution dramatically changed the Earth allowing oxygen to accumulate into the atmosphere for the first time and further allowing the evolution of oxygen-utilizing organisms including eukaryotes. Eukaryotes include animals, but also algae, a broad group of photosynthetic oxygen-producing organisms that now dominate photosynthesis in the modern oceans. When, however, did algae begin to occupy marine ecosystems and compete with cyanobacteria as important phototrophic organisms?
Underground pipelines that transport oil and gas are very important engineering communications worldwide. Some of these underground communications are built and operated in earthquake-prone areas.
Seismic safety or seismic stability of underground pipelines began to be intensively studied since the 1950s.
A virtual human can be as good as a flesh-and-blood one when it comes to helping people practice new leadership skills. That's the conclusion from new research published in the journal Frontiers in Virtual Reality that evaluated the effectiveness of computer-generated characters in a training scenario compared to real human role-players in a conventional setting.
The life of almost all animals in the ocean depends on the availability of oxygen, which is dissolved as a gas in seawater. However, the ocean has been continuously losing oxygen for several decades. In the last 50 years, the loss of oxygen accumulates globally to about 2% of the total inventory (regionally sometimes significantly more). The main reason for this is global warming, which leads to a decrease in the solubility of gases and thus also of oxygen, as well as to a slowdown in the ocean circulation and vertical mixing.