Tech
Species such as the golden apple snail are putting the agricultural sector in the Ebro river basin in quite a predicament. Meanwhile, in the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula, water hyacinths are threatening to destroy the natural ecosystem of the Guadiana River. Invasive species change not only the habitat of many other species but they also directly impact the region's economy. Some of these species are already wreaking havoc on certain areas but others could do so in the future and have a huge impact, both environmentally and financially.
Calcium acetylide was discovered more than 150 years ago. It is a yellowish-white, beige, or grey solid, a compound of calcium and carbon. Calcium acetylide is currently used to produce gaseous acetylene. In industry, it is widely used in the production of acetic acid and ethyl alcohol, as well as it can be used in the production of plastics, rubber, and rocket engines.
PITTSBURGH--A research team led by professors from the Department of Physics and Astronomy have created a serpentine path for electrons, imbuing them with new properties that could be useful in future quantum devices.
Jeremy Levy, a distinguished professor of condensed matter physics, and Patrick Irvin, research professor, are coauthors of the paper "Engineered spin-orbit interactions in LaAlO3/SrTiO3-based 1D serpentine electron waveguides," published in Science Advances on November 25.
Telomeres are specialised structures at the end of chromosomes which protect our DNA and ensure healthy division of cells. According to a new study from researchers at the Francis Crick Institute published in Nature, the mechanisms of telomere protection are surprisingly unique in stem cells.
For the last 20 years, researchers have been working to understand how telomeres protect chromosome ends from being incorrectly repaired and joined together because this has important implications for our understanding of cancer and aging.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," Leo Tolstoy wrote famously in 1878 in the opening lines of Anna Karenina. Turns out the Russian author was onto something.
Cohesive families, indeed, seem to share a few critical traits--psychologists agree. Being emotionally flexible may be one of the most important factors when it comes to longevity and overall health of your romantic and familial relationships.
Scientists who are members of the Borexino Collaboration have provided the first experimental proof of the occurrence of the so-called CNO cycle in the Sun: They have managed to directly detect the distinctive neutrinos generated during this fusion process. This is an important milestone on the route to better understanding the fusion processes that occur in the Sun. At the same time, although the CNO cycle plays a minor role in our Sun, it is most likely the predominant way of producing energy in other more massive and hotter stars.
Researchers at the University of Gothenburg have detected a connection between Brachyspira, a genus of bacteria in the intestines, and IBS -- especially the form that causes diarrhea. Although the discovery needs confirmation in larger studies, there is hope that it might lead to new remedies for many people with irritable bowel syndrome.
Four-and-a-half billion years ago, Earth would have been hard to recognise. Instead of the forests, mountains and oceans that we know today, the surface of our planet was covered entirely by magma - the molten rocky material that emerges when volcanoes erupt. This much the scientific community agrees on. What is less clear is what the atmosphere at the time was like. New international research efforts led by Paolo Sossi, senior research fellow at ETH Zurich and the NCCR PlanetS, attempt to lift some of the mysteries of Earth's primeval atmosphere.
AMHERST, Mass. - An international team of about 100 scientists of the Borexino Collaboration, including particle physicist Andrea Pocar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, report in Nature this week detection of neutrinos from the sun, directly revealing for the first time that the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen (CNO) fusion-cycle is at work in our sun.
The CNO cycle is the dominant energy source powering stars heavier than the sun, but it had so far never been directly detected in any star, Pocar explains.
The elementary particles that build the universe have two types: bosons and fermions, where the fermions are classified as Dirac, Weyl, and Majorana fermions. In recent years, Weyl fermions are found in condensed matter systems Weyl semimetals as a kind of quasiparticles, and they manifest themselves as Weyl points from dispersion relations.
Since the establishment of the renormalization group theory, it has been known that systems of critical phenomena typically possess an upper critical dimension dc (dc=4 for the O(n) model), such that in spatial dimensions at or higher than the dc, the thermodynamic behavior is governed by critical exponents taking mean-field values.
The discovery of high Tc superconductivity in cuprates attracts people to explore superconductivity in nickelates, whose crystal structures are similar to cuprates. Recently, Danfeng Li et al. at Stanford University published an article on Nature, reporting the observed superconductivity in hole-doped nickelates Nd0.8Sr0.2NiO2. Different from cuprates, the parent compound NdNiO2 do not preserve long range magnetic order, which was thought to be responsible for superconductivity in copper oxides. Besides, the ground state of NdNiO2 is metallic.
OAK BROOK, Ill. - Advanced imaging with CT shows that people who cook with biomass fuels like wood are at risk of suffering considerable damage to their lungs from breathing in dangerous concentrations of pollutants and bacterial toxins, according to a study being presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).
Multimaterial fibers that integrate metal, glass and semiconductors could be useful for applications such as biomedicine, smart textiles and robotics. But because the fibers are composed of the same materials along their lengths, it is difficult to position functional elements, such as electrodes or sensors, at specific locations. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have developed a method to pattern hundreds-of-meters-long multimaterial fibers with embedded functional elements.
Australian researchers have identified a protein that could protect the kidneys from 'bystander' damage caused by cancer therapies.
The 'cell survival protein', called BCL-XL, was required in laboratory models to keep kidney cells alive and functioning during exposure to chemotherapy or radiotherapy. Kidney damage is a common side effect of these widely used cancer therapies, and the discovery has shed light on how this damage occurs at the molecular level.