Tech
The new article Evidence from Urban Roads without Bicycle Lanes on the Impact of Bicycle Traffic on Passenger Car Travel Speeds published in Transportation Research Record, the Journal of the Transportation Research Board, demonstrates that bicycles do not significantly reduce passenger car travel speeds on low speed, low volume urban roads without bicycle lanes.
Overflowing rivers can cause enormous problems: Worldwide, the annual damage caused by river floods is estimated at over 100 billion dollars - and it continues to rise. To date it has been unclear whether Europe is currently in a flood-rich period from a long-term perspective.
A massive global study of the world's reefs has found sharks are 'functionally extinct' on nearly one in five of the reefs surveyed.
Professor Colin Simpfendorfer from James Cook University in Australia was one of the scientists who took part in the study, published today in Nature by the Global FinPrint organisation. He said of the 371 reefs surveyed in 58 countries, sharks were rarely seen on close to 20 percent of those reefs.
Science has validated Indigenous wisdom by identifying a rare, healthy sugar in native stingless bee honey that is not found in any other food.
University of Queensland organic chemist Associate Professor Mary Fletcher said Indigenous peoples had long known that native stingless bee honey had special health properties.
"We tested honey from two Australian native stingless bee species, two in Malaysia and one in Brazil and found that up to 85 per cent of their sugar is trehalulose, not maltose as previously thought," she said.
Amazonia experiences seasonal fires each year. More than 90% of the fires are distributed across the southern boundary of Amazon Basin where the vegetation dominated by savannas are flammable in the dry season. In recent decades, however, more fires have been reported in the Amazon forests. The 2019 Amazon fires surged to a record high.
Many computational properties are maximized when the dynamics of a network are at a "critical point", a state where systems can quickly change their overall characteristics in fundamental ways, transitioning e.g. between order and chaos or stability and instability. Therefore, the critical state is widely assumed to be optimal for any computation in recurrent neural networks, which are used in many AI applications.
Feeding the world's growing population in a sustainable way is no easy task. That's why scientists are exploring options for transforming fruit and vegetable byproducts -- such as peels or pulp discarded during processing -- into nutritious food ingredients and supplements. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have shown that blueberry and persimmon waste can be made into antioxidant-rich powders that might have beneficial effects on gut microbiota.
Having more flowers and maintaining diverse bee communities could help reduce the spread of bee parasites, according to a new study.
The research, conducted on more than 5,000 flowers and bees, reveals how bee parasites spread and what measures could help control them.
Bees can be infected with a cocktail of parasites that can cause a range of symptoms from reduced foraging ability to dysentery and death. Though parasites contribute to bee declines, scientists are unsure how they spread between bee species.
In a new paper detailing findings from North Carolina State University's GenX Exposure Study, researchers detected novel per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) called "fluoroethers" in blood from residents of Wilmington, North Carolina. The fluoroethers - Nafion byproduct 2, PFO4DA and PFO5DoA - represented 24% of the total PFAS detected in the blood of Wilmington residents and appear to leave the body faster than legacy PFAS. These are the first measurements of these chemicals in humans.
Miniaturized computer systems and wireless technology are offering scientists new ways to keep tabs on reactions without the need for larger, cumbersome equipment. In a proof-of-concept study in ACS Sensors, researchers describe an inexpensive new device that functions like a conventional magnetic stir bar, but that can automatically measure and transmit information on a solution's color, viscosity and a variety of other attributes to a smart phone or computer.
While awaiting full access to their labs due to COVID-19 restrictions, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have taken this rare opportunity to report the technical details of pioneering research they conducted on the disinfection of drinking water using ultraviolet (UV) light.
Back in 2012, the NIST scientists and their collaborators published several papers on some fundamental findings with potential benefits to water utility companies. But these articles never fully explained the irradiation setup that made the work possible.
Scientists investigating the evolution of the virus that causes Covid19 say that its mutation seems to be directed by human proteins that degrade it, but natural selection of the virus enables it to bounce back. The findings could help in the design of vaccines against the virus.
The seventh named tropical cyclone of the North Atlantic Ocean has formed, and like some others this season, it has broken a record. NASA's Aqua satellite provided a look at the small record-breaker.
The National Hurricane Center (NHC) reports that Gonzalo is the earliest seventh named storm on record in the Atlantic basin, beating Gert of 2005 by 2 days. Tropical Depression Seven formed on July 21 by 5 p.m. EDT in the Central North Atlantic Ocean, and by 8:50 a.m. EDT on July 22 it strengthened into a tropical storm and was renamed Gonzalo.
Infrared data from NASA's Terra satellite showed that dry air around Tropical Storm Douglas has been inhibiting it from strengthening into a hurricane.
On July 22 at 2:15 a.m. EDT (0615 UTC), the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite gathered temperature information about Tropical Storm Douglas' cloud tops. Infrared data provides temperature information, and the strongest thunderstorms that reach high into the atmosphere have the coldest cloud top temperatures.