Tech
Infrared imagery from NASA's Aqua satellite shows that Tropical Storm Francisco had powerful thunderstorms with heavy rain capabilities around the center of circulation as it moves toward landfall in southern Japan.
On Aug. 5, 2019, the Japan Meteorological Agency has issued warnings for the Amami, Kyushu and Shikoku. Advisories are in effect for Chugoku, Kinki Ogasawara, Okinawa and Tokai.
Disordered materials - such as cellular foams, fiber and polymer networks - are popular in applications ranging from architecture to biomedical scaffolding. Predicting when and where these materials may fail could impact not only those materials currently in use, but also future designs. Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of California Los Angeles were able to forecast likely points of failure in two-dimensional disordered laser-cut lattices without needing to study detailed states of the material.
ATLANTA--Blocking the ability of the bacterial pathogen that causes gonorrhea to uptake the mineral zinc can stop infection by this widespread sexually transmitted infection, according to a study by the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University.
The findings, published in the journal PLoS Pathogens, could be used to move gonorrhea vaccine development forward because they provide insight into how to block growth of this pathogen. No vaccine has been developed to prevent this serious infection.
The University of Arizona Richard F. Caris Mirror Laboratory is a world leader in the production of the world's largest telescope mirrors. In fact, it is currently fabricating mirrors for the largest and most advanced earth-based telescope: The Giant Magellan Telescope.
The most detailed study to date of ancient predators trapped in the La Brea Tar Pits is helping Americans understand why today we're dealing with coyotes dumping over garbage cans and not saber-toothed cats ripping our arms off.
Modern light microscopic techniques provide extremely detailed insights into organs, but the terabytes of data they produce are usually nearly impossible to process. New software, developed by a team led by MDC scientist Dr. Stephan Preibisch and now presented in Nature Methods, is helping researchers make sense of these reams of data.
What The Study Did: This study (called a systematic review and meta-analysis) combined the results of 103 studies with nearly 478,000 children (ages 2 to 13) to look at how common overweight and obesity are among children across Europe.
Author: Iván Cavero-Redondo, Ph.D., of the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, in Cuenca, Spain, was the coauthor.
(doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2019.2430)
Pollutants coming out of cars' exhausts are harmful to the environment and public health. With the goal of overall curbing car emissions, the US Department of Energy (DOE) issued a challenge to scientists worldwide: catalytically converting 90% of all critical pollutants (hydrocarbons, CO, NOx etc.) in car exhaust into less harmful substances at 150ºC. However, nanoparticle based heterogeneous catalysts - like the three-way exhaust catalyst used in cars - work best at high temperatures (between 200 and 400ºC), thus making the 150ºC DOE challenge seem difficult to attain.
BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Engineers have designed a new system that can help cool buildings in crowded metropolitan areas without consuming electricity, an important innovation at a time when cities are working to adapt to climate change.
Using genetic tools in mice, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine say they have identified a pair of proteins that precisely control when sound-detecting cells, known as hair cells, are born in the mammalian inner ear. The proteins, described in a report published June 12 in eLife, may hold a key to future therapies to restore hearing in people with irreversible deafness.
The distribution of electrons in transition metals, which represent a large part of the periodic table of chemical elements, is responsible for many of their interesting properties used in applications. The magnetic properties of some of the members of this group of materials are, for example, exploited for data storage, whereas others exhibit excellent electrical conductivity. Transition metals also have a decisive role for novel materials with more exotic behaviour that results from strong interactions between the electrons.
An international team of researchers have published a study exploring the association between summer temperature and drought across Europe placing recent drought in the context of the past 12 centuries. The study reveals that, throughout history, northern Europe has tended to get wetter and southern Europe to get drier during warmer periods. They also observe that recent changes in drought patterns are not unprecedented as yet and emphasising that continuing to improve understanding of the relationship between summer heat and drought is critical to projecting flood and drought risks.
As a source of inspiration, aquatic creatures such as fish, cetaceans, and jellyfish could inspire innovative designs to improve the ways that manmade systems operate in and interact with aquatic environments. Jellyfishes in nature propel themselves through their surroundings by radially expanding and contracting their bell-shaped bodies to push water behind them, which is called jet propulsion.
Researchers at the Center for Innovative Integrated Electronic Systems (CIES) at Tohoku University have successfully observed microscopic chemical bonding states in ultrathin MgO - an important determinant in STT-MRAM performance. The observation was carried out via an angle-resolved hard X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (AR-HAXPES) in collaboration with Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute (JASRI) at its Spring-8 Synchrotron Radiation facility.
Awareness is growing among scientists about the significance of pre-modern anthropogenic impacts prior to the Industrial Revolution on present-day patterns of biodiversity. In particular, pre-modern energy-intensive industries, such as ironwork, of the sort depicted in the 1997 anime film Princess Mononoke directed by Hayao Miyazaki, were major drivers of ecosystem alteration and have had long-lasting impacts on the distributions of many species. However, the phenomenon remains insufficiently studied and the empirical evidence is quite limited.