Новости за 21.05.2019

If a genetically or synthetically engineered organism is released into the environment, how will we know? How can we tell it apart from the millions of microorganisms that exist naturally in the wild? That's the challenge being taken on by a multi-institution research team, including Eric Young, assistant professor of chemical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), that is developing a biosecurity tool that can detect engineered microorganisms based on their unique DNA signatures.

Environmental conditions, lifestyle choices, chemical exposure, and foodborne and airborne pathogens are among the external factors that can cause disease. In contrast, internal genetic factors can be responsible for the onset and progression of diseases ranging from degenerative neurological disorders to some cancers.

A team of international scientists—including researchers at the University of St. Andrews, Syracuse University and Royal Holloway, University of London—have demonstrated a new source of food for early life on the planet.

Superconductors' never-ending flow of electrical current could provide new options for energy storage and superefficient electrical transmission and generation, to name just a few benefits. But the signature zero electrical resistance of superconductors is reached only below a certain critical temperature, hundreds of degrees Celsius below freezing, and is very expensive to achieve.

Many ways to approach the Riemann Hypothesis have been proposed during the past 150 years, but none of them have led to conquering the most famous open problem in mathematics. A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests that one of these old approaches is more practical than previously realized.

Most living things have a suite of genes dedicated to repairing their DNA, limiting the rate at which their genomes change through time. But scientists at Vanderbilt and University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered an ancient lineage of budding yeasts that appears to have accumulated a remarkably high load of mutations due to the unprecedented loss of dozens of genes involved in repairing errors in DNA and cell division, previously thought to be essential.

Cell boundaries are made of lipids. When cells are severely damaged, these lipids need to be rapidly removed to avoid toxicity and facilitate tissue healing. Researchers have discovered that a small ancient protein, Serum Amyloid A (SAA), plays a previously unknown key role in this vital process.

Tiger sharks have a reputation for being the "garbage cans of the sea"—they'll eat just about anything, from dolphins and sea turtles to rubber tires. But before these top predators grow to their adult size of 15 feet, young tiger sharks have an even more unusual diet. Scientists have just announced in a new paper in Ecology that baby tiger sharks eat birds. And not seabirds like gulls or pelicans—familiar backyard birds like sparrows, woodpeckers, and doves.

Amazon is preparing to do something it's never done before: disclose its companywide greenhouse gas emissions.

The warming of the Earth by the human-caused greenhouse effect is progressing. But predictions for the next decades still show relatively large uncertainties. A German-Australian research team headed by GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel identified the large natural variations in the tropical Pacific region as the key reason. As a conclusion of their study, published in the renowned scientific journal Nature Communications, the scientists call for more climate data from this region.

Life without Google is normal in China. About 1.4 billion Chinese people wake up each day to check WeChat instead of Gmail, navigate with Baidu instead of Google Maps, and watch videos on Youku instead of YouTube.

Prostate cancer is the second-leading cause of male cancer deaths worldwide. Deaths from prostate cancer are primarily due to metastasized cancer, in which cancer cells have migrated through the body and begun to grow in other areas. Results reported in Biomicrofluidics promise a new way to detect this deadly disease through a simple, inexpensive device.

Efforts to rein in government use of facial recognition have a big couple of weeks ahead, days after San Francisco approved a first-of-its-kind ban on use of the technology by police and other city agencies.

Refugees who are more willing to take risks, who tend to reciprocate friendliness, and who are more strongly convinced than others are that they are in control of their lives integrate into society faster. This is the result of a study undertaken on the basis of the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees in Germany, which researchers from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) at the German Institute of Economic Research (DIW) devised in conjunction with researchers from the Saarland University and the University of Münster. Читать дальше...

To the uninitiated, it can be hard to imagine.

Bangladesh has banned fishing in the Bay of Bengal for the next two months in an effort to replenish stocks, a minister said Tuesday, triggering protests by hundreds of fishermen.

The US Postal Service said Tuesday it would begin its first tests of self-driving trucks to deliver mail between two distribution centers in the southwest.

If you've ever felt frustrated while staring at a little spinning pinwheel while a computer finishes a task, try waiting for six weeks.

What is blockchain, where is it used, and will it become mainstream?

Video games are often seen as immersive fantasies, which offer a means of escape from the humdrum chores and duties of everyday life. Games studies scholars speak of players entering a "magic circle", forged by programmers—an act apart", with its own unique rules and rituals. But this way of thinking about games—as simple escapes, stress releases and magic circle worlds—has started to lose its validity.

A group of UK and Peruvian researchers have carried out the first detailed study of how rural communities interact with peatlands in the Peruvian Amazon, a landscape that is one of the world's largest stores of carbon.

Gravity: We can live with it, and it turns out we can live without it, for a little while anyway.

In the future, quantum physics could become the guarantor of secure information technology. To achieve this, individual particles of light—photons—are used for secure transmission of data. Findings by physicists from the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research could play a key role. The researchers accidentally came across a light source that generates a photon pair from the energy of an electron. One of these particles of light has the potential to serve as a carrier of the fragile quantum information... Читать дальше...

A new book by Professor Stephanie Barrientos consolidates more than 10 years of research on contemporary working conditions and gender discrimination in a new book Gender and Work in global value chains: Capturing the Gains?

A new study of UK lake sediment records stretching back over several centuries has found that the floods that hit Northern England in 2009 and 2015 (Storm Desmond), were the largest in 600 years—pointing to the impact of climate change on the frequency and magnitude of extreme events.