- PhysOrg
- 19/10/9 19:00
A promising replacement for the toxic and flammable greenhouse gases that are used in most refrigerators and air conditioners has been identified by researchers from the University of Cambridge.
195 articles from WEDNESDAY 9.10.2019
A promising replacement for the toxic and flammable greenhouse gases that are used in most refrigerators and air conditioners has been identified by researchers from the University of Cambridge.
The European Union is poised to bring trade policy into the fight against climate change, a move that risks stoking global commercial tensions.
Many farmers across sub-Saharan Africa try to coax crops out of sandy soils that are not ideal for holding water and nutrients. Their harvests are predictably poor. A traditional approach would have them apply more fertilizers and use irrigation, but both of these options require access to resources and infrastructure that many of them do not have. A relatively new technology modeled for eight...
Humans will never migrate to a planet outside of Earth's solar system because it would take far too long to get there, Swiss Nobel laureate Michel Mayor said Wednesday.
Four Steller sea lions at the Marine Mammal Research Unit in Port Moody have been instrumental in groundbreaking research since the facility opened in 2003, but now the facility is struggling after U.S. funding was cut in...
Scroungers and parasites seem to show up in nature wherever life produces something useful, and that includes parental care. Among birds, for example, the practice of laying eggs in other birds' nests is surprisingly common.
A team of researchers has found a new way to produce a polymer material called PBO, a product known commercially as Zylon that's used in bulletproof vests and other high-performance fabrics. The new approach could be useful in making PBO products that resist degradation, a problem that has plagued PBO-based materials in the past.
Transparent conductive films (TCFs) have many applications in touch screens, organic light emitting diodes and solar cells. These applications need materials that are strong, energy efficient and stable, which is why companies and researchers are interested in carbon-based materials. This applies especially to networks of single-walled carbon nanotubes, which are expected to replace the...
Trump administration officials broke the law when they reversed course and gave a green light to a proposed copper and gold mine near Alaska's Bristol Bay, mining opponents said in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
Monitoring progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals requires a huge amount of data. Citizen science could help fill important data gaps, say IIASA researchers.
Even though CRISPR technologies allow for better manipulation of genomes with many positive effects on modern drug development and the discovery of new and better antibiotics, significant problems such as genome instability and toxicity of the Cas9 protein still remain when using the technology.
Rolling blackouts affecting up to 800,000 customers began Wednesday in parts of California as a utility company switched off power because of hot, windy weather that raises the risk of wildfires.
In a bid to stop wildfires, San Francisco Bay Area residents could be denied power for several days.
About a million people in California were without electricity Wednesday as the state's largest utility pulled the plug to prevent a repeat of the past two years when windblown power lines sparked deadly wildfires that destroyed thousands of...
Submarine canyons are a final frontier on planet Earth. There are thousands of these breathtaking geological features hidden within the depths of the ocean—yet scientists have more high-resolution imagery of the surface of Mars than of Earth's ocean floor.
Examining the position occupied by tombs in their landscape in Prepalatial Crete gives us new insights into the role played by burial sites, mortuary practices and the deceased in the living society.
Quantum effects are genuinely found in the world of nanostructures and allow a wide variety of new technological applications. For example, a quantum computer could in the future solve problems, which conventional computers need a lot of time to handle. All over the world, researchers are engaged in intensive work on the individual components of quantum technologies—these include circuits that...
Rocky exoplanets that are around Earth-size are comparatively small, which makes them incredibly difficult to detect and characterise using telescopes. What are the optimal conditions to find such small planets that linger in the darkness? "A rocky planet that is hot, molten, and possibly harboring a large outgassed atmosphere ticks all the boxes," says Dan Bower, astrophysicist at the Center for...
People with the same diagnosis typically receive a standard treatment that is not necessarily effective for everyone. With knowledge of the individual patient's genome, it may be possible in the future to a greater extent to target the medical treatment to fit with the patient's genetic characteristics. Genetic information can thus contribute to more personalised—or customised—medicine. This...
A new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis sheds light on how human gut microbes break down processed foods—especially potentially harmful chemical changes often produced during modern food manufacturing processes.
Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research in Japan have developed a new system for keeping tissue viable for long-term study once transferred from an animal to a culture medium. The new system uses a microfluidic device that can keep tissue from both drying out and from drowning in fluid. A proof-of-concept experiment showed that tissue explanted from the mouse brain...
Fossil fuel giants have known the harm they do for decades. But they created a system that absolves them of responsibilityLet’s stop calling this the Sixth Great Extinction. Let’s start calling it what it is: the “first great extermination”. A recent essay by the environmental historian Justin McBrien argues that describing the current eradication of living systems (including human...
Scientists have developed CRISPR-BEST, a new genome editing tool for actinomycetes. It addresses the problem of genome instability caused by DNA double-stranded breaks in current CRISPR-technologies.
If you're reading this on a mobile phone or laptop computer, you might thank this year's three laureates for the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on lithium-ion batteries. "This is a highly-charged story of tremendous potential," said Olof Ramstrom of the Nobel committee for...