Culture
Come harvest time, the cotton fields look like popcorn is literally growing on plants, with fluffy white bolls bursting out of the green pods in every direction. There are 100 million families around the world whose livelihoods depend on cotton production, and the crop's annual economic impact of $500 billion worldwide underscores its value and importance in the fabric of our lives.
The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST, Acting President: Yoon Seok-jin) announced that a research team, led by Dr. Oh Hyung-Suk and Dr. Lee Woong-hee, at the Clean Energy Research Center at KIST, developed a technology to reduce the use of precious metal catalysts at electrodes where oxygen is produced. The use of precious metal catalysts is one of the problems hindering the practical application of artificial photosynthesis technology.
To look at how life evolved, scientists usually turn to the fossil record, but this record is often incomplete. Researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), alongside an international team of collaborators, have used another tool - the chromosomes of living animals - to uncover clues about our past. The study, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, reveals early events in the evolution of vertebrates, including how jawed vertebrates arose through hybridization between two species of primitive fish.
After a yearlong study of people with opioid dependence, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers report evidence that adding $8 an hour to their paychecks may help those in recovery stay drug free longer, as well as encourage them to get and hold regular jobs.
The researchers say poverty is an independent risk factor for drug abuse that treatment plans largely ignore.
It has been estimated that in 2040 a quarter of the world's children will live in regions where clean and drinkable water is lacking. The desalination of seawater and the purification of wastewater are two possible methods to alleviate this, and researchers at Linköping University have developed a cheap and eco-friendly steam generator to desalinate and purify water using sunlight. The results have been published in the journal Advanced Sustainable Systems.
A Danish-German research collaboration may have found a solution to the large climate impact from the world's rice production: By adding electric conductive cable bacteria to soil with rice plants, they could reduce methane emissions by more than 90%.
Half of world´s population is nourished by rice crops, but rice cultivation is harsh to he climate. The rice fields account for five percent of global emissions of the greenhouse gas methane, which is 25 times stronger than CO2.
Black poplar leaves infected by fungi are especially susceptible to attack by gypsy moth caterpillars. A research team at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, has now further investigated this observation. The scientists found that the young larvae of this herbivore upgrade their diet with fungal food: Caterpillars that fed on leaves covered with fungal spores grew faster and pupated a few days earlier than those feeding only on leaf tissue.
If we were talking about food, most experts would choose the former, but in the case of energy storage the opposite is true. It turns out that more energy can be stored by charging less often, but right up to 100%.
Tsukuba, Japan - Governments throughout the world use rockets to launch satellites and people into orbit. This currently requires a lot of high-energy fuel, which is 95% of total rocket mass. Because the launch cost of a rocket can reach 10 billion yen, launching a 1-gram payload is said to be the same as buying 1 gram of gold. Minimizing the total cost of launching rockets would maximize the scientific payloads and increase the feasibility of space exploration.
Patients with type 2 diabetes secrete not only too little insulin but also too much glucagon, which contributes to poor blood glucose control. A new study from Uppsala University suggests that this is because the glucagon-secreting α-cells have become resistant to insulin.
For the first time, chemists at the University of Bonn and Lehigh University in Bethlehem (USA) have developed a titanium catalyst that makes light usable for selective chemical reactions. It provides a cost-effective and non-toxic alternative to the ruthenium and iridium catalysts used so far, which are based on very expensive and toxic metals. The new catalyst can be used to produce highly selective chemical products that can provide the basis for antiviral drugs or luminescent dyes, for example.
Experimental condensed matter physicists in the Department of Physics at the University of Oklahoma have developed an approach to circumvent a major loss process that currently limits the efficiency of commercial solar cells.
Solar cells convert the sun's energy into electricity and are the main component of solar panels and many types of electrical devices as broad-ranging as satellites and calculators.
When high in the atmosphere, ozone protects Earth from harmful solar radiation -- but ozone at ground level is a significant pollutant. Exposure to high concentrations of ground-level ozone aggravates respiratory illnesses, thus exacerbating the negative health effects of heat and contributing to the catastrophic impacts of recent heatwaves and drought in Europe.
A team of researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center used CRISPR technology to identify key regulators of aggressive chronic myeloid leukemia, a type of cancer that remains difficult to treat and is marked by frequent relapse.
Lisle, Ill. (April 20) - A year and a half following the publication of the pedunculate oak genome by France's National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE) and The Commission for Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies (CEA), initial results based on this genomic resource were published in the April 16, 2020, issue of New Phytologist.