EAST LANSING, Mich. – To paraphrase the Rolling Stones: We can’t always get everything we want in life, but we get what we need. Michigan State University researchers believe this is a powerful principle in evolution as well. Trade-offs, which are evolutionary compromises, drive the diversity of life, said Chris Adami, MSU professor of microbiology and molecular genetics. (more…)
Physiker der Universität Wien erforschen Ursprung der Elementarteilchen
Auch nach der spektakulären Entdeckung des Higgs-Teilchens 2012 am CERN bleibt die Suche nach einer umfassenden Theorie der fundamentalen Wechselwirkungen eines der großen ungelösten Probleme in der theoretischen Physik. Besondere Schwierigkeiten bereitet die Zusammenführung von Quantenmechanik und Gravitation. Physiker um Harold Steinacker von der Universität Wien untersuchen mit sogenannten Matrix-Modellen einen alternativen Zugang zur favorisierten Stringtheorie. Dazu publizierten sie kürzlich im Fachjournal “Progress of Theoretical and Experimental Physics”. (more…)
Er ist einer der größten Vulkane Europas, befindet sich unter dem größten Gletscher Europas und ist seit Mitte August 2014 wieder aktiv – der Bardarbunga auf Island. DLR-Wissenschaftler haben ihn und das dazugehörige Vulkansystem, ein gewaltiges Netz aus unterirdischen Magmakanälen, Schloten und Kratern, schon seit einigen Jahren genau im Blick. Der deutsche Erdbeobachtungssatellit TerraSAR-X lieferte nun wichtige Daten von der jüngsten Aktivität des Vulkans. (more…)
NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft gave humanity its first close-up look at Neptune and its moon Triton in the summer of 1989. Like an old film, Voyager’s historic footage of Triton has been “restored” and used to construct the best-ever global color map of that strange moon. The map, produced by Paul Schenk, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, has also been used to make a movie recreating that historic Voyager encounter, which took place 25 years ago, on August 25, 1989. (more…)
The days of self-assembling nanoparticles taking hours to form a film over a microscopic-sized wafer are over. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have devised a technique whereby self-assembling nanoparticle arrays can form a highly ordered thin film over macroscopic distances in one minute.
Ting Xu, a polymer scientist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, led a study in which supramolecules based on block copolymers were combined with gold nanoparticles to create nanocomposites that under solvent annealing quickly self-assembled into hierarchically-structured thin films spanning an area of several square centimeters. The technique is compatible with current nanomanufacturing processes and has the potential to generate new families of optical coatings for applications in a wide number of areas including solar energy, nanoelectronics and computer memory storage. This technique could even open new avenues to the fabrication of metamaterials, artificial nanoconstructs that possess remarkable optical properties. (more…)
ChemikerInnen erforschen Verderb von Lebensmitteln
Annette Rompel und ihr Team vom Institut für Biophysikalische Chemie der Universität Wien erforschen die “Bräunungsreaktion” beim Verderb von Champignons. Die ForscherInnen konnten nachweisen, dass das dafür zuständige Enzym bereits gebildet wird, wenn der Pilz noch gar nicht verdorben ist. Die Studie erscheint aktuell online in den renommierten Fachjournalen Phytochemistry und Acta Crystallographica. (more…)
New research from UCL shows we will soon uncover the origin of the ultraviolet light that bathes the cosmos, helping scientists understand how galaxies were built.
The study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by UCL cosmologists Dr Andrew Pontzen and Dr Hiranya Peiris (both UCL Physics & Astronomy), together with collaborators at Princeton and Barcelona Universities, shows how forthcoming astronomical surveys will reveal what lit up the cosmos. (more…)
Microscopic fish teeth may carry a message of hope from an ecological upheaval in the distant past, scientists at Yale University and the University of California-San Diego (UCSD) have found.
An analysis of tooth fossils and shark scales from the sea floor indicates that a massive die-off of species 66 million years ago did not, in fact, leave uniformly dead oceans around the world. In the Pacific Ocean, at least, some small fish species actually flourished. (more…)
