Science news

• Flying Mini-Robots Can Cling to Your Window [Video]

  19-05-2016 22:30 via rss.sciam.com
  
  A new type of micro aerial vehicle saves precious power by perching on leaves or walls instead of hovering
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• Could additives in your toothpaste be bad for your gut?

  19-05-2016 22:15 via cbc.ca
  
  A common additive in cosmetics, soaps and toothpastes could be seriously harming your "happy" gut bacteria... or it could be doing absolutely nothing. Those are the contradictory results of two recently published studies looking at the additive triclosan.
  
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• Carbon dioxide levels jump by record amount due to El Nino

  19-05-2016 22:15
  
  WASHINGTON (AP) — The amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air jumped by the biggest amount on record last month, a rise amplified by El Nino, scientists say.
  
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• Incoming U.N. climate chief seeks swift action - at odds with Trump

  19-05-2016 22:08
  By Alister Doyle OSLO (Reuters) - The United Nations's incoming climate chief said on Thursday she will push for rapid action under a U.N. accord to slow global warming and expressed hopes that U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will drop calls for a renegotiation if elected. Mexico's Patricia Espinosa, a former foreign minister appointed on Wednesday to head the Bonn-based U.N. Climate Change Secretariat from July, urged all governments swiftly to ratify the 195-nation accord h
  
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• Hubble Telescope Captures Incredible Up-Close View of Mars

  19-05-2016 21:25
  
  Hubble took the photo on May 12, when Mars was just 50 million miles (80 million kilometers) from Earth. Opposition "marks the planet's closest approach to Earth, so that Mars appears bigger and brighter in the sky than usual," European Space Agency officials wrote today (May 19) in a description of the newly released photo. The closest approach will actually come on May 30, when Earth and Mars are separated by 46.8 million miles (75.3 million km).
  
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• [Working Life] A problem by any other name

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Authors: Paul Rogge, Emily Regier
  
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• [This Week in Science] Tough core-shell catalysts

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Author: Phil Szuromi
  
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• [This Week in Science] The TRIC to building strong bones

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Author: Annalisa M. VanHook
  
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• [This Week in Science] The secrets of making signaling responsive

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Author: L. Bryan Ray
  
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• [This Week in Science] Synapse identity through specific splicing

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Author: Peter Stern
  
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• [This Week in Science] Peptide domain links phosphate need to uptake

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Author: Pamela J. Hines
  
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• [This Week in Science] Making the fast faster still

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Author: Stella M. Hurtley
  
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• [This Week in Science] Making small robots stick

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Author: Marc S. Lavine
  
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• [This Week in Science] Making a graphene super-edge

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Author: Jelena Stajic
  
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• [This Week in Science] Insights into antibody therapy for HIV-1

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Author: Kristen L. Mueller
  
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• [This Week in Science] How zinc helps copper make methanol

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Author: Phil Szuromi
  
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• [This Week in Science] From a bar to a charge, magnetically

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Author: Jelena Stajic
  
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• [This Week in Science] Evolutionary maintenance of gene duplications

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Author: Laura M. Zahn
  
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• [This Week in Science] DNA gatekeepers

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Author: Julia Fahrenkamp-Uppenbrink
  
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• [This Week in Science] Discerning the nematic connection

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Author: Jelena Stajic
  
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• [This Week in Science] Antibiotics: A double-edged sword

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Author: Orla M. Smith
  
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• [This Week in Science] Another pathway to cancer resistance

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Author: Kristen L. Mueller
  
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• [This Week in Science] A starvation survival signal fights DNA damage

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Author: Guy Riddihough
  
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• [This Week in Science] A radical route to making methane

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Author: Nicholas S. Wigginton
  
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• [Special Issue Review] Emerging solutions to the water challenges of an urbanizing world

  19-05-2016 21:20
  The top priorities for urban water sustainability include the provision of safe drinking water, wastewater handling for public health, and protection against flooding. However, rapidly aging infrastructure, population growth, and increasing urbanization call into question current urban water management strategies, especially in the fast-growing urban areas in Asia and Africa. We review innovative approaches in urban water management with the potential to provide locally adapted, resource-efficie
  
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• [Special Issue Review] City-integrated renewable energy for urban sustainability

  19-05-2016 21:20
  To prepare for an urban influx of 2.5 billion people by 2050, it is critical to create cities that are low-carbon, resilient, and livable. Cities not only contribute to global climate change by emitting the majority of anthropogenic greenhouse gases but also are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change and extreme weather. We explore options for establishing sustainable energy systems by reducing energy consumption, particularly in the buildings and transportation sectors, and pr
  
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• [Special Issue Perspective] Transport solutions for cleaner air

  19-05-2016 21:20
  In cities across the globe, road transport remains an important source of air pollutants that are linked with acute and chronic health effects. Decreasing vehicle emissions—while maintaining or increasing commuter journeys—remains a major challenge for city administrators. In London, congestion-charging and a citywide low-emission zone failed to bring nitrogen dioxide concentrations under control. In Beijing, controls on the purchase and use of cars have not decreased transport emissions to
  
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• [Special Issue Perspective] The ecological future of cities

  19-05-2016 21:20
  The discipline of urban ecology arose in the 1990s, primarily motivated by a widespread interest in documenting the distribution and abundance of animals and plants in cities. Today, urban ecologists have greatly expanded their scope of study to include ecological and socioeconomic processes, urban management, planning, and design, with the goal of addressing issues of sustainability, environmental quality, and human well-being within cities and towns. As the global pace of urbanization continue
  
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• [Special Issue Perspective] Meta-principles for developing smart, sustainable, and healthy cities

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Policy directives in several nations are focusing on the development of smart cities, linking innovations in the data sciences with the goal of advancing human well-being and sustainability on a highly urbanized planet. To achieve this goal, smart initiatives must move beyond city-level data to a higher-order understanding of cities as transboundary, multisectoral, multiscalar, social-ecological-infrastructural systems with diverse actors, priorities, and solutions. We identify five key dimensio
  
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• [Special Issue Perspective] Living in cities, naturally

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Natural features, settings, and processes in urban areas can help to reduce stress associated with urban life. In this and other ways, public health benefits from, street trees, green roofs, community gardens, parks and open spaces, and extensive connective pathways for walking and biking. Such urban design provisions can also yield ecological benefits, not only directly but also through the role they play in shaping attitudes toward the environment and environmental protection. Knowledge of the
  
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• [Special Issue Perspective] Hidden linkages between urbanization and food systems

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Global societies are becoming increasingly urban. This shift toward urban living is changing our relationship with food, including how we shop and what we buy, as well as ideas about sanitation and freshness. Achieving food security in an era of rapid urbanization will require considerably more understanding about how urban and food systems are intertwined. Here we discuss some potential understudied linkages that are ripe for further examination.
  Authors: Karen C. Seto, Navin Ramankutty
  
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• [Special Issue Perspective] Building functional cities

  19-05-2016 21:20
  The literature views many African cities as dysfunctional with a hodgepodge of land uses and poor “connectivity.” One driver of inefficient land uses is construction decisions for highly durable buildings made under weak institutions. In a novel approach, we model the dynamics of urban land use with both formal and slum dwellings and ongoing urban redevelopment to higher building heights in the formal sector as a city grows. We analyze the evolution of Nairobi using a unique high–spatial r
  
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• [Special Issue News] Vancouver's Green Dream

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Vancouver, Canada, is trying to become the greenest city on Earth. In 2011, it adopted a Greenest City Action Plan that has made it a prominent pioneer in urban greening, including efforts to transform raw sewage and food waste into energy, and to coax residents to use less water and leave their cars to walk, bike, or ride public transport. And it isn't the only metropolis setting formidable targets. Around the world, urban leaders are embarking on an array of efforts to reduce the strain that c
  
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• [Special Issue News] Roots of the Urban Mind

  19-05-2016 21:20
  For the first 190,000 years of our history as a species, humans lived in small, mobile communities of up to a couple hundred individuals, in which everybody knew everybody else. Today, more than half of us live in cities, surrounded by multitudes of people we'll never meet. This radical change happened in an evolutionary eye blink: We navigate our modern world with Paleolithic brains. In the traditional view, agriculture was the crucial innovation that paved the way for cities. But overcoming fo
  
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• [Special Issue News] Rise of the City

  19-05-2016 21:20
  In 2014, 54% of the world's population, or 3.9 billion people, lived in urban areas. That's up from one-third in 1950, and forecasters say the proportion will rise to 66% by 2050. This two-page infographic highlights the geography of urbanization, and the impacts that cities can have on the environment.
  
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• [Special Issue News] China Rethinks Cities

  19-05-2016 21:20
  China is rethinking its urbanization. Although the rapid growth of the nation's cities helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of rural poverty, the breakneck pace has created urban sprawl, car-dependency, massive traffic jams, skyrocketing emissions, sedentary lifestyles, and cityscapes lacking character or individuality. In February, national authorities adopted new urbanization guidelines that should, over time, lead to more compact cities with denser networks of narrow streets, more p
  
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• [Special Issue News] A Plague of Rats

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Rats have long been one of the world's most ubiquitous—and infamous—forms of urban wildlife, synonymous with pestilence and squalor. They've attracted only sporadic attention from scientists, however, and much about the secretive city rat—chiefly the Norway rat, Rattus norvegicus, remains a mystery. But as the world's urban population surges, and more people crowd into rat-plagued slums, the rodents are getting renewed attention from researchers and public health experts. Over the past dec
  
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• [Research Article] The tumor microenvironment underlies acquired resistance to CSF-1R inhibition in gliomas

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Macrophages accumulate with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) progression and can be targeted via inhibition of colony-stimulating factor–1 receptor (CSF-1R) to regress high-grade tumors in animal models of this cancer. However, whether and how resistance emerges in response to sustained CSF-1R blockade is unknown. We show that although overall survival is significantly prolonged, tumors recur in >50% of mice. Gliomas reestablish sensitivity to CSF-1R inhibition upon transplantation, indica
  
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• [Research Article] The radical mechanism of biological methane synthesis by methyl-coenzyme M reductase

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Methyl-coenzyme M reductase, the rate-limiting enzyme in methanogenesis and anaerobic methane oxidation, is responsible for the biological production of more than 1 billion tons of methane per year. The mechanism of methane synthesis is thought to involve either methyl-nickel(III) or methyl radical/Ni(II)-thiolate intermediates. We employed transient kinetic, spectroscopic, and computational approaches to study the reaction between the active Ni(I) enzyme and substrates. Consistent with the meth
  
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• [Report] Ubiquitous signatures of nematic quantum criticality in optimally doped Fe-based superconductors

  19-05-2016 21:20
  A key actor in the conventional theory of superconductivity is the induced interaction between electrons mediated by the exchange of virtual collective fluctuations (phonons in the case of conventional s-wave superconductors). Other collective modes that can play the same role, especially spin fluctuations, have been widely discussed in the context of high-temperature and heavy Fermion superconductors. The strength of such collective fluctuations is measured by the associated susceptibility. Her
  
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• [Report] Thresholds and ultrasensitivity from negative cooperativity

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Negative cooperativity is a phenomenon in which the binding of one or more molecules of a ligand to a multimeric receptor makes it more difficult for subsequent ligand molecules to bind. Negative cooperativity can make a multimeric receptor’s response more graded than it would otherwise be. However, through theory and experimental results, we show that if the ligand binds the receptor with high affinity and can be appreciably depleted by receptor binding, then negative cooperativity produces a
  
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• [Report] Supercurrent in the quantum Hall regime

  19-05-2016 21:20
  A promising route for creating topological states and excitations is to combine superconductivity and the quantum Hall (QH) effect. Despite this potential, signatures of superconductivity in the QH regime remain scarce, and a superconducting current through a QH weak link has been challenging to observe. We demonstrate the existence of a distinct supercurrent mechanism in encapsulated graphene samples contacted by superconducting electrodes, in magnetic fields as high as 2 tesla. The observation
  
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• [Report] Self-assembly of noble metal monolayers on transition metal carbide nanoparticle catalysts

  19-05-2016 21:20
  We demonstrated the self-assembly of transition metal carbide nanoparticles coated with atomically thin noble metal monolayers by carburizing mixtures of noble metal salts and transition metal oxides encapsulated in removable silica templates. This approach allows for control of the final core-shell architecture, including particle size, monolayer coverage, and heterometallic composition. Carbon-supported Ti0.1W0.9C nanoparticles coated with Pt or bimetallic PtRu monolayers exhibited enhanced re
  
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• [Report] Rewritable artificial magnetic charge ice

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Artificial ices enable the study of geometrical frustration by design and through direct observation. However, it has proven difficult to achieve tailored long-range ordering of their diverse configurations, limiting both fundamental and applied research directions. We designed an artificial spin structure that produces a magnetic charge ice with tunable long-range ordering of eight different configurations. We also developed a technique to precisely manipulate the local magnetic charge states a
  
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• [Report] Quantifying the promotion of Cu catalysts by ZnO for methanol synthesis

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Promoter elements enhance the activity and selectivity of heterogeneous catalysts. Here, we show how methanol synthesis from synthesis gas over copper (Cu) nanoparticles is boosted by zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles. By combining surface area titration, electron microscopy, activity measurement, density functional theory calculations, and modeling, we show that the promotion is related to Zn atoms migrating in the Cu surface. The Zn coverage is quantitatively described as a function of the methan
  
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• [Report] ppGpp couples transcription to DNA repair in E. coli

  19-05-2016 21:20
  The small molecule alarmone (p)ppGpp mediates bacterial adaptation to nutrient deprivation by altering the initiation properties of RNA polymerase (RNAP). ppGpp is generated in Escherichia coli by two related enzymes, RelA and SpoT. We show that ppGpp is robustly, but transiently, induced in response to DNA damage and is required for efficient nucleotide excision DNA repair (NER). This explains why relA-spoT-deficient cells are sensitive to diverse genotoxic agents and ultraviolet radiation, whe
  
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• [Report] Perching and takeoff of a robotic insect on overhangs using switchable electrostatic adhesion

  19-05-2016 21:20
  For aerial robots, maintaining a high vantage point for an extended time is crucial in many applications. However, available on-board power and mechanical fatigue constrain their flight time, especially for smaller, battery-powered aircraft. Perching on elevated structures is a biologically inspired approach to overcome these limitations. Previous perching robots have required specific material properties for the landing sites, such as surface asperities for spines, or ferromagnetism. We describ
  
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• [Report] HIV-1 therapy with monoclonal antibody 3BNC117 elicits host immune responses against HIV-1

  19-05-2016 21:20
  3BNC117 is a broad and potent neutralizing antibody to HIV-1 that targets the CD4 binding site on the viral envelope spike. When administered passively, this antibody can prevent infection in animal models and suppress viremia in HIV-1–infected individuals. Here we report that HIV-1 immunotherapy with a single injection of 3BNC117 affects host antibody responses in viremic individuals. In comparison to untreated controls that showed little change in their neutralizing activity over a 6-month p
  
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• [Report] Enhanced clearance of HIV-1–infected cells by broadly neutralizing antibodies against HIV-1 in vivo

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Antiretroviral drugs and antibodies limit HIV-1 infection by interfering with the viral life cycle. In addition, antibodies also have the potential to guide host immune effector cells to kill HIV-1–infected cells. Examination of the kinetics of HIV-1 suppression in infected individuals by passively administered 3BNC117, a broadly neutralizing antibody, suggested that the effects of the antibody are not limited to free viral clearance and blocking new infection but also include acceleration of
  
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• [Report] Coregulation of tandem duplicate genes slows evolution of subfunctionalization in mammals

  19-05-2016 21:20
  Gene duplication is a fundamental process in genome evolution. However, most young duplicates are degraded by loss-of-function mutations, and the factors that allow some duplicate pairs to survive long-term remain controversial. One class of models to explain duplicate retention invokes sub- or neofunctionalization, whereas others focus on sharing of gene dosage. RNA-sequencing data from 46 human and 26 mouse tissues indicate that subfunctionalization of expression evolves slowly and is rare amo
  
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