Abra Science

 Floods, droughts, and other water-related disasters are some of the costliest natural events that occur in Canada and around the world. Even with significant global advances in science and infrastructure designed to predict and manage such extreme disasters, many communities still face major societal and economic impacts when these events occur. In a new paper published in Nature, a team of University of Saskatchewan (USask) and international researchers presented their findings from a global investigation to determine gaps in science and policy that require reinforcement to better protect the world from droughts and floods. "Our flood and drought risk management paradigms are still based on the assumption that the past is representative of the future," said Dr. Saman Razav, Ph.D., an associate professor in USask's School of Environment and Sustainability, the Global Institute for Water Security (GIWS), and the College of Engineering in the department of civil, geologica...

 In underwater acoustics, deep learning is gaining traction in improving sonar systems to detect ships and submarines in distress or in restricted waters. However, noise interference from the complex marine environment becomes a challenge when attempting to detect targeted ship-radiated sounds. ABNN’s gradual focus on specific line-spectrum features of a ship. CREDIT: Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences In The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, published by the Acoustical Society of America through AIP Publishing, researchers in China and the United States explore an attention-based deep neural network (ABNN) to tackle this problem. “We found the ABNN was highly accurate in target recognition, exceeding a conventional deep neural network, particularly when using limited single-target data to detect multiple targets,” co-author Qunyan Ren said. Deep learning is a machine-learning method that uses artificial neural networks inspired by the human bra...

  An image of Neptune from Voyager 2. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Deep inside Neptune and Uranus, temperatures and pressures are extreme enough to produce superionic water—a phase in which oxygen ions crystallize while highly mobile hydrogen ions float through interstitial spaces. Information about superionic water’s phase behavior would help planetary scientists model and understand the ice giants’ evolution, structure, and unusual magnetic fields. Theoretical and computational studies of superionic water’s structure and stability have supplemented scarce experimental data—the phase was observed for the first time in 2019. But those have yielded limited, and sometimes contradictory, results. Now Bingqing Cheng at the University of Cambridge and her collaborators have made predictions about superionic water’s lattice structure at planetary conditions by simulating the material using machine-learning potentials (MLPs) and an artificial neural-network architecture. Molecular-dyn...

The pandemic-related drop in greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 was likely the largest on record in a single year, but how our recovery might affect future emissions is less clear. New modeling examines alternative scenarios and how they could impact climate mitigation targets. A group of IIASA researchers in the Energy, Climate, and Environment Program performed a bottom-up assessment of changes in energy-related demand and estimated how new patterns of travel, work, consumption, and production might reduce or increase climate mitigation challenges. "Many people have been wondering what the large changes in societies that came with the COVID-19 pandemic and its lockdowns mean for climate change," says Jarmo Kikstra, lead author of the study. "If societies are just moving back to old practices, the answer is that there is virtually no effect. However, if some of the changes in energy-use practices persist, climate mitigation challenges will be affected." The r...

  Artist’s illustration of hydrodynamical behavior from an interacting ensemble of quantum spin defects in diamond. Credit: Norman Yao/Berkeley Lab In 1998, researchers including Mark Kubinec of UC Berkeley performed one of the first simple quantum computations using individual molecules. They used pulses of radio waves to flip the spins of two nuclei in a molecule, with each spin's "up" or "down" orientation storing information in the way that a "0" or "1" state stores information in a classical data bit. In those early days of quantum computers, the combined orientation of the two nuclei that is, the molecule's quantum state could only be preserved for brief periods in specially tuned environments. In other words, the system quickly lost its coherence. Control over quantum coherence is the missing step to building scalable quantum computers. Now, researchers are developing new pathways to create and protect quantum coherence. Do...

  Disordered carbon anodes for Na-ion batteries quo vadis? Credit: Science China Press Na-ion batteries (NIBs) are gradually attracting much attention as an alternative to lead-acid batteries and supplement to Li-ion batteries (LIBs) owing to the abundant Na resources and excellent cost-effectiveness. Since the most commonly used graphite as an anode material in LIBs cannot be inherently used in NIBs, tremendous efforts have been made to advance the fundamental understanding and design of suitable anode materials for NIBs, including the improvement of Na storage capacity and the study on Na storage mechanisms. According to all these studies, disordered carbons are now the most promising anode candidates for NIBs. Nevertheless, there are still many challenges need to be addressed, and the further exploration of disordered carbon anodes is very important in the future. Recently, Prof. Yong-Sheng Hu and Prof. Yaxiang Lu from Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences sy...

 Fraudulent practices in food production, especially false claims of geographical origin, cause billions of dollars in economic damage every year. Botanists at the University of Basel have now developed a model that can be used to determine the origin of food in an efficient and low-cost manner. Strawberries from Switzerland or olive oil from Italy can be sold at much higher prices than the same products from other countries. Both the authorities and the food industry spend a great deal of time fighting false declarations of geographical origin that are assumed to cause an estimated USD 30 million to 40 billion a year in economic damage. One method for detecting food fraud is to determine the δ18O (delta-O-18) value of a product sample, which characterizes the oxygen isotope ratio. Until now, this procedure has been highly time consuming and costly. A case of suspected fraud involved not only collecting reference data from the claimed country of origin, but also comparative data fr...

  A recent study led by Dr. Wei and Dr. Qiao from the First Institute of Oceanography, Ministry of Natural Resources provides an evaluation of the performance of the newly released CMIP6 models in simulating the global warming slowdown observed in the early 2000s. This study reveals that the key in simulating and predicting near-term temperate change is to correctly separate and simulate the two distinct signals, i.e., the human-induced long-term warming trend and natural variabilities, especially those at interannual, interdecadal, and multidecadal scales. This work was online published in Science China Earth Sciences. After the unprecedented warming over the last quarter of the 20th century, the global surface temperature growth slowed unexpectedly during 1998-2013 despite the sharp increase in greenhouse gas emissions; this phenomenon is termed the global warming hiatus or slowdown to be more precise. The global warming slowdown challenges the existing scientific underst...

  Molecular motion image. Credit: University of Nottingham New research has shown how a synthetic self-made fibers can guide molecular movement that can be fuelled by light over long distances, a discovery that could pave the way for new ways to use light as a source of sustainable energy. Researchers from the University of Nottingham have for the first time used a path of assembled molecules liquids that traveling molecules can be propelled along by light. The research 'Light-controlled micron-scale molecular motion' has been published today in Nature Chemistry.  Professor David Amabilino from the School of Chemistry at the University of Nottingham is one of the lead researchers, he explains: "In living organisms, molecular motors travel along specific molecular paths, it is an essential part of cell function. We have shown that a synthetic self-made molecular fiber in a liquid behaves like a path for the movement of a molecular traveler over a distance 10,000 tim...

  A quasar – the most luminous persistent source of light in the universe. Credit: NASA A discovery that provides new insight into how galaxies evolve. At the center of galaxies, like our own Milky Way, lie massive black holes surrounded by spinning gas. Some shine brightly, with a continuous supply of fuel, while others go dormant for millions of years, only to reawaken with a serendipitous influx of gas. It remains largely a mystery how gas flows across the universe to feed these massive black holes. University of Connecticut Assistant Professor of Physics Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, lead author on a paper published recently in The Astrophysical Journal, addresses some of the questions surrounding these massive and enigmatic features of the universe by using new, high-powered simulations. “Supermassive black holes play a key role in galaxy evolution and we are trying to understand how they grow at the centers of galaxies,” says Anglés-Alcázar. “This is very important not just ...

  William Shatner (pictured September 2017), who played Captain James T. Kirk in the cult classic TV series "Star Trek," is set to become the first member of the iconic show's cast to journey to the final frontier as a guest aboard a Blue Origin rocket. Blue Origin announced Sunday it was delaying an upcoming flight set to carry actor William Shatner to space due to anticipated winds. Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk in the cult classic TV series "Star Trek," is due to become the first member of the iconic show's cast to journey to the final frontier as a guest aboard a Blue Origin suborbital rocket. His history-making flight was scheduled for October 12. But "due to forecasted winds on Tuesday, October 12, Blue Origin's mission operations team has made the decision to delay the launch of NS-18 and is now targeting Wednesday, October 13," a spokeswoman said in a statement. The new flight is scheduled for 8:30 am (1330 GMT). Sha...

Many contrarians dispute that cosmic inflation occurred. The evidence says otherwise The expanding Universe, full of galaxies and the complex structure we observe today, arose from a smaller, hotter, denser, more uniform state. But even that initial state had its origins, with cosmic inflation as the leading candidate for where that all came from. (Credit: C.-A. Faucher-Giguere, A. Lidz, and L. Hernquist, Science, 2008) KEY TAKEAWAYS Studying the Big Bang tells us how our universe evolved to become this way, but it doesn't immediately reveal why the Big Bang occurred or what might have preceded it. Theoretically and observationally, the evidence for cosmic inflation preceding and setting up the Big Bang is incredibly strong and comprehensive. There are still some new, sensitive things to measure, but the lack of low-hanging fruit doesn't mean the tree is dead. For as long as humans have been around, our innate curiosity has compelled us to ask questions about the universe. Why ...