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Deep public divisions over climate change are unrelated to differences in how well ordinary citizens understand scientific evidence on global warming. Indeed, members of the public who score the highest on a climate-science literacy test are the most politically polarized on whether human activity is causing global temperatures to rise.

Small wireless computing devices, ranging from the size of a matchbox to the size of a dime are going to change the way Florida monitors its water quality, sea level rise, hurricanes, agriculture, aquaculture, and even its aging senior population. The types of sensing devices developed by computer scientist Jason Hallstrom, Ph.D., who recently joined Florida Atlantic University, can collect information about the surrounding environment and transmit that information to cloud-based computing systems that store, analyze and present that information to educators, researchers and decision-makers.

Commercially available hydrocarbons were used as templates to synthesize uniform nanographene sheets using a series of sheet extending agents and a new transition metal catalyst, which were developed by Kyohei Ozaki, Katsuaki Kawasumi, Mari Shibata, Hideto Ito, and Professor Kenichiro Itami at Nagoya University’s Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules (ITbM) and of the JST-ERATO Itami Molecular Nanocarbon Project. Nanographenes, which are nanometer-sized graphenes, possess good semiconducting properties making them highly promising materials for the next generation of organic electronic devices.

In the first experimental use of algorithms that employ structure-based molecular modeling to optimize deimmunized drug candidates, Karl Griswold, PhD, and co-investigator Christopher Bailey-Kellogg, PhD of Dartmouth College complement their prior sequence-based deimmunizing algorithms and expand the tool kit of protein engineering technologies to use in next generation drug development.

(Phys.org)—A team of researches affiliated with several institutions in Japan has conducted research into the cellular structure of tight junctions in the small intestine, and has made progress in better understanding their construction, possibly helping to pave the way towards creating drugs that would be better equipped to make their way into the bloodstream. In their paper published in the journal Science, the team describes their research and findings and what they believe must be done next

Some of the most prized violins in the world were crafted in the Italian workshops of Amati, Stradivari, and Guarneri—master violinmaking families from the 17th and 18th centuries who produced increasingly powerful instruments in the renaissance and baroque musical eras. These violins, worth millions of dollars today, represent the Cremonese period—what is now considered the golden age of violinmaking.

The second law of thermodynamics tells us that all systems evolve toward a state of maximum entropy, wherein all energy is dissipated as heat, and no available energy remains to do work. Since the mid-20th century, research has pointed to an extension of the second law for nonequilibrium systems: the Maximum Entropy Production Principle (MEPP) states that a system away from equilibrium evolves in such a way as to maximize entropy production, given present constraints.

In the 16th century, during its conquest of South America, the Spanish Empire forced countless Incas to work extracting silver from the mountaintop mines of Potosí, in what is now Bolivia—then the largest source of silver in the world. The Inca already knew how to refine silver, but in 1572 the Spanish introduced a new technology that boosted production many times over and sent thick clouds of lead dust rising over the Andes for the first time in history.

The microbes that call the New York City subway system home are mostly harmless, but include samples of disease-causing bacteria that are resistant to drugs—and even DNA fragments associated with anthrax and Bubonic plague—according to a citywide microbiome map published today by Weill Cornell Medical College investigators.

Space travel is difficult and expensive – it would cost thousands of dollars to launch a bottle of water to the moon. The recent discovery of hydrogen-bearing molecules, possibly including water, on the moon has explorers excited because these deposits could be mined if they are sufficiently abundant, sparing the considerable expense of bringing water from Earth