Vly News - Professional news Platform

The graph shows the mechanism of Nepenthes gracilis. Credit: Anne-Kristin Lenzo Scientists at the University of Bristol have discovered the deadly workings of carnivorous plants. In the steamy jungles of Borneo, plants have developed innumerable tricks to help them survive and beat their neighbors. The Slender Pitcher Plant, Nepenthes gracilis, is one of the most ingenious: Its cup-shaped leaves are equipped with a hanging canopy-like cap that turns into a deadly stepping stone for ants when hit by falling raindrops. His findings, published today in Biology Letters revealing for the first time how the shut-off spring works. The team was surprised to find that instead of bending the lid on its own or in the narrow constriction between the jug’s cup and the lid, the spring was located far behind the wall of the tubular jug. The off-center location on the back of the tube has two effects. The Slender Pitcher Plant catc

A group of researchers have succeeded in converting methane to methanol using a light, dispersed transition metal such as copper in a process known as photooxidation. According to an article reporting on research published in Chemical Communications, the reaction is the best obtained to date for the conversion of methane gas to liquid fuel under ambient temperature and pressure conditions (25 °C and 1 bar, respectively). The term bar as a unit of pressure comes from the Greek word for weight (baros). One bar is equivalent to 100,000 Pascals (100 kPa), which is very close to the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level (101,325 Pa). The results of this study are an important step in making natural gas available as an energy source for the production of alternative fuels other than gasoline and diesel. Although natural gas is considered a fossil fuel, its conversion to methanol produces less carbon dioxide (CO2) than other liquid fuels in the same category. In Brazil, methanol plays

AI learns how to recognize and classify different dog breeds from images. A new machine learning method from CZ Biohub now makes it possible to classify and compare different human proteins from fluorescence microscopy images. Credit: CZ Biohub Humans are good at looking at pictures and finding patterns or making comparisons. Take a look at a collection of dog photos, for example, and you can sort them by color, ear size, face shape, and so on. But can you compare them quantitatively? And perhaps more interestingly, can machines extract meaningful information from images that humans cannot? Now Stanford University’s Chan Zuckerberg Biohub team of scientists have developed a machine learning method to quantitatively analyze and compare images—in this case microscopic images of proteins—without any prior knowledge. As reported in Natural Method , their algorithm, dubbed “cytoself”, provides rich and detailed information about the loc

The reason your weekly grocery store is becoming so much more expensive has been revealed because the cost of living crisis continues to hit shoppers at the checkout. The weekly staple, which saw its biggest price increase in a year, was mentioned in the data behind this week’s announcement that inflation was at its highest level in two decades. Vegetables, fruit, breakfast cereals, breads, eggs, oil, butter and margarine all spiked in price last year according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Smile and hold on: The reason your weekly grocery store is getting so much more expensive has been revealed as the cost of living crisis continues to hit shoppers at checkout The opposite graph has depicted an alarming rise in the cost of basic foodstuffs, with vegetables, cereals and other household staples topping the list of sharp price increases. The ABS released its quarterly Consumer Price Index (CPI) figures – a key measure of inflation – on Wednesday morning, show

Cosmic rays consisting of electrically charged particles of high energy are constantly bombarding the Earth’s atmosphere. These particles come from deep space, they have traveled billions of light years. However, where did they come from? What shot them through the Universe with such incredible power? These questions have been one of the most significant challenges of astrophysics for more than a century. An international team of researchers led by the University of Würzburg and the University of Geneva (UNIGE) sheds light on one aspect of this mystery: neutrinos are thought to have been born in a blazar, the core of a galaxy that is fed by a supermassive black hole. Sara Buson has always considered it a significant task. In 2017, researchers and their colleagues introduced blazar (TXS 0506+056) as a potential neutrino source for the first time. The study sparked a scientific debate about whether there really is a link between blazars and high-energy neutrinos. After taking this

A former Qantas baggage handler has exposed the chaos behind the scenes as the airline struggles to save its sinking reputation with travelers experiencing long delays and flight cancellations. The man who chose not to be named claimed that after 1,800 baggage handlers were laid off during the Covid-19 period and work was outsourced to third-party contractors, baggage was left in rooms for weeks and even planes broke down. “Yeah, when the pandemic hit, we got JobKeeper for a while and were given enforced redundancy,” he told Nine’s Today Show. ‘Many men don’t want to go. Many older men with more than 35, 30 years experience, they don’t know how to apply for jobs online. So it affects older people. An unnamed former Qantas baggage handler said the airline had suffered since it fired its experienced ground crew and replaced them with inexperienced contract workers. The former Qantas employee said morale plummeted after experienced baggage handlers were let go and performanc