The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear the importance of understanding precisely how diseases spread throughout networks of transportation. In a paper publishing on Thursday in the IAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, Stephen Kirkland (University of Manitoba), Zhisheng Shuai (University of Central Florida), P. van den Driessche (University of Victoria), and Xueying Wang (Washington State University) study the way in which changes in a network of multiple interconnected communities impact the ensuing spread of disease.
Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Fathom Bristol used a hydraulic model to consider the degree to which human-caused climate change may have affected flooding in Houston in 2017 during Hurricane Harvey. Resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center were used to quantify the increase in Houston flood area and depth and to host a portal where other scientists and the public can access and explore the resulting data.
E-Mail
Researchers from Skoltech have designed and conducted experiments measuring gas permeability under various conditions for ice-containing sediments mimicking permafrost. Their results can be useful both in modeling and testing techniques for gas production from Arctic reservoirs and in tracing methane emission in high latitudes. The paper was published in the journal
Energy&Fuels.
Permafrost, even though it sounds very stable and permanent, is actually quite diverse: depending on the composition of the frozen ground, pressure, temperature and so on, it can have varying properties, which are extremely important if you want to build something on permafrost, such as an oil and gas field. Permafrost is also very gassy: it may contain a lot of natural gas in the form of hydrates, and its permeability is an important parameter both for research and for many activities in the Arctic.
Credit: IKBFU
X-rays are widely used to study the structures of various objects. New sources of x-rays, like Free Electron Lasers and 4th generation synchrotrons are being built around the Globe. The best optics for the new sources is usually made of the single crystal materials, such as silicon, germanium or diamond. However, the ideal periodicity of crystals leads to some unwanted diffraction losses - X-ray glitches. This effect causes dips in the intensity of the radiation transmitted through the optical element, down to zero. Scientists from the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University with foreign colleagues have developed a method that allows not only to predict the appearance of glitches but even to eliminate their influence on experiments.
Researchers from York University and the University of British Columbia have found social media use to be one of the factors related to the spread of COVID-19 within dozens of countries during the early stages of the pandemic.
The researchers say this finding resembles other examples of social media misinformation ranging from the initial phase of vaccine rollout to the 2021 Capitol riot in the United States.