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That drought is set to worsen with a fifth consecutive failed rainy season, the WMO projected on Friday, fearing an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.

Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia are already going through their worst drought for 40 years.

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When our eyes move during REM sleep, we’re looking at things in the dream world our brains have created, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The findings shed light not only on how we dream, but also on how our imaginations work.

REM sleep, which is named for the rapid eye movements associated with it, has been known since the 1950s to be the phase of sleep when dreams occur. But the purpose of the eye movements has remained a matter of much mystery and debate.

REM sleep first occurs about 90 minutes after falling asleep. Your eyes rapidly move from side to side behind closed eyelids. Mixed frequency brain wave activity becomes closer to that seen in wakefulness. Your breathing becomes faster and irregular, and your heart rate and blood pressure increase to near waking levels. Although some can also occur in non-REM sleep, most of your dreaming occurs during REM sleep. Your arm and leg muscles become temporarily paralyzed, which prevents you from acting out your dreams. You sleep less of your time in REM sleep as you age.

Meyer Burger has signed a binding supply agreement for silicon wafers with the Norwegian manufacturer Norwegian Crystals. The polysilicon used to manufacture the wafers is of European and U.S. origin.

“This makes agri-PV systems increasingly attractive for agriculture, because it provides a way to keep domestic agriculture competitive with the international market and to enable farmers to earn additional income,” explains Max Trommsdorff, project manager at Fraunhofer ISE. “At the same time, we can drive the expansion of renewable energies, reduce pressure on scarce land and increase resilience to weather extremes and climate change in different farming systems.”

Nevertheless, only a few projects have been realised so far. Those involved in the project see one of the crucial hurdles in the existing legal framework. These include inadequate incentive systems and comparatively complex approval processes. In addition, there are growing concerns about the acceptance of the local population and the attractiveness of the landscape.

Such economic, legal and social hurdles are to be compiled within the framework of the project. Subsequently, the participants want to work out proposals for solutions on how to reduce and overcome these hurdles. The focus should be on the optimal use of the potentials and the avoidance of wrong decisions in the application of agriphotovoltaics.

Unnecessary Playing with nature.

The stem-cell-derived embryos could shed new light on the earliest stages of human pregnancy.

The most massive star known by astronomers is truly of gargantuan proportions. Dubbed R136a1, this is the most massive and luminous star ever discovered in the cosmos. Additionally, it belongs to the Large Magellanic Cloud and is one of the hottest stars out there, and it is very, very different than our Sun.

Astronomers have obtained the sharpest image ever of star R136a1, the most massive known star in the Universe, with the 8.1-meter Gemini South telescope in Chile, part of the International Gemini Observatory operated by NSF’s NOIRLab. Researchers at NOIRLab, led by Venu Kalari, challenge our understanding of the most massive stars and suggest their mass may be lower than previously believed.

The formation of the biggest stars – those with 100 times the mass of the Sun – is still a mystery to astronomers. Observing these giants, which normally reside within dust-shrouded star clusters, is challenging. A giant star’s fuel reserves are depleted in less than a million years. Compared with our Sun, which has a lifespan of about 10 billion years, ours is less than halfway through. Individual massive stars in clusters are difficult to distinguish due to their densely packed nature, short lifetimes, and vast astronomical distances.

A new technique makes it possible to capture videos of single atoms “swimming” at the interface between a solid and a liquid for the first time. The approach uses stacks of two-dimensional materials to trap the liquid, making it compatible with characterization techniques that usually require vacuum conditions. It could enable researchers to better understand how atoms behave at these interfaces, which play a crucial role in devices such as batteries, catalytic systems and separation membranes.

Several techniques exist to image single atoms, including scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). However, they involve exposing atoms on the surface of the sample to a high-vacuum environment, which can change the material’s structure. Techniques that do not require a vacuum, meanwhile, are either lower-resolution or only work for short time periods, meaning that the atoms’ motion cannot be captured on video.

Researchers led by materials scientists Sarah Haigh of the University of Manchester’s National Graphene Institute (NGI) have now developed a new approach that enables them to track the motion of single atoms on a surface when that surface is surrounded by liquid. They showed that the atoms behave very differently under these circumstances than they do in vacuum. “This is crucial,” explains Haigh, “since we want to understand atomic behaviour for realistic reaction/environmental conditions that the material will experience in use – for example, in a battery, supercapacitor and membrane reaction vessels.”

Researchers have developed a new type of high-efficiency photodetector inspired by the photosynthetic complexes plants use to turn sunlight into energy. Photodetectors are used in cameras, optical communication systems and many other applications to turn photons into electrical signals.

Researchers developed a new type of high-efficiency photodetector that is similar to the photosynthetic complexes plants use to turn sunlight into energy. The new design integrates a simple organic detector into the propagation region to produce efficient polariton-to-charge conversion over distances of up to 100 microns. (Image: Bin Liu, University of Michigan)

“Our devices combine long-range transport of optical energy with long-range conversion to electrical current,” said research team leader Stephen Forrest from the University of Michigan. “This arrangement, analogous to what is seen in plants, has the potential to greatly enhance the power generation efficiency of solar cells, which use devices similar to photodetectors to convert sunlight into energy.”