Science

In the course of research scientists have modelled two railway routes in Britain, namely “Preston – Lancaster” and “Glasgow – Edinburgh”, on which up to 50 thousand rail circuits are used to control the free or occupied state of sections in certain places, as well as to transmit signals to the locomotive from track devices and directly between them.

Thus, the researchers found that during the period when geomagnetic storms occur, geomagnetically induced currents cause electrical disturbances in rail circuits, which play a key role in ensuring the safety of railway traffic.

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A series of previously unknown Nazca geoglyphs were discovered by Japanese scientists with the help of artificial intelligence. However, their purpose remains unclear.

Before that, many experts assumed that the mysterious images were addressed to gods, aliens or simply advanced Earth civilisations. The geoglyphs were discovered from an aeroplane flying over the desert.

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Researchers from the Swedish University of Gothenburg told in a publication in PLoS One that the results of a study of the remains of medieval Scandinavians found in the necropolis at Varnheim Monastery showed that almost 50 per cent of them had at least one carious lesion, which in addition could be found only in adults.

For their study, the Swedish experts selected the remains of 171 people with fully or partially preserved dentition. Most of them, 133 individuals, had permanent teeth. The average age of the deceased was about 35 years.

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It is noted that the researchers made a breakthrough by synthesising from precursors of nitrogen and carbon the so-called carbon nitrides, which are stronger than cubic boron nitride, considered the second hardest material on the planet after diamonds. The researchers admit that after discovering the first-of-its-kind carbon nitride material, they could not believe that they had succeeded in creating a material that the scientific community had been dreaming of for decades.

Although researchers were able to discern the potential of carbon nitride back in the 1980s, including its high thermal stability, it was not possible to create it. Moreover, there has been no proper study on the synthesis of this material until now.

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It is noted that all of the new species are considered “ghost spiders” belonging to the genus Otoniela. Prior to the new discovery, only two species belonged to this genus, namely the Peruvian and Brazilian Otoniela adisi and Otoniela quadrivittata, which can be found in Venezuela and Argentina.

The number of species belonging to the genus has now tripled as researchers analysed archival data on spiders, finding that they had discovered not one but six new species of arachnids. All of them were found in South America

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