Researchers from Institute of Biology and Ecology in cooperation with Institute of Parasitology of Slovak Academy of Sciences and University of South Carolina published article in prestigious journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. They found out that green lizard (Lacerta viridis) plays reservoir role and castor bean tick (Ixodes ricinus) vector role for recently newly described bacteria from the genus Cryptoplasma, closely related to Anaplasma phagocytophilum, which causes disease in humans and animals. It represents the first finding of genus Cryptoplasma in Slovakia, or Europe in general and the first finding in host animals – lizards. Cryptoplasma was till now found only in Ixodes pacificus ticks in California, USA.
Contact: Viktória Majláthová (viktoria.majlathova@upjs.sk)
Workers from the ÚCHV with collaboration Department of material research SAV published the article in prestige journal Applied Surface Science (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169433217318044). They studied metal nanocavities (Ni/Ag) structures for the application in surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy. Prepared nanostructured surfaces display excellent enhancement of analytical signal with enhancement factor 1010 and great sensitivity. Potential application area of these surfaces is sensorics.
Contact: Andrej Oriňak (andrej.orinak@upjs.sk)
Flysch Belt represents a characteristic arc along the outer periphery of the Western Carpathians. It consists of sedimentary rocks deposited during the Mesozoic to Tertiary period in the deep-sea sedimentary basins, such as the Magura basin. The source areas, which supplied the sedimentary material, as thick as several kilometres, are still intensively discussed. Eocene (Tertiary) Makovica sandstones of the Magura Nappe were studied by researchers of the Institute of Geography, in collaboration with the Earth Science Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, the Geological Institute of Dionýz Štúr and the Polish Geological Institute. They published the findings in the established journal of Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. The unique aspect of the research is in the first U-Pb radiometric dating obtained from the detrital zircons indicates the Proterozoic to Variscan age (~ 2200–260 million years) of their parent rocks. Heavy-mineral analysis coupled with the palaeocurrent measurements (textural features on the surface of sedimentary rock layers occurred during the sedimentation) and the acquired age data locate the source regions outside the Carpathian domain, presumably in the Tisia microcontinent and Marmarosh massif, which are currently situated in the territory of Southern Hungary, Romania and Transcarpathian Ukraine.
Superconducting nanostructures
While studying superconductivity in polycrystalline boron doped diamond with hydrogen covered grains, researchers of the QMAGNA team observed the coexistence of ferromagnetism and superconductivity, two usually antagonistic phenomena. Moreover, they discovered the presence of localized Cooper pairs in isolated submicron sized diamond grains. These new results were published this year in two papers in a prestigious scientific journal [G. Zhang, T. Samuely et al., ACS Nano 11 5358 (2017) and G. Zhang, T. Samuely et al., ACS Nano 11 11746 (2017)] with impact factor 14.
https://www.natureindex.com/article/10.1021/acsnano.7b07148
Polycrystalline boron doped diamond with hydrogen covered grains is both ferromagnetic and superconducting at the same time.
In the polycrystalline boron doped diamond, a phase-coherent superconducting condensate is present. In isolated nanograins localized Cooper pairs were observed.
Contact (Tomáš Samuely, tomas.samuely@upjs.sk)
The graph theorists of Institute of Mathematics published, in cooperation with Technical University of Košice, the paper doi:10.7151/dmgt.2036 in quality Current Content-based journal Discussiones Mathematicae Graph Theory in which (motivated by similar previously known concepts of colourings which use the chromatic connectedness between vertices) they defined and described properties of a new edge colouring, so called conflict-free connection where every two vertices of a graph are connected by a path with the single occurrence of some colour. In their work, it was showed that determining the minimum number of colours used in conflict-free connection is easy for edge-2-connected graphs, but hard for graphs with cut-edges (for which they derived some necessary and some sufficient conditions for conflict-free 2-colourability); along with these results, there were studied the estimates of this chromatic invariant as well as the proper version of such edge colouring.
Researchers at the Institute of Computer Science and the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Harvard Medical School have identified a portion of the brain responsible for determining how far away a sound originates. They will help people with hearing impairment or other brain disorders.
Kopco N, Huang S, Belliveau JW, Raij T, Tengshe C, Ahveninen J (2012). Neuronal Representations of Distance in Human Auditory Cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA, 109 (27), 11019-11024.
