Phys.org

A new study has shown that selective breeding can lead to a modest rise in coral heat tolerance.

Is there anywhere else in our solar system that could support life? An imposing NASA probe is due to lift off on Monday on a five-and-a-half-year journey to Europa, one of Jupiter's many moons, to take the first detailed step toward finding out.

More than 6,500 volunteers have supported the accurate identification of approximately 1,000 prehistoric burial mounds in the Netherlands in just four months, proving the value of involving volunteers in archaeology.

Researchers have unveiled a novel approach to tackle obesity by targeting fat absorption in the small intestine. The cutting-edge nanoparticle system, engineered to deliver therapeutic molecules directly to the digestive tract, has shown significant potential to prevent diet-induced obesity. The wor...

From brighter TV screens to better medical diagnostics and more efficient solar panels, new Curtin-led research has discovered how to make more molecules stick to the surface of tiny nanocrystals, in a breakthrough that could lead to improvements in everyday technology.

SpaceX successfully "caught" the first-stage booster of its Starship megarocket Sunday as it returned to the launch pad after a test flight, a world first in the company's quest for rapid reusability.

Female crested gibbons display jerky, almost geometric patterns of movement. Researchers from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU), Oslo in Norway and Paris have studied these conspicuous movements, which are comparable to human dances.

A team of geologists, life scientists and biologists affiliated with several institutions in China has found one of the earliest examples of a winged seed in a mine in Anhui Province. Their paper is published in the journal eLife.

Researchers at Freie Universität Berlin, University of Maryland and NIST, Google AI, and Abu Dhabi set out to robustly estimate the free Hamiltonian parameters of bosonic excitations in a superconducting quantum simulator. The protocols they developed, outlined in a paper pre-published on arXiv, cou...

Based on the data from the Magellan-Clay telescope in Chile, astronomers have performed a chemo-dynamical study of a very metal-poor star known as HE 2315−4240. Results of the study, published on the preprint server arXiv, yield important insights into the nature of this star.

According to highly cited conventional models, cooling and a major drop in sea levels about 34 million years ago should have led to widespread continental erosion and deposited gargantuan amounts of sandy material onto the ocean floor. This was, after all, one of the most drastic climate transitions...

The word laser usually conjures up an image of a strongly concentrated and continuous light beam. Lasers that produce such light are, in fact, very common and useful. However, science and industry often also require very short and strong pulses of laser light.

A team of engineers, physicists and quantum specialists at Google Research has found that reducing noise to a certain level allows the company's sycamore quantum chip to beat classical computers running random circuit sampling (RCS).

The moon's impact on our planet, culture, and society goes beyond just affecting tides. Recent research by Texas A&M University, published in the journal Transportation Research Part D, indicates a 45.8% increase in wildlife vehicle collisions during a full moon.

Utilizing advanced artificial intelligence and citizen science data from the iNaturalist app, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed some of the most detailed maps yet showcasing the distribution of California plant species.

This week, astronomers considered whether dark energy varies over cosmic timescales. Via neutron analysis, physicists revealed that some Early Iron Age swords were altered recently by swindlers in order to be more historically exciting. And a professor in New Jersey solved two fundamental problems t...

Snails on a tiny rocky islet evolved before scientists' eyes. The marine snails were reintroduced after a toxic algal bloom wiped them out from the skerry. While the researchers intentionally brought in a distinct population of the same snail species, these evolved to strikingly resemble the populat...

When lightning strikes, the electrons come pouring down. In a new study, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, led by an undergraduate student, have discovered a novel connection between weather on Earth and space weather. The team utilized satellite data to reveal that lightning storms...

Plastic pollution is everywhere. Each year, over 368 million metric tons of plastics are produced with over 13 million metric tons of it ending up in the soil where it can be toxic to wildlife.

In physics, a system composed of two substances can be modeled in accordance with classical mixture theory, which considers the fraction corresponding to each constituent and the interactions among constituents. Examples include the coexistence of high- and low-density phases in supercooled water, a...

In 1898, two male lions terrorized an encampment of bridge builders on the Tsavo River in Kenya. The lions, which were massive and maneless, crept into the camp at night, raided the tents and dragged off their victims. The infamous Tsavo "man-eaters" killed at least 28 people before Lt. Col. John He...

UC Santa Barbara researchers have achieved the first-ever "movie" of electric charges traveling across the interface of two different semiconductor materials. Using scanning ultrafast electron (SUEM) techniques developed in the Bolin Liao lab, the research team has directly visualized the fleeting p...

From designing new drug candidates in medicine to drafting new taxation policies in social sciences, the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) in scientific research are all around.

Once you know where to look for them, lichens are everywhere. These composite organisms—fungal and photosynthetic partners joined into a greater whole—can survive on a vast array of surfaces, from rocks and trees to bare ground and buildings. They are known from every continent, and almost certainly...

Mountain chickadees in Boulder have evolved a different tune to avoid getting mixed up with their cousins, according to a new CU Boulder-led study published Oct. 9 in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (MPIC) recently published a paper detailing their observations of a major coral bleaching and mortality event that occurred on the deep reefs of the Clipperton Atoll, a remote coral island in the Eastern Tropical Pacific. This bleaching, which ...

When something draws us in like a magnet, we take a closer look. When magnets draw in physicists, they take a quantum look. Scientists from Osaka Metropolitan University and the University of Tokyo have successfully used light to visualize tiny magnetic regions, known as magnetic domains, in a speci...

It might sound far-fetched, but recent research suggests that dogs' and humans' brains synchronize when they look at each other.

Fish taxies—refrigerated cargo vessels or reefers that function as mobile ports for fishing boats—are frequently described as weak links in the traceability of the seafood value chain. For the first time, research has identified the owners of all globally used reefers, the flags they use, and the fi...

When three massive objects meet in space, they influence each other through gravity in ways that evolve unpredictably. In a word: Chaos. That is the conventional understanding. Now, a researcher from the University of Copenhagen has discovered that such encounters often avoid chaos and instead follo...

There is a profound mystery in our sun. While the sun's surface temperature measures around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, its outer atmosphere, known as the solar corona, measures more like 2 million degrees Fahrenheit, about 200 times hotter.

Many people are aware that large earthquakes are often followed by a sequence of aftershocks as stresses are redistributed in the surrounding area. Many may not be aware that there are also sequences of earthquakes that occur before most large earthquakes.

In recent years, many physicists and materials scientists have been studying a newly uncovered class of magnetic materials known as altermagnets. These materials exhibit a unique type of magnetism that differs from both conventional ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism, marked by electrons whose sp...

Scientist Jim Wild has traveled to the Arctic Circle numerous times to study the northern lights, but on Thursday night he only needed to look out of his bedroom window in the English city of Lancaster.

Novel magnetic nanodiscs could provide a much less invasive way of stimulating parts of the brain, paving the way for stimulation therapies without implants or genetic modification, MIT researchers report.

Like so many organisms on the planet, when cells experience mosh-pit-level crowding, they may just become stressed. Yet unlike most other life forms, cells subject to physical stress from crowding by neighbors can find some relief by dramatically slowing their own growth—and in doing so form an eye-...

Researchers at LMU University Hospital have discovered a new molecular switch that protects against cell death.

A team led by physicists Steffen Sahl and Stefan Hell at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen and the MPI for Medical Research in Heidelberg has succeeded in measuring distances within biomolecules using a light microscope, down to 1 nanometer and with Ångström ...

A research team led by Professor Jaeheung Cho from the Department of Chemistry at UNIST has published a study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society reporting the reaction mechanism of cobalt(III)-based metal complexes with nitrile substances, paving the way for potential new drug developme...

A team of ecologists at the University of Coimbra, Aarhus University and the University of Bristol has found that approximately one-third of plant species in Europe are under threat of population reduction as the number of seed dispersals declines.