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Phys.org / A 65-year-old linguistics framework challenged by modern research
In a re-evaluation of Hockett's foundational features that have long dominated linguistic theory—concepts like "arbitrariness," "duality of patterning," and "displacement"—an international team of linguists and cognitive ...
Phys.org / Experimental proof shows quantum world is even stranger than previously thought
The quantum world is famously weird—a single particle can be in two places at once, its properties are undefined until they are measured, and the very act of measuring a quantum system changes everything. But according ...
Phys.org / Electric discharges detected on Mars for the first time
On Mars, winds constantly stir up whirlwinds of fine dust. It was at the center of two of these dust devils that the SuperCam instrument's microphone, the first ever to operate on Mars, accidentally recorded particularly ...
Phys.org / The collapse of Maya civilization: Drought doesn't explain everything
Between 750 and 900 CE, the population of the Maya lowlands in Central America experienced a major demographic and political decline which, according to the scientific literature, coincided with repeated episodes of intense ...
Phys.org / Plastic pollution is worsened by warming climate and must be stemmed, researchers warn
Climate change conditions turn plastics into more mobile, persistent, and hazardous pollutants. This is done by speeding up plastic breakdown into microplastics—microscopic fragments of plastic—spreading them considerable ...
Phys.org / 5 reasons the COP30 climate conference failed to deliver on its 'people's summit' promise
As the sun set on the Amazon, the promise of a "people's Cop" faded with it. The latest UN climate summit—known as Cop30, hosted in the Brazilian city of Belém—came with the usual geopolitics and the added excitement ...
Phys.org / Group 13 elements: The lucky number for sustainable redox agents?
Researchers from The University of Osaka created a reagent for important building-block molecules with an abundant main-group element, gallium. These early findings show that an organic gallium compound can display transition-metal-like ...
Phys.org / Entanglement-enhanced optical lattice clock achieves unprecedented precision
Optical lattice clocks are devices that measure the passing of time via the frequency of light that is absorbed or emitted by laser-cooled atoms trapped in a repeating pattern of light interference known as optical lattice.
Phys.org / Physicist delineates limits on the precision of quantum thermal machines
Quantum thermal machines are devices that leverage quantum mechanical effects to convert energy into useful work or cooling, similarly to traditional heat engines or refrigerators. Thermodynamics theory suggests that increasing ...
Medical Xpress / Prototype device restores lost smell by teaching the brain to feel odors
There is new hope for people who have lost their smell. Scientists have successfully tested a breakthrough device that lets people detect the presence of certain odors. This innovative system helps them "smell" again by translating ...
Phys.org / Astronomers capture an exceptional gamma-ray flare from a blazar
Astronomers have performed very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) observations of a gamma-ray loud blazar known as TXS 2013+370. The observations, posted November 19 on the arXiv preprint server, resulted in the detection ...
Tech Xplore / New insight into why LLMs are not great at cracking passwords
Large language models (LLMs), such as the model underpinning the functioning of OpenAI's conversational platform ChatGPT, have proved to perform well on various language-related and coding tasks. Some computer scientists ...
