Phys.org news

Butterfly fossils are rare, and finds that preserve fine anatomical details and wing patterns are an absolute exception. An international research team from Sweden, the U.S., and Germany, led by Dr. Hossein Rajaei, lepidopterist ...

A 2,000-year-old papyrus fragment, discovered in the archives of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo, reveals 30 previously unpublished verses by Empedocles, a pre-Socratic philosopher of the fifth century ...

Reducing aircraft soot emissions may not reduce contrail clouds, according to in-flight observations of emissions from a passenger jet with modern "lean-burn" engines, reported in Nature. Contrails from aircraft contribute ...

In 2024, NASA's Perseverance rover found surprising levels of Nickel in the Martian bedrock of an ancient river channel, called Neretva Vallis, which flowed into the Jezero crater. A new study, published in Nature Communications, ...

In the search to replace antibiotic growth promoters with effective alternatives in modern swine production, plant-based essential oils are showing potential to provide lasting benefits. In a rare long-term public study that ...

A growing network of meltwater lakes at the edge of the Greenland ice sheet is accelerating the flow of major glaciers, potentially increasing the pace of global sea-level rise. Warmer air and sea temperatures have led to ...

Heterogeneous catalysis—in which catalysts and reactants are of different phases, e.g., solid and gas—is important to many industrial processes and often involves solid metal as the catalyst. Ammonia synthesis, catalytic ...

Historical observations from an observatory in Germany have now independently verified evidence for brief, mysterious flashes of light in the night sky, first picked up by an American astronomical survey in the 1950s. Through ...

An international team led by Monash University has uncovered evidence of a rare form of exploding star, helping to shed light on one of the most cataclysmic events in the universe. At the end of their lives, most massive ...

Rivers are rarely the calm, orderly streams we imagine on maps. Over time, their winding paths—called meanders—shift, bend, and occasionally snap off in sudden "cutoff" events that shorten loops and reshape the landscape. ...

AI language models, used to generate human-like text to power chatbots and create content, are also revolutionizing biology by treating complex biological data like a language. Language models are increasingly used, for example, ...

The Syrian civil war, which began in 2011, caused widespread population displacement and infrastructure damage. However, it has also led to an unintended environmental effect with notable changes in the country's landscape, ...