Phys.org news

Billions of alkaline-loving microbes could offer a new way to protect nuclear waste buried deep underground. This approach overcomes the limitations of current cement barriers, which can crack or break down over time.

Neutron stars are ultra-dense star remnants made up primarily of nucleons (i.e., protons and neutrons). Over the course of millions of years, these stars progressively cool down, radiating heat into space.

A new study from UNC-Chapel Hill researchers shows that advanced artificial intelligence tools, specifically large language models (LLMs), can accurately determine the locations where plant specimens were originally collected, ...

A fossil only tells part of the story. When an animal's body is preserved as a fossil, there are often pieces missing, and even a perfectly preserved body doesn't tell the whole story of how that animal behaved, how it lived, ...

In the canopies of a South American rainforest, a tiny soldier termite has stunned a team of international scientists with its whale-like features.

Using NASA's Swift and Fermi space telescopes, Indian astronomers have conducted a long-term multiwavelength study of a nearby blazar designated TXS 0518+211. Results of the study, published Nov. 26 on the arXiv pre-print ...

Why does plastic turn brittle and paint fade when exposed to the sun for long periods? Scientists have long known that such organic photodegradation occurs due to the sun's energy generating free radicals: molecules that ...

A team from the Faculty of Physics and the Center for Quantum Optical Technologies at the Center of New Technologies, University of Warsaw has developed a new method for measuring elusive terahertz signals using a "quantum ...

The carbon cycle in our oceans is critical to the balance of life in ocean waters and for reducing carbon in the atmosphere, a significant process to curbing climate change or global warming.

The copper isotope Cu-64 plays an important role in medicine: It is used in imaging processes and also shows potential for cancer therapy. However, it does not occur naturally and must be produced artificially—a complex ...

A new study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam shows how gravitational waves from black holes can be used to reveal the presence of dark matter and help determine its properties. The key is a new model, based on ...

The microbe Pyrodictium abyssi is an archaeon—a member of what's known as the third domain of life—and an extremophile. It lives in deep-sea thermal vents, at temperatures above the boiling point of water, without light ...