Phys.org news

For decades, the ability to visualize the chemical composition of materials, whether for diagnosing a disease, assessing food quality, or analyzing pollution, depended on large, expensive laboratory instruments called spectrometers. ...

Challenging long-held assumptions, Aarhus University researchers have demonstrated that the protein building blocks essential for life as we know it can form readily in space. This discovery, appearing in Nature Astronomy, ...

Pūkeko use sound elements to create calls and combine them to create complex call sequences in order to expand the range of options for expressing themselves—these are the findings of an international team including Konstanz ...

The ocean is continuously ventilated when surface waters sink and transport, for example, oxygen and carbon to greater depths. The efficiency of this process can be estimated using the so-called water age, which describes ...

A new analysis of air quality data from the past 70 years shows that Canada's record wildfire smoke in 2023 is part of a broader, continent-wide trend toward smokier skies across North America.

Light is a universal stimulus that influences all living things. Cycles of light and dark help set the biological clocks for organisms ranging from single-celled bacteria to human beings. Some bacteria use photosynthesis ...

A team of scientists announced Tuesday they have developed new deep-sea landers specifically to test their contentious discovery that metallic rocks at the bottom of the ocean are producing "dark oxygen".

Researchers in the lab of Asst. Prof. Chibueze Amanchukwu at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) have spent three years looking for failure, scouring the academic literature for ...

A hundred years ago, quantum mechanics was a radical theory that baffled even the brightest minds. Today, it's the backbone of technologies that shape our lives, from lasers and microchips to quantum computers and secure ...

"A plague is upon us'' may have been a common phrase in ancient Jordan, where countless people perished from a mysterious malady that would shape both a society and an era of civilization.

The interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS, was first discovered in July 2025, and made its closest approach to the sun (perihelion) in late October. New observations of 3I/ATLAS were taken in December from the SPHEREx observatory—a ...

Cuts in sulfur emissions from oceangoing vessels have been tied to a reduction in lightning stroke density along heavily trafficked shipping routes in the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea, according to new research from ...