Phys.org news

NASA begun fueling its moon rocket Wednesday for humanity's first lunar trip in more than half a century, aiming for an evening liftoff with four astronauts.

New research has discovered that the molecular machines responsible for copying our DNA have a surprising hidden talent—an ability to create entirely new and highly sophisticated DNA sequences from scratch. The study, led ...

It had been a long day of teaching for Rudy Lerosey-Aubril. As a reward, he returned to cleaning an intriguing Cambrian arthropod fossil he had recently received for review. At first, the specimen showed all the expected ...

Findings from the Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) program—a collaborative effort involving 865 researchers—have been published in Nature as a collection of three papers alongside a release of ...

Farmers, gardeners, and botanists have long observed that plant diseases tend to flare up during periods of high humidity, particularly after rainfall. Humid conditions help bacteria enter plant leaves, and once inside, certain ...

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 ...

Using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), Chinese astronomers have explored the behavior of a rotating radio transient (RRAT) known as RRAT J1574+4703. The new observations found that this object ...

Magicians often talk while performing their acts, using a type of speech called "patter." This can include scripted dialog, storytelling, and interactions, and is often used to entertain and manage audiences, with many people—including ...

Using high-intensity lasers, researchers have taken an important step toward miniaturization of particle accelerators by demonstrating free-electron laser amplification at extreme ultraviolet wavelengths (27–50 nm), with ...

A review finds that antibiotic resistance genes—capable of undermining modern medicine—can travel through the air across both cities and farmland, and argues that airborne spread represents an overlooked public health risk.

In a first-of-its-kind study, a team of researchers led by geoscientist Michael Rawlins at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has shown in fine-grained detail what happens when Arctic permafrost thaws. Focusing on a ...

Saturn's magnetic shield is asymmetrical compared to Earth's, suggests a new study involving University College London (UCL) researchers, and this is likely a result of its fast rotation coupled with the heavy material it ...