Phys.org news

Phys.org / Methane emerges from interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it exits the solar system

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is now on its way out of our solar system, never to return. The comet was only the third-ever detected object to originate from outside our solar system. Traveling at high speeds, it looped around ...

1 hour ago
Phys.org / Baby Neanderthals may have had a rapid growth spurt compared to modern babies

Baby Neanderthals may have been much larger and grown much more quickly than their modern Homo sapiens counterparts, according to a new study of the most intact Neanderthal infant skeleton. Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) ...

5 hours ago
Phys.org / A newly recognized pollutant is widely present in the atmosphere

A new study shows that a specific type of silicone, the so-called methylsiloxanes, is widely present in the atmosphere across diverse environments. Also, concentrations appear to be much higher than expected. According to ...

1 hour ago
Phys.org / Webb's Little Red Dots may reveal how giant black holes formed soon after the Big Bang

The launch of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2021 pushed the horizon of seeing the early universe, unveiling cosmic events just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Among the most striking discoveries ...

1 hour ago
Phys.org / Monumental ship burial beneath ancient Norwegian mound predates the Viking Age

Monumental ship burials in Scandinavia may have started around a century earlier than previously thought, according to a paper published in the journal Antiquity. It reports the discovery of the remains of a 1,300-year-old ...

3 hours ago
Phys.org / Weighing in on the mystery of the gravitational constant

The time had come to open the envelope, but Stephan Schlamminger, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), wasn't sure he wanted to know the secret number that lay inside. For the past 10 ...

2 hours ago
Phys.org / Monkeys navigate a virtual forest with thought alone, pushing brain-computer interfaces beyond the lab

As a part of a study testing out a new type of implanted brain-computer interface (BCI), three rhesus monkeys controlled movements in a virtual reality (VR) world using only brain signals. The study, published in Science ...

7 hours ago
Phys.org / Relocating Venice among the options explored to protect the city against sea-level rise

Relocating the city of Venice is among four potential options—including movable barriers, ring dikes and closing the Venetian Lagoon—that could help it adapt to future sea-level rise over the next 200 years, according to ...

2 hours ago
Phys.org / Sex pheromone of a sandgrain-sized insect deciphered

Parasitic wasps of the genus Trichogramma are among the smallest insects in the world—yet they play an important role in natural ecosystems and agricultural landscapes as natural antagonists of pest species. Research teams ...

4 hours ago
Phys.org / How a new technique will help us mine rare-earth metals with plants

Researchers have developed a technique for detecting and measuring the concentration of many rare-earth elements in plants, without destroying the plant. The technique can be used to optimize "plant mining" efforts, in which ...

2 hours ago
Phys.org / Laser-plasma accelerator drives free-electron laser for record 8 hours

For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that a laser-plasma accelerator can reliably drive a free-electron laser for more than eight hours. Published in Physical Review Accelerators and Beams, the result was achieved ...

9 hours ago
Phys.org / Looking deep inside quarks: CMS test probes to 10⁻²⁰ meters and finds no inner structure

According to our current understanding of the universe, quarks are fundamental, point-like particles: basic building blocks that are not made up of smaller particles. A recent paper from the CMS Collaboration describes how ...

5 hours ago