Phys.org news

Sea urchins are ecosystem engineers, the marine equivalent of mega-herbivores on land. By grazing and shredding seaweed and seagrass, they control algal growth and promote the survival of slow-growing organisms like corals ...

The cosmos has served up a gift for a group of scientists who have been searching for one of the most elusive phenomena in the night sky. Their study, presented in Science Advances, reports on the very first observations ...

A new study by researchers from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and the University of Naples Federico II shows a domestic cat's purr reveals far more about its individual identity than its meow. While meows are highly flexible ...

Scientists in Britain say ancient humans may have learned to make fire far earlier than previously believed, after uncovering evidence that deliberate fire-setting took place in what is now eastern England around 400,000 ...

Dark matter is an elusive type of matter that does not emit, reflect or absorb light, yet is estimated to account for most of the universe's mass. Over the past decades, many physicists worldwide have been trying to detect ...

Plastics are made from crude oil and petroleum by-products, so a team of scientists decided to explore if they could turn waste cooking oil into a useful plastic material, and they succeeded.

To boost our understanding of a little-known civilization that thrived more than 3,000 years ago, scientists have built an easy-to-use digital catalog of 483 Bronze Age sites in western Anatolia.

Scientists have long been trying to reconstruct the appearance of dinosaurs. The tidbits they are able to piece together from fossils and other analysis are displayed in museums, educational materials, and media, lending ...

Neutrinos are one of the most mysterious particles in the universe, often called "ghost particles" because they rarely interact with anything else. Trillions stream through our bodies every second, yet leave no trace. They ...

There were many ways in which the elites of ancient Roman society flaunted their wealth. They built vast villas, sponsored extravagant games and imported luxury goods. And military top brass, at least those stationed at an ...

What if your conscious experiences were not just the chatter of neurons, but were connected to the hum of the universe? In a paper published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, I present new evidence indicating that conscious ...

Astronomers have employed NASA's Chandra spacecraft to perform X-ray observations of a massive galaxy cluster known as SPT-CL J0217-5014. Results of the observational campaign, published December 4 on the arXiv preprint server, ...