Phys.org news

There is high global demand for critical metals, and many countries want to try extracting these sought-after metals from the seabed. An international study, which has discovered large numbers of new species at a depth of ...

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 ...

Inspired by the Japanese art of kirigami, a team of scientists from the University of Amsterdam have developed a material that can reflect different colors of light, depending on how it is stretched. The results were recently ...

When ice melts into water, it happens quickly, with the transition from solid to liquid being immediate. However, very thin materials do not adhere to these rules. Instead, an unusual state between solid and liquid arises: ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

While synchrotron radiation is often thought of as "stable," the electromagnetic field exhibits pronounced randomly fluctuating distributions both temporally and spatially. These fluctuations encode spatial information about ...

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.

Researchers from the School of Physics at Wits University, working with collaborators from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, have demonstrated how quantum light can be engineered in space and time to create high-dimensional ...

The shift from warm summer to cool fall conditions can be stressful for many animals. Surviving each season requires a multitude of different physiological and behavioral traits that scientists are still working to understand.

Methanol is an ideal feedstock for bio-manufacturing. Converting it into lactate, a monomer for biodegradable plastic, offers a promising strategy for addressing the challenge of white pollution. However, it remains difficult ...