Phys.org news

Roses are known for their thorns, the sharp structures that can sting and prickle the skin. Thorns, botanically known as prickles, are thought to discourage animals from feeding on plants and may also help climbing roses ...

Intelligent people tend to perform better at school and at work, as numerous studies have shown. But what happens in domains where incentives such as good grades or financial rewards don't apply and where socioeconomic status ...

Tall trees are generally associated with high-biomass forests. This is particularly true for forests dominated by Sequoia sempervirens (hereafter redwood), the world's tallest tree species. Extreme decay resistance, the ability ...

Planets form from disks of gas and dust around young stars, but the gas needed for growth does not last forever. New observations from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) now offer a new view of how this gas escapes ...

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have demonstrated a promising new way to protect fragile quantum information using nothing but mechanical vibrations—essentially ...

In a study recently published in Nature Communications, researchers from Berlin, Potsdam, and Jena present a new method for analyzing the epigenome. The machine-learning method identifies differentially methylated DNA regions ...

The bacterium Acinetobacter baumannii poses a substantial threat in health care settings, readily forming biofilms on wounds and medical surfaces and contributing to persistent infections and delayed healing. Its growing ...

A 30-year conservation effort has helped the critically endangered Galápagos snapdragon (Galvezia leucantha subsp. leucantha) recover from just six individuals to a small, carefully tended wild population. Following tireless ...

Forests support much of the world's biodiversity and play a vital role in regulating Earth's climate, but they are increasingly exposed to drought. To understand the potential consequences of drought, a key question is whether ...

Scientists have recently reconstructed the ancestral karyotype of the banana family, revealing how chromosome numbers decreased stepwise from 17 to 9–11 over evolutionary time.

Astronomers can't see dark matter directly, but they know it's there: Its gravity shapes galaxies and the large-scale structure of the cosmos. In an effort to uncover the composition of this hidden mass, a team at Lawrence ...

A team of scientists from Caltech and Yale University has shown for the first time how to accurately quantify an important quantum phenomenon in metals, called the Kondo effect, for specific real materials. Unlike previous ...