Phys.org news

The origin of turtles has always been a bit of a puzzle for scientists who study the evolution of animals. To this day, where they fit in the tree of life remains a highly debated topic.

Chemical bonding is one of the central organizing principles of the microscopic world. It determines how atoms combine and thereby governs a wide range of physical and chemical properties of quantum systems across many length ...

Using finely tuned nanoscale building blocks, researchers from Brown University and the University of Michigan College of Engineering have stabilized a fleeting structural phase of matter that had been predicted theoretically ...

While society often assumes that finding a romantic partner is the ultimate key to happiness, tracking relationship changes over time reveals a distinctly different reality. A massive longitudinal study proves that individuals ...

Astronomers have found some of the strongest evidence yet that stars can swallow their own planets. A new study, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, supports the long-held belief that young stars ...

While NASA imagery has shown evidence of ancient rivers and lakes on Mars that transitioned to dry dunes, uncertainty remains over the timing of the environmental changes that may have contributed to these shifts.

As our world's population grows, so does the demand for ammonia—a key ingredient in fertilizer. The International Renewable Energy Agency estimates that ammonia production must quadruple by 2050 to feed the increase in global ...

New research published in BMC Biology helps to fill in questions about the so-called "Furongian gap" from about 497 million to 485 million years ago, when paleontologists previously thought there were far fewer fossils than ...

Astronomical observations show that the most massive galaxies in the early universe formed approximately three to four billion years after the Big Bang and stopped producing stars very early in cosmic history, around one ...

Despite the intensity of modern exploration, the eastern Mediterranean continues to yield unexpected discoveries. On the small Greek island of Kastellorizo, researchers have documented a previously unknown cave cricket thriving ...

Scientists at the University of California, Riverside are making breakthroughs in understanding how quantum wave functions move across ultra-thin materials—research that could eventually improve solar energy technologies ...

Honeycombs are famous for their elegant design, but now they may have found a new application: quantum computing. To collect knowledge from subatomic particles, quantum computers require carefully designed materials capable ...