Phys.org news

Early mammalian ancestors were nocturnal, sleeping during the day while the dinosaurs dominated the land. However, some mammalian lineages, including human ancestors, independently transitioned to diurnality (active during ...

Changes in rainfall within global monsoon regions affect the livelihoods of billions. For years, climate models have suggested that the fingerprint of human-caused climate change on monsoons would become visible by a certain ...

For nearly two decades, two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors have been studied as a complement or possible successor to silicon transistors, promising smaller, faster and more energy-efficient processors. To ease their production ...

Simulated lunar dirt can be turned into extremely durable structures, potentially paving the way to more sustainable and cost-effective space missions, a new study suggests. Using a special laser 3D printing method, researchers ...

Every year, over 100 billion nitrile rubber gloves are produced. They are made from synthetic polymers—a material chemically related to plastic and derived from crude oil. The vast majority is used in the health care sector, ...

Tiny insects trapped in amber could tell us a great deal about their roles in past ecosystems: pollinators, parasites, predators, and prey. But how many of the insects preserved alongside each other reflect interactions during ...

Particles in the atmosphere, known as aerosols, cool the climate by acting as cloud condensation nuclei. The more cloud droplets form around these particles, the less sunlight penetrates a cloud. This cools the climate, although ...

A research team at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has analyzed 40 years of data covering about 1,500 tropical cyclones and discovered that average rain rates surge by more than 20% in the 60 hours ...

Planetary systems such as our solar system take hundreds of millions of years to evolve. Since humanity has only existed for a sliver of that time, astronomers have only observed planetary systems at birth or, more often, ...

Duckweed is the fastest-growing flowering plant, but new knowledge of duckweed genetics discovered by Adelaide University researchers could lead to even faster growing rates. The research team, led by Professor Nikolai Borisjuk ...

A research team from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has developed GrainBot, an AI-enabled toolkit that automatically extracts and quantifies multiple microstructural features from microscopy images. ...

A study reveals how two proteins cooperate in a key early step of antiviral detection, as reported by researchers at Science Tokyo. Using cryo-electron microscopy and high-speed atomic force microscopy, they found that LGP2 ...