Phys.org news

Understanding the universe as a whole requires simulations on cosmic scales. An international team of astrophysicists, with a leading role for researchers at Leiden University, Netherlands, has now released one of the largest ...

Palmyra Atoll, a remote, uninhabited speck of land, coral and sea halfway between Hawaii and American Samoa, is one of the healthiest, intact atolls on the planet—so ecologically sensitive that visiting researchers freeze ...

Scientists at the University of East Anglia have uncovered a hidden property of light that allows it to twist, spin and behave differently—without mirrors, materials or special lenses. In a breakthrough that could transform ...

A paper in Genome Biology and Evolution discovers that the endangered Mediterranean fin whale is not completely isolated from Atlantic groups. Both Atlantic and Mediterranean populations have declined for the past 200,000 ...

Why are there so many species of coral reef fish? According to a new study, it's because about 50 million years ago, some fish figured out how to bite food from hard surfaces.

A new decades-long study of oceanographic data provides the first evidence that deep-ocean heat has moved closer to Antarctica, threatening the fragile ice shelves that fringe the continent.

An international study led by Adelaide University has found bowhead whale populations are recovering only in stocks where large areas of hazardous sea ice conditions limited devastating hunting centuries ago. The research ...

Anyone who has ever used a microscope knows that it takes time to bring a sample into sharp focus. Each time you move the slide, the image blurs, and you have to stop and carefully turn a knob to bring everything back into ...

Under a microscope, a bouquet of lollipop-like structures, each smaller than a grain of sand, waves gently in a Petri dish of liquid. Suddenly, they snap together, like the jaws of a Venus flytrap, as a scientist waves a ...

After nearly four decades, the world's longest-running soil warming experiment is revealing a surprising result: even "stable" carbon in forest soils can break down as temperatures rise, releasing more CO₂ into the atmosphere. ...

Atmospheric dust plays a dual role in Earth's climate: it reflects some sunlight back into space while also absorbing and retaining the planet's heat like an insulating blanket. But while dust likely cools the planet overall, ...

Researchers including a number from the University of Exeter, have identified the most urgent unanswered questions about peatlands, providing a global roadmap to guide future science and policy for one of the planet's most ...