Phys.org news

With El Niño-driven heat and prolonged dry spells threatening rice production, scientists from Japan's National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO), other Japanese research institutions and the International ...

Caltech researchers have identified a novel chemical reaction that could explain the formation of the building blocks of DNA and RNA, the molecules that encode all of life's functions. The work is an important step toward ...

Researchers at the University of Notre Dame and collaborators have discovered a key process in how the outer membrane of gram-negative bacteria attaches to the cell wall, advancing the understanding of how these bacteria ...

The aftermath of a supernova, a stellar explosion, is usually a slowly fading cloud of hot gas. So when astronomers pointed NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory at the nearby galaxy Messier 83 (M83), they did not expect to find ...

Researchers have found evidence of a previously unknown branch of the marsupial family tree, a discovery that could reshape our understanding of how Australia's unique mammals evolved. Published in the Journal of Paleontology, ...

Over 40,000 seamounts—undersea mountains that don't breach the ocean's surface—are scattered across the ocean floor. Some form linear chains, while others occur as dispersed, isolated features that are not part of well-defined ...

When stars like our sun age, they puff up into red giants. Their bubbling outer mass gradually escapes into space, and their remaining cores contract into white dwarfs. Since most stars end their lives this way, the universe ...

The vaquita (Phocoena sinus), an elusive porpoise found only in the shallow waters of Mexico's northern Gulf of California, is one of the rarest and most endangered marine mammals on Earth. Measuring about 5 feet (1.5 meters) ...

Planting trees is widely promoted as a natural solution to climate change. But a new study led by researchers from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences finds that the hydrological consequences ...

What would it take to instantly transform a material from an electrical insulator into a conductive state without ever touching it? Using ultrafast laser pulses and powerful X-rays, scientists at the National Synchrotron ...

For more than a century, chemists have been building complex molecules step by step—bond by bond, atom by atom. But what if, instead of painstakingly reassembling molecules, they could be directly "rewritten"? This is exactly ...

A new study finds that plants respond to injury by actively redirecting sugars to damaged tissues, helping fuel the regeneration process. Using a fluorescent sensor to track sugar movement in living plants, researchers have ...