Phys.org news

Venus appears pale yellow in visible light, but ultraviolet images reveal dramatic dark and bright patterns moving with the planet's upper sulfuric acid clouds. Scientists have known about these markings for roughly a century, ...

Sea turtles are famous for being prodigious wanderers. Guided by Earth's magnetic field, ocean currents and the sun, they tend to crisscross the seas in search of food, returning to the region of their birth every few years ...

High-energy nuclear collisions recreate extreme conditions similar to those in the early universe, producing quark–gluon plasma (QGP), a hot state of matter in which quarks and gluons are no longer confined inside protons ...

Why do we remember certain moments while forgetting others? Every day, our minds are bombarded with thousands of pieces of information, yet our brains have a limited capacity to consolidate these experiences into lasting ...

Using a new combination of computational tools to analyze ancient DNA, Yale researchers have discovered two ancient, extinct giant tortoise lineages that once lived on the Galapagos Islands.

Researchers have captured in real time the "birth moment" when the performance of a next-generation memory material is determined. The key lies in controlling oxygen vacancies, microscopic defects created when oxygen atoms ...

Why do humans rely on XY chromosomes to determine sex, while birds use ZW—and many reptiles use neither, letting temperature decide instead? Sex determination is remarkably diverse across the animal kingdom. In genotypic ...

Commercially farmed tomatoes taste sweeter when food and garden waste compost is added to their soil, a University of Queensland study has found. Researchers in the School of Agriculture and Food Sustainability grew tomatoes ...

We share our planet with millions of plants and animals. This variety of life is known as biodiversity, a term encompassing everything from microscopic genes to entire ecosystems, such as deserts and vibrant coral reefs.

A protein that sticks cells and tissues together has been found to have a surprising second job: helping cells that are packed into a continuous sealed layer, also known as epithelial cells, engulf nearby dead cells.

Just a few minutes of freezing and thawing can have a decisive impact on how ferrihydrite, the most reactive iron mineral in cold soils, permafrost and glaciers, transforms, according to researchers at Umeå University. As ...

How has offspring dependence on parents evolved over the course of evolution? Researchers at the University of Bayreuth, in collaboration with Kyoto University, Japan, have investigated one possible mechanism by studying ...