Phys.org news

"A plague is upon us'' may have been a common phrase in ancient Jordan, where countless people perished from a mysterious malady that would shape both a society and an era of civilization.

Quantum mechanics is rich with paradoxes and contradictions. It describes a microscopic world in which particles exist in a superposition of states—being in multiple places and configurations all at once, defined mathematically ...

A new unified theory connects two fundamental domains of modern quantum physics: It joins two opposite views of how a single exotic particle behaves in a many-body system, namely as a mobile or static impurity among a large ...

Increasing paternal age has been linked to elevated health risks for the next generation, including higher risks of obesity and stillbirth. But what drives this increased risk remains unknown.

For decades, the ability to visualize the chemical composition of materials, whether for diagnosing a disease, assessing food quality, or analyzing pollution, depended on large, expensive laboratory instruments called spectrometers. ...

Light is a universal stimulus that influences all living things. Cycles of light and dark help set the biological clocks for organisms ranging from single-celled bacteria to human beings. Some bacteria use photosynthesis ...

Researchers from the South Pole Telescope project team looked deep into the center of the Milky Way, discovering powerful, surprising bursts of light from two accreting white dwarf systems.

A team of scientists announced Tuesday they have developed new deep-sea landers specifically to test their contentious discovery that metallic rocks at the bottom of the ocean are producing "dark oxygen".

New research from the University of St Andrews has found that the social spread of group bubble-net feeding among humpback whales is crucial to the success of the population's ongoing recovery.

Archaeologists working near Skipsea Castle in East Yorkshire say a series of rare discoveries is transforming understanding of life in the centuries before the Norman Conquest.

A long-standing mystery about how wild bats navigate complex environments in complete darkness with remarkable precision, has been solved in a new University of Bristol-led study. The findings are published in Proceedings ...

Collective behavior is an unusual phenomenon in condensed-matter physics. When quantum spins interact together as a system, they produce unique effects not seen in individual particles. Understanding how quantum spins interact ...