Phys.org news

While most people are aware of how plastic, arsenic and various industrial chemicals can pollute bodies of water, the effects of caffeine on freshwater environments remain largely unknown. Nonetheless, traces of caffeine, ...

When picturing a scaled, toothy Tyrannosaurus rex stomping across North America, building nests and eating other dinosaurs, it's easy to forget that scientists have gleaned everything we know about T. rex from clues left ...

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London are closer to understanding tendinopathy, a common condition that can cause persistent pain and impaired movement in people and many animals.

X-ray technology and artificial intelligence—along with the discovery of lead in the ink of fragments from a collection of ancient Roman scrolls—could soon help scientists read long-lost texts buried by the eruption of Mount ...

Bipedalism, or walking on two legs, is one of the key features that distinguishes humans from other apes. But when and why our ancestors transitioned from a life often spent in trees to a life spent almost exclusively on ...

The Black Death is often remembered as a single catastrophic event that swept across Europe between 1347 and 1353, killing millions. Yet the disease did not disappear after that first devastating outbreak. For more than four ...

Dwarf galaxies—with a mass equal to about a billion suns, but often considerably less—are the most abundant in the universe. However, because of their low luminosity, they are very difficult to detect. They have mostly been ...

Scientists have discovered several 518-million-year-old fossils that reshape understanding of the origins of the animal group containing starfish. The fossils show that these animals ate using tentacles rather than passively ...

SpaceX announced Tuesday that it was planning to send its flagship rocket, Starship, into orbit, a key step in its project to one day reach the moon or Mars.

Two-thirds of a century after Jane Goodall observed "David Greybeard" break off a twig to fashion a fishing rod for termites, researchers following in her footsteps have found that adult chimpanzees in Senegal literally hand ...

Large-scale oyster reef restoration in the Chesapeake Bay is successfully creating three-dimensional habitats that support larger, more diverse fish communities, according to new research from scientists at the University ...

The biopolymer lignin—one of the most important carbon reservoirs in plants and soils—not only decays through fungi or bacteria but can also be chemically attacked by iron linked to reactive oxygen species, without the involvement ...