Phys.org news

Japanese red elder plants safeguard their own survival when they drop fruits infested by Heterhelus beetle larvae, as well as the survival of these larvae. A Kobe University study changes the narrative on how a plant and ...

When most people hear "polymer," they think of plastics. In our group, polymerization is a way to line up identical molecules like beads on a string and let quantum mechanics take over. Put magnetic building blocks in a one-dimensional ...

Between 2023 and 2025, more than 30 million hectares burned in Canada due to wildfires. The threat from increasingly frequent and intense wildfires goes beyond fire and smoke—the heat can also transform naturally occurring ...

All complex biological systems—like the DNA, RNA and proteins constantly being copied and built within our cells—are prone to errors. That means as life evolved to be more elaborate, it also had to evolve error-correcting ...

When a species lives in two distinct types of habitats, individuals with traits better suited to each habitat will thrive and reproduce, naturally selecting descendants with those traits. But what about mobile aquatic species ...

Scientists at Duke-NUS Medical School have found that viruses circulating in live poultry markets can be detected more effectively by sampling the surrounding environment than by testing individual birds. The study, published ...

From brightly colored textile dyes to persistent pesticides and antibiotics, many modern pollutants dissolved in water—such as Bisphenol A—resist traditional treatment methods. A promising approach uses electricity to ...

Biology textbooks explain that cells follow a universal rule when processing gene transcripts to make proteins. Non-coding snippets of RNA are bracketed by a guanine-thymine (GT) nucleotide sequence on one end and an adenine-guanine ...

A new study published in Science is challenging long-held assumptions about how we measure genetic risk in endangered species. Researchers analyzed whole genomes from hundreds of koalas, finding that populations previously ...

Genes that play a key role in the formation of an infectious organ used by parasitic plants have been identified by plant scientists at RIKEN. This discovery fills a gap in our understanding of how parasitic plants infect ...

Walking on two legs has long been considered a milestone in human evolution and one of our most defining characteristics. Until now, researchers assumed that the first humans originated in Africa and that bipedalism developed ...

Using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher for the Northern Hemisphere (HARPS-N), an international team of astronomers has discovered a hot sub-Neptune exoplanet ...