Phys.org news

Just as avalanches on snowy mountains start with the movement of a small quantity of snow, the ESA-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft has discovered that a solar flare is triggered by initially weak disturbances that quickly become ...

In the Kenyan savanna, lions and livestock essentially live in shifts: Cattle graze during the day and are enclosed at night when lions are active.

Through sand extraction and the disposal of dredged harbor silt, about 200 million tons of sediment are relocated every year in the coastal waters of the North Sea. The Wadden Sea is particularly strongly affected. This is ...

Human activity continues to expand ever further into wild areas, throwing ecology out of balance. But what begins as an environmental issue often evolves into a human problem.

A research group has achieved a new plasma confinement regime using small 3D magnetic perturbations that simultaneously suppress edge instabilities and enhance core plasma confinement in the Experimental Advanced Superconducting ...

Before scientists even knew how many Florida scrub millipedes were left in the wild, a quiet breakthrough happened in a University of South Florida lab. The rare, giant millipedes reproduced in captivity.

A research team led by the University of Oxford's Department of Engineering Science has shown it is possible to engineer a quantum mechanical process inside proteins, opening the door to a new class of quantum-enabled biological ...

Astronomers have long sought evidence to explain why comets at the outskirts of our own solar system contain crystalline silicates, since crystals require intense heat to form and these "dirty snowballs" spend most of their ...

Imagine computer hardware that is blazing fast and stores more data in less space. That's the promise of antiferromagnets, magnetic materials that do not interfere with each other and can switch states at high speed, opening ...

In a new study, an international group of researchers has found that chiral phonons can create orbital current without needing magnetic elements—in part because chiral phonons have their own magnetic moments. Additionally, ...

Light and matter can remain at separate temperatures even while interacting with each other for long periods, according to new research that could help scale up an emerging quantum computing approach in which photons and ...

A nanostructure made of silver and an atomically thin semiconductor layer can be turned into an ultrafast switching mirror device that may function as an optical transistor—with a switching speed around 10,000 times faster ...