Phys.org news

A highly contagious herpes virus causes Marek's disease, a deadly illness that mainly infects chickens. While it does not make people sick, the virus causes tumors and paralysis in chickens and, if unchecked, can spread rapidly ...

Risso's dolphins around the British Isles are part of a single population—genetically distinct from those elsewhere in the Atlantic, new research shows. Scientists studied the DNA of dolphins that stranded in England, Scotland ...

Approximately 40% of insect species worldwide are thought to be in decline and under threat of extinction. Among the key causes are habitat loss, pollution and climate change. Another threat is artificial light from sources ...

More than 1,000 years ago, two babies were tucked away in an abandoned Roman toilet channel. Yet, despite what the location suggests, they were cherished, not discarded.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers obtained high-contrast coronagraphic images of the protoplanetary disk around the young, nearby star TW Hydrae. Results of the observational campaign, published July ...

Using spectral data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), astronomers have gained some of the clearest evidence yet that white dwarf stars are accreting debris from disintegrating exoplanets. Captured while ...

Researchers in the lab of Sam Peng, the Pfizer Inc.–Gerald Laubach Career Development Assistant Professor of Chemistry at MIT and a core institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, have developed a super-resolution ...

Most sensors are designed to do only one thing: detect what passes through them. But what if a sensor could do more? To create a new generation of technology, researchers have looked to living systems for inspiration. If ...

New York University researchers have pinpointed the molecular players responsible for plants "feeling full" once they've taken up enough nitrogen—a finding that could help scientists develop plants that absorb more nitrogen ...

Fertilization is often imagined as a frantic race, with millions of sperm competing for a single prize. But new research by a team of evolutionary biologists from Syracuse University, the University of Siena in Italy and ...

Nitrogen gas is abundant in Earth's atmosphere, but most living organisms can't readily use it. Only a subset of microbes with enzymes known as nitrogenases can break nitrogen gas apart and convert it into ammonia.

The left-right asymmetry of South African butterfly lilies (genus Wachendorfia) has been regarded as a classic evolutionary puzzle for more than a century. Due to the mirror-image arrangement of the floral parts, the plants ...