Phys.org news

For more than a decade, it was thought that the world's most plastic-polluted birds couldn't get any more contaminated by the man-made material. But then, from 2023–2026, the record was broken every single year.

Launched on Oct. 20, 2018, the joint ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has traveled for almost eight years, using a carefully planned but eventful sequence of planetary flybys and solar-electric propulsion to gradually approach ...

Deep in the ocean, brown algae and diatoms produce a complex carbohydrate molecule called fucoidan, which helps form their protective outer layers. The fucoidan molecule is very difficult for microbes to break down because ...

From a mountainside overlooking Utah's Great Salt Lake, a time traveler turning back the clock 20,000 years would watch a dramatic transformation of the landscape. The shallow, salty lake below would swell into an immense ...

Chemical reactions are often written as simple equations: Starting materials go in, and a product comes out. In reality, the same substrates can follow many different pathways depending on their concentrations, temperature, ...

A research team at the Institute of Applied Physics at TU Darmstadt has shown for the first time that atoms that are completely disordered and in constant motion can nevertheless emit jointly directed light preferentially ...

A new study finds that while most Americans are interested in science and believe it benefits society, the public's relationship with science is more complicated than those positive views suggest.

Ice is cheap, abundant and surprisingly strong. But it has one major weakness: Cracks can race through it, causing it to shatter without warning. Now, scientists have developed a new material that could overcome that problem. ...

More than 5,000 years ago, a royal woman named Meretneith (also written as Merneith) lived in ancient Egypt. She was possibly the daughter of Djer, the third king of the First Dynasty, a period when the first kings ruled ...

Inside each human cell, about 2 meters (6.6 feet) of genomic DNA must be accurately copied and equally transmitted to two daughter cells during cell division. To achieve this, the copied DNA is condensed into thick, short ...

Heat stress is a leading cause of weather-related deaths and can be especially dangerous in cities, where phenomena like urban heat islands drive temperatures higher than in surrounding rural areas. Now, a new dataset developed ...

An international team that includes researchers from Murdoch University's Centre for Crop and Food Innovation (CCFI) has built the most comprehensive genetic map of the peanut yet and used this new genomic resource to breed ...