Phys.org news

The shape of biological structures, ranging from flower petals to the limbs or organs of animals, is often naturally best suited for performing specific functions. Biological structures also often present curved surfaces ...

Rare images taken by a Japanese space probe during a flyby of a near-Earth asteroid have revealed that the space rock resembled a snowman, scientists said Monday.

In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Technion and Tel Aviv University present BetaDescribe, an AI system that translates protein sequences into natural-language descriptions, ...

Contrary to common assumptions, pigeons do not lock their eyes in place during flight. Instead, they make slow, subtle eye movements that may help them gather more information about their surroundings.

Hummingbirds make bromeliad plants split into new species twice as fast as other pollinators do, scientists at the University of Reading have found. The research team gathered records of which animals pollinate 403 types ...

In new images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to celebrate its fourth science anniversary, a familiar galaxy transforms into something far richer and far more complex than ever seen before. Webb's unprecedented sensitivity ...

RMIT University researchers have tested a more effective way to capture microplastics from wastewater, using a combination of microbubbles and nanobubbles to achieve removal rates of more than 90%.

A new Southwest Research Institute-led study compared eight AI-generated lunar crater catalogs, discovering that many of their published performance metrics drop sharply when the databases are evaluated using the same scientific ...

Astronomers have used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) to study the composition of 3I/ATLAS, the brightest interstellar object ever seen, in detail. By measuring specific chemical fingerprints—the ...

In the course of studying planets beyond our solar system (6,316 confirmed exoplanets and counting), scientists have discovered some very interesting systems. Consider TOI-201, a compact system populated by three bodies, ...

China's Tianwen-2 space probe, which is set to bring back samples from an asteroid for research, has reached its target after traveling 1 billion kilometers (620 million miles) over more than a year, the Chinese space agency ...

New research has revealed that water behaves differently when confined to spaces just one molecule thick. For the first time, scientists have directly measured the vibrational signatures of truly two-dimensional water. In ...