Phys.org news

For more than a century, chemists have been building complex molecules step by step—bond by bond, atom by atom. But what if, instead of painstakingly reassembling molecules, they could be directly "rewritten"? This is exactly ...

Caltech researchers have identified a novel chemical reaction that could explain the formation of the building blocks of DNA and RNA, the molecules that encode all of life's functions. The work is an important step toward ...

What would it take to instantly transform a material from an electrical insulator into a conductive state without ever touching it? Using ultrafast laser pulses and powerful X-rays, scientists at the National Synchrotron ...

The aftermath of a supernova, a stellar explosion, is usually a slowly fading cloud of hot gas. So when astronomers pointed NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory at the nearby galaxy Messier 83 (M83), they did not expect to find ...

Over 40,000 seamounts—undersea mountains that don't breach the ocean's surface—are scattered across the ocean floor. Some form linear chains, while others occur as dispersed, isolated features that are not part of well-defined ...

Bee species that nest in plant stems appear to be at the greatest short-term risk from increasing temperatures due to climate change, while those that nest in the ground are better able to evade extreme heat, according to ...

When stars like our sun age, they puff up into red giants. Their bubbling outer mass gradually escapes into space, and their remaining cores contract into white dwarfs. Since most stars end their lives this way, the universe ...

In the early universe, the first galaxies began to take shape roughly a million years after the Big Bang. Within these young systems, stars formed from vast reservoirs of cold gas, gradually building the structures we see ...

Changes in wind patterns play the leading role in influencing often devastating tropical rainfall changes, rather than simply the warming atmosphere holding more moisture, according to new research.

The warm Gulf Stream is maintained by coldness. The Barents Sea is a cooling machine. To predict how ocean currents in the Atlantic Ocean may develop, one needs to know what drives them. The hunt for driving forces has led ...

A molecular geneticist at Montana State University has discovered a cellular process once believed impossible by scientists—the creation of the amino acid cysteine within a living cell when the cell's primary systems for ...

A new study finds that plants respond to injury by actively redirecting sugars to damaged tissues, helping fuel the regeneration process. Using a fluorescent sensor to track sugar movement in living plants, researchers have ...