Phys.org news

Phys.org / Rules of unknown board game from the Roman period revealed

Researchers have used AI to reconstruct the rules of a board game carved into a stone found in the Dutch city of Heerlen. The team concludes that this type of game was played several centuries earlier than previously assumed.

Feb 10, 2026 in Other Sciences
Phys.org / Discovery of a possible pulsar in the Milky Way's center could enable unprecedented tests of General Relativity

Researchers from Columbia University and Breakthrough Listen, a scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of civilizations beyond Earth, have published new results from the Breakthrough Listen Galactic Center ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Astronomy & Space
Phys.org / DNA-binding proteins from volcanic lakes could improve disease diagnosis

Scientists have uncovered new DNA-binding proteins from some of the most extreme environments on Earth and shown that they can improve rapid medical tests for infectious diseases. The work has been published in Nucleic Acids ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Biology
Phys.org / How giant galaxies could form just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang

The existence of massive, elliptical galaxies in the early universe has puzzled astronomers for two decades. An international team led by Nikolaus Sulzenauer and Axel Weiß from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Astronomy & Space
Phys.org / Mauled by a bear, 27,500 years ago: What a lavish teen burial reveals

A teenager's skeleton lay supine in a shallow pit on a bed of red ocher, his remains adorned with several ivory pendants, four perforated antler batons, mammoth ivory pendants, and a flint blade, his skull decorated with ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Other Sciences
Phys.org / The wild physics that keeps your body's electrical system flowing smoothly

Building on their pioneering 2018 research into how some of the body's cells, such as neurons and cardiac tissue, communicate via ions that flow through cellular channels, chemists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Biology
Phys.org / Non-biologic processes don't fully explain Mars organics collected by Curiosity, researchers say

In a new study, researchers say that nonbiological sources they considered could not fully account for the abundance of organic compounds in a sample collected on Mars by NASA's Curiosity rover. The paper is published in ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Astronomy & Space
Phys.org / Bison hunters abandoned long-used site 1,100 years ago to adapt to changing climate, Great Plains study finds

On the Great Plains of North America, bison were hunted for thousands of years before populations collapsed to near extinction due to overexploitation in the late 1800s. But long before then, bison hunters used various strategies ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Other Sciences
Dialog / How charges invert a long-standing empirical law in glass physics

If you've ever watched a glass blower at work, you've seen a material behaving in a very special way. As it cools, the viscosity of molten glass increases steadily but gradually, allowing it to be shaped without a mold. Physicists ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Physics
Phys.org / Noise pollution is affecting birds' reproduction, stress levels and more: The good news is we can fix it

New research led by the University of Michigan is painting a more comprehensive picture of how noise pollution is impacting birds around the world. "The major takeaway from this study is that anthropogenic noise affects many ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Biology
Phys.org / Where did that raindrop come from? Climate model ensemble captures worldwide water isotopes over 45 years

Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, and sometimes these atoms are slightly heavier than usual. These heavier forms are called isotopes. As water evaporates or moves through the atmosphere, the amount of these isotopes changes ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Earth
Phys.org / Acoustic communication—an overlooked driver in boxfish evolution

A new international study reveals the unexpected importance of acoustic communication in the evolution of boxfishes. This discovery offers new perspectives on the role of acoustic communication in the evolutionary history ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Biology