Phys.org news

Compelling evidence that the structure of matter surrounding supermassive black holes has changed over cosmic time has been uncovered by an international team of astronomers.

Leading synthetic biologists have shared hard-won lessons from their decade-long quest to build the world's first synthetic eukaryotic genome in a Nature Biotechnology paper. Their insights could accelerate development of ...

Red-backed shrikes fly thousands of kilometers to reach Africa—and they do so with astonishing precision. Aided by new technology, researchers at Lund University in Sweden have been able to track the birds' journeys in ...

Over the past 50 years, the lyrics of popular songs in the U.S. have become simpler, more negative, and contain more stress-related words, according to an analysis published in Scientific Reports. The authors suggest that ...

Astronomers have produced the first continuous, two-dimensional maps of the outer edge of the sun's atmosphere, a shifting, frothy boundary that marks where solar winds escape the sun's magnetic grasp. By combining the maps ...

Machine learning is transforming many scientific fields, including computational materials science. For about two decades, scientists have been using it to make accurate yet inexpensive calculations of interatomic potentials, ...

In an age of rising sea levels, as polar ice sheets melt in a climate warmed by fossil fuel emissions, climate modelers are racing to understand what the future might hold for coastlines around the world. But uncertainties ...

Biphenomycins, natural products derived from bacteria, show excellent antimicrobial activity, but have long remained out of reach for drug development. The main obstacle was the limited understanding of how these compounds ...

Scientists have discovered that beneficial root-dwelling fungi boost plant resilience to disease by remodeling the plant cell membrane at pathogen infection sites—offering critical new insights into how plants coordinate ...

Killer whales or orca (Orcinus orca) have been observed hunting with Pacific white-sided dolphins (Lagenorhynchus obliquidens) in the waters off British Columbia, Canada, and sharing fish scraps with them after making a kill, ...

Florida State University researchers have created a new crystalline material with unusual magnetic patterns that could be used for breakthroughs in data storage and quantum technologies.

Using a dual-cation substitution approach, researchers at Science Tokyo introduced ferromagnetism into bismuth ferrite, a well-known and promising multiferroic material for next-generation memory technologies. By replacing ...