Phys.org news

Plant owners with a so-called green thumb often seem to have a more finely tuned sense of what their plants need than the rest of us. A new "smart lighting" system for indoor vertical farms grants this ability on a facility-wide ...

CU Boulder researchers have built high-performing optical microresonators, opening the door for new sensor technologies. At its simplest form, a microresonator is a tiny device that can trap light and build up its intensity. ...

The deep, murky pigment known as Prussian blue put the "blue" in traditional blueprints, colored Hokusai's "Great Wave off Kanagawa" and today is used for industrial purposes, from laundry to battery components to poison ...

At Rice University, a research lab's signature keepsake has helped perfect a method for growing patterned diamond surfaces that could help decrease operating temperatures in electronics by 23 degrees Celsius. The paper is ...

Imagine trying to design a key for a lock that is constantly changing its shape. That is the exact challenge we face in modern drug discovery when dealing with intrinsically disordered proteins.

The humble breadcrumb could hold the key to cutting out fossil fuels from one of the chemical industry's most widely used reactions, according to a new study. Scientists have found a one-pot microbial formula that uses waste ...

Several studies have predicted that not all geomagnetic reversals have been discovered, but it was unknown in which periods they might be hidden. Researchers led by the National Institute of Polar Research used a statistical ...

What makes one bat take risks and venture far from its roost in search of food, while another stays close to familiar, safer areas? A new study from Tel Aviv University's School of Zoology reveals that the environment in ...

Drugs made of mRNA have the potential to transform medicine—if only they could get into cells in one piece. Now, University of Connecticut researchers have shown that packaging mRNA like a virus could smuggle it into cells ...

Plants have an immune system, like people, and when it is triggered by threats like disease or pests, a plant's defenses are activated. But there's a downside to this protective mechanism: the plant's growth is suppressed ...

In 2013, farmers in the highlands of Ethiopia began to notice something unsettling: a familiar variety of wheat was failing in an unfamiliar way. Stems weakened, plants collapsed, and fields that had once held firm against ...

When the federal government brings its toughest environmental enforcement actions against polluters, they tend to be in communities of greater wealth, not the most polluted places. That's the takeaway from a new paper co-authored ...