Phys.org news

Researchers have created a material that manufactures the proteins responsible for cell movement, without needing intact living cells. By embedding cell-free gene expression into a thin sheet of protein filaments, they were ...

Quantum systems can occupy superpositions, quantum states that combine different possibilities. For instance, a microwave field can be prepared in a superposition of an empty state and a state that contains microwave light.

Astronomers identified an exceptionally tiny core that may represent an early stage in the formation of a massive star. Located in an infrared-dark area called Dragon Cloud, the core is nicknamed the "dragon egg." The paper, ...

The Kronshtadskiy subglacial lake near East Antarctica's Amery Ice Shelf was hidden beneath Antarctica's ice, but its drainage left a mark visible from space as a broad depression that deepened by more than 6 meters (20 feet) ...

Give AI agents political positions, ask them to defend their views and persuade one another, and let them decide which contacts to keep. This recent experiment, published in Nature Communications, found that over repeated ...

Humans and chimpanzees share almost all their genes. Despite this, our brains have developed in different ways. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have now shown that a viral pandemic dating back several million years ...

El Niño is part of a natural climate pattern that occurs roughly every two to seven years, bringing warmer-than-normal water to parts of the equatorial Pacific. The most recent very strong El Niño events, in 1997–98 and 2015–16, ...

Establishing a long-term presence on the moon will require solving challenges that are easy to overlook on Earth. Lunar temperatures, for instance, can vary from hundreds of degrees below zero to boiling, making effective ...

More than 30,000 years ago, people associated with one of Europe's major Paleolithic cultures (the Gravettian) were more interconnected than previously thought. An international research team led by the University of Vienna ...

Two black holes can collide and merge into one. But could the opposite happen: could a single black hole split into two smaller ones? That question is explored in a new theoretical study: "When Black Holes Admit Pair-of-pants ...

Protected areas have been set up to shield deep-sea life from the impacts of seabed mining in the Pacific Ocean. However, new research led by scientists at Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) and published in Nature Ecology ...

Molecular machines are regarded as the next step in miniaturization. Their models can be found in living cells, where molecular motors convert energy and generate movement. Scientists have been working for decades to artificially ...