Phys.org news

For the first time, astronomers have directly measured the speed of superheated gas billowing from a cauldron of stellar activity at the heart of M82, a nearby galaxy undergoing an extraordinary burst of star formation. The ...

More than half a century after the groundbreaking Apollo program's last crewed flight to the moon, three men and one woman are preparing for a lunar journey set to turn a new page in American space exploration.

Application of an advanced dating technique establishes the first precise construction timeline for houses built out of coral in French Polynesia. The findings reveal previously hidden patterns of architectural development ...

When you reach into a bucket of ice, open your front door on a snowy day, or feel the tingle of menthol toothpaste, a protein in your nerve cells called TRPM8 springs into action, opening like a tiny gate to send a "cold" ...

Earth's magnetic field acts as a vital shield against radiation arriving from space, but it is not constant. A new international study has examined how a reduction of the magnetic field similar to the Laschamps excursion ...

In the intricate machinery of the inner ear, hearing begins with a protein that moves a few billionths of a meter up to 100,000 times per second. That protein, called TMC1, sits at the tips of sensory hair cells deep in the ...

A team of scientists led by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has identified a rare, switchable quantum property in a new type of nickel sulfide material. The discovery could have applications ...

Caltech scientists have developed a new way to produce optical frequency combs—important tools in devices that keep time and measure distances very precisely—at the chip scale, an advance that should make it easier to incorporate ...

Extreme climate impacts on people and the environment are often associated with very high levels of global warming (3 or 4°C). A new study led by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) shows that this assumption ...

New research from the University of St Andrews has revealed that human readiness for intergroup violence is not a single or unified mindset. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the new study, ...

A research team led by Prof. Sun Jianwei has achieved an advancement in organic synthesis and medicinal chemistry by developing an air-stable chiral phosphine-catalyzed enantioselective approach to synthesize enantioenriched ...

For decades, it has been widely believed that electrons move most efficiently in materials that are clean and highly ordered. Much like water flowing more easily through a smooth pipe, conventional wisdom has held that electrical ...