Phys.org news

Phys.org / Football-sized fossil creature may have been one of the first land animals to eat plants

Life on Earth started in the oceans. Sometime around 475 million years ago, plants began making their way from the water onto the land, and it took another 100 million years for the first animals with backbones to join them. ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Biology
Phys.org / Current flows without heat loss in newly engineered fractional quantum material

A team of US researchers has unveiled a device that can conduct electricity along its fractionally charged edges without losing energy to heat. Described in Nature Physics, the work, led by Xiaodong Xu at the University of ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Physics
Phys.org / Oldest known sewn hide and other artifacts from Oregon caves shed light on early clothing in harsh climates

In 1958, an amateur archaeologist named John Cowles excavated the Cougar Mountain Cave in Oregon and retained many of the artifacts found there. Upon his death in the 1980s, these items were transferred to the Favell Museum ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Other Sciences
Phys.org / Machine learning reveals hidden landscape of robust information storage

In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, researchers used machine learning to discover multiple new classes of two-dimensional memories, systems that can reliably store information despite constant environmental ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Physics
Phys.org / Fossil discovery suggests giant pythons once roamed Taiwan

Pythons are a common sight across much of Asia, especially in the tropical jungles and wetlands of countries like Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia. But one curious exception has been the main island of Taiwan, where there ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Biology
Phys.org / Experiment relies on pulsars to probe dark matter waves

Dark matter is a type of matter that is predicted to make up most of the matter in the universe, yet it is very difficult to detect using conventional experimental techniques, as it does not emit, absorb, or reflect light. ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Astronomy & Space
Phys.org / Female scientists wait longer to have papers published in life and biomedical sciences

If you are a woman working in biomedical and life sciences, you may have longer to wait for your academic paper to appear in print than a comparable paper authored by a man. According to research published in the journal ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Other Sciences
Phys.org / Fermi data help refine orbital parameters of a gamma-ray binary

Using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, Chinese astronomers have observed a gamma-ray binary system known as PSR J2032+4127. Results of the new observations, published February 3 on the arXiv preprint server, shed more ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Astronomy & Space
Phys.org / Underestimated wake: Shipping traffic causes more turmoil in the Baltic Sea than expected

Commercial shipping not only affects the Baltic Sea on the surface, but also has a significant impact on the water column and the seabed. A study by the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW) and Kiel ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Earth
Phys.org / Bacterial hitchhikers can give their hosts super strength

A Dartmouth study finds that molecular hitchhikers living within bacteria can make their hosts extra resistant to medical treatment by corralling them into tightly packed groups. The findings introduce a previously unknown ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Biology
Dialog / Old galaxies in a young universe?

The standard cosmological model (present-day version of "Big Bang," called Lambda-CDM) gives an age of the universe close to 13.8 billion years and much younger when we explore the universe at high-redshift. The redshift ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Astronomy & Space
Phys.org / A possible first-ever Einstein probe observation of a black hole tearing apart a white dwarf

On July 2, 2025, the China-led Einstein Probe (EP) space telescope detected an exceptionally bright X-ray source whose brightness varied rapidly during a routine sky survey. Its unusual signal immediately set it apart from ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Astronomy & Space