Phys.org news

Scientists have directly observed a fleeting chemical reaction that creates a key ingredient in urban smog. The research offers insight into the earliest stages of pollution formation and could help improve air quality forecasting ...

A new study that combines paleoclimate data and climate models suggests that large volcanic eruptions can disrupt the relationship between atmospheric circulation patterns over the tropical Indian and Pacific oceans. In addition, ...

The next time you need to freshen up the paint on your house or apply a bit of cosmetic glitter before heading out for the night, you might want to give a quick nod to the butterflies fluttering in a nearby garden. Taking ...

Dark matter is known to make up roughly 85% of all mass in the universe, as evidenced by the way galaxies spin and how galaxy clusters are held together under gravity. Yet despite decades of searching, physicists have never ...

Intelligent people tend to perform better at school and at work, as numerous studies have shown. But what happens in domains where incentives such as good grades or financial rewards don't apply and where socioeconomic status ...

A 30-year conservation effort has helped the critically endangered Galápagos snapdragon (Galvezia leucantha subsp. leucantha) recover from just six individuals to a small, carefully tended wild population. Following tireless ...

Planets form from disks of gas and dust around young stars, but the gas needed for growth does not last forever. New observations from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) now offer a new view of how this gas escapes ...

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have demonstrated a promising new way to protect fragile quantum information using nothing but mechanical vibrations—essentially ...

Scientists have recently reconstructed the ancestral karyotype of the banana family, revealing how chromosome numbers decreased stepwise from 17 to 9–11 over evolutionary time.

With the invasive emerald ash borer beetle decimating black ash across North America, according to the U.S. Forest Service, a team led by researchers at Penn State conducted an expansive study of genetic diversity in black ...

Researchers at the University of St Andrews have gained unprecedented insight into marine mammal behavior when they become tangled in fishing nets. In a paper published Aug. 26 in Royal Society Open Science, researchers from ...

In a study recently published in Nature Communications, researchers from Berlin, Potsdam, and Jena present a new method for analyzing the epigenome. The machine-learning method identifies differentially methylated DNA regions ...