Phys.org news

Snakes may well be one of nature's greatest predators, capable of eating whole deer or even crocodiles, but just as impressive is that they can go months, or even a whole year, without a single meal. And now an international ...

You can tell a lot about a material based on the type of light shining at it: Optical light illuminates a material's surface, while X-rays reveal its internal structures and infrared captures a material's radiating heat. ...

Astronomers have strengthened long-standing predictions that massive runaway stars could have originated in binary pairs, and were dramatically ejected into space when their companion stars underwent supernova explosions. ...

When some ancient Romans were feeling a little under the weather, they were treated with human feces. While this practice was mentioned in ancient Greco-Roman medical texts by figures such as Pliny the Elder, there was no ...

Should we protect an emblematic species if it may come at the cost of another one—particularly in ecosystems that are still recovering from human impacts? This is the conservation dilemma facing Monte Leon National Park, ...

Great things can come from failure when it comes to geology. The Midcontinent rift formed about 1.1 billion years ago and runs smack in the middle of the United States at the Great Lakes. The rift failed to completely rupture, ...

That low-frequency fuzz that can bedevil cellphone calls has to do with how electrons move through and interact in materials at the smallest scale. The electronic flicker noise is often caused by interruptions in the flow ...

Two-dimensional (2D) materials promise revolutionary advances in electronics and photonics, but many of the most interesting candidates degrade within seconds of air exposure, making them nearly impossible to study or integrate ...

Forest soils have an important role in protecting our climate: They remove large quantities of methane—a powerful greenhouse gas—from our atmosphere. Researchers from the University of Göttingen and the Baden-Württemberg ...

A new study challenges the idea that climate change drove early human innovation. Instead, researchers find that cultural developments arose under different environmental conditions, shaped by movement, interaction, and knowledge ...

Scientists have captured a rare view of one of the ocean's least understood whales—without ever seeing it. By listening to the sounds beaked whales naturally produce, researchers have reconstructed a three-dimensional picture ...

For decades, scientists have tried to answer a simple question: why be honest when deception is possible? Whether it is a peacock's tail, a stag's roar, or a human's résumé, signals are means to influence others by transmitting ...