Phys.org news

Proteins long known to be essential for hearing have been hiding a talent: they also act as gatekeepers that shuffle fatty molecules across cell membranes. When this newly discovered function goes haywire—due to genetic ...

Research from Adelaide University and the South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI) has shown for the first time that Australian sea lion pups can learn foraging behavior from their mothers. Social information ...

In present day Kazakhstan, both local folklore and genetic evidence found buried in royal tombs have shone a light on the region's ties to Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. New DNA analysis of ruling elites from the Golden ...

This week in the scientific process: researchers reported the first-ever shark sighted in Antarctic waters. Penguins beware! Biologists report that honey bees navigate more precisely than previously thought. And not all humans ...

There are many ways to communicate with prospective romantic partners. If you are a Japanese scarab beetle, it's a matter of distinguishing left from right. New work from U.S. and Chinese scientists, published this week in ...

The tiny fatty capsules that deliver COVID-19 mRNA vaccines into billions of arms may work better when they're a little disorganized. That's the surprising finding from researchers who developed a new way to examine these ...

Scientists have uncovered an elegant biophysical trick that tuberculosis-causing bacteria use to survive inside human cells, a discovery that could lead to new strategies for fighting one of the world's deadliest infectious ...

As space agencies prepare for human missions to the moon and Mars, scientists need to understand how the absence of gravity affects living cells. Now, a team of researchers has built a rugged, affordable microscope that can ...

Researchers have long been puzzled by the observed cooling of the eastern tropical Pacific and the Southern Ocean accompanying global warming. Existing climate models have failed to capture this pattern. At the Max Planck ...

Advances in supercomputing have made solving a long‐standing astronomical conundrum possible: How can we explain the changes in the chemical composition at the surface of red giant stars as they evolve?

Almost half a century ago, a remarkable molecule called metallocene took center stage in chemistry, earning Geoffrey Wilkinson and Ernst Otto Fischer the Nobel Prize. These organic compounds, made of a transition metal "sandwiched" ...

With a new mathematical model, a team of biophysicists has revealed fresh insights into how biological tissues are shaped by the active motion of structural imperfections known as "topological defects." Published in Physical ...