Phys.org news

What would it take to instantly transform a material from an electrical insulator into a conductive state without ever touching it? Using ultrafast laser pulses and powerful X-rays, scientists at the National Synchrotron ...

With El Niño-driven heat and prolonged dry spells threatening rice production, scientists from Japan's National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO), other Japanese research institutions and the International ...

A team of U.S. researchers has designed a passive quantum error correction technique that enables qubits to correct their own errors. Demonstrated by Shruti Shirol and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, ...

Trinity's Prof. Stefan Sint, along with collaborators from Germany, Spain and Italy, has published the most precise determination to date of the strong coupling constant. This parameter governs the interactions between quarks ...

A molecular geneticist at Montana State University has discovered a cellular process once believed impossible by scientists—the creation of the amino acid cysteine within a living cell when the cell's primary systems for ...

Archaeologists have discovered a game board carved into the steps of a medieval bathhouse in the Moroccan town of Walīla (the Roman city of Volubilis). The find is a rare example of a medieval game board that can be securely ...

Listening to someone who disagrees with you on a controversial topic, but shares basic values, might not change your mind—but it could moderate an extreme position, reducing polarization, new Cornell economics research finds.

Prime editing can potentially repair the vast majority of known disease-causing human mutations, but the technology, first developed in 2019, has not yet been widely used in the body, or in vivo, to treat genetic disease. ...

The vaquita (Phocoena sinus), an elusive porpoise found only in the shallow waters of Mexico's northern Gulf of California, is one of the rarest and most endangered marine mammals on Earth. Measuring about 5 feet (1.5 meters) ...

The ability to control the movement of negatively charged particles (i.e., electrons) is central to the functioning of all modern electronic devices. This control is typically attained using a gate, an electrode via which ...

For more than a century, chemists have been building complex molecules step by step—bond by bond, atom by atom. But what if, instead of painstakingly reassembling molecules, they could be directly "rewritten"? This is exactly ...

Changes in wind patterns play the leading role in influencing often devastating tropical rainfall changes, rather than simply the warming atmosphere holding more moisture, according to new research.