Phys.org news

The pulp and paper industry, which manufactures everything from tissue paper to cardboard, also generates a significant yet often overlooked byproduct—a complex polymer called lignin. Around 100 million tons of lignin are ...

A shape that captured worldwide attention for solving a decades-old mathematical puzzle has returned to the spotlight. While the shape's properties allowed it to solve previous puzzles, little is known about its other associated ...

Since their discovery by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope in 2022, little red dots (LRDs) have been the subject of great interest to astronomers. Understanding the nature of these extremely distant, compact red sources has ...

Deploying ocean iron fertilization—a strategy for carbon dioxide capture—in higher latitudes rather than near the equator could reduce environmental impacts while still achieving removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, ...

Resolving a long-standing problem in semiconductor physics and optoelectronics, a team of researchers from Skoltech—a VEB.RF group institution—and their colleagues from ITMO University and HSE University have for the first ...

For decades, a 30 million-year-old fossil sat entombed in rock in an Oregon museum collection. When it was first found, paleontologists thought it might be an early relative of sheep, camels and pigs, whose fossilized skeletons ...

As NASA's Curiosity rover recently began climbing a Martian valley nicknamed "Valle Grande," it sent back images that were a familiar sight to mission scientists: honeycomb-like textures called polygonal fractures, each about ...

As materials become thinner—now reaching the thickness of single atoms—it has become increasingly difficult to create sufficiently large sheets and transfer them without cracking them into tiny flakes. Recent work by a broad ...

Scientists from China, Europe and the U.S., including Dr. Stephan Spiekman, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart and the University of Hohenheim, have described a fossil of the long-necked marine ...

Scientists at the Universities of Liverpool and Oxford have developed a promising new way to kill antibiotic-resistant strains of Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacterium that causes gonorrhea, using a targeted therapy that is ...

Forest trees growing in air containing higher levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) radically change the way they "cycle" nitrogen, a key plant nutrient, with implications for forests as a nature-based climate solution.

Plants need nitrogen fertilizers, which are usually ammonia-based. Ammonia is therefore one of the most important chemical products. However, its production is currently extremely energy-intensive. An international team from ...