Phys.org news

Measuring conditions in volatile clouds of superheated gases known as plasmas is central to pursuing greater scientific understanding of how stars, nuclear detonations and fusion energy work. For decades, scientists have ...

Proteins are the molecular machines of cells. They are produced in protein factories called ribosomes based on their blueprint—the genetic information. Here, the basic building blocks of proteins, amino acids, are assembled ...

Muscles make up nearly 40% of the human body and power every move we make, from a child's first steps to recovery after injury. For some, however, muscle development goes awry, leading to weakness, delayed motor milestones ...

Whatever challenges life throws, mothers often know best as they guide offspring through the risky stages of early development. This scenario, familiar when applied to humans, turns out to be true for plants too, according ...

It's not what they intended to do or expected to find. They're not even all that interested in birds. When Andre Naranjo and his colleagues began work on a new study published in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, ...

A team of biochemists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has developed a faster way to identify molecules in the lab that could lead to more effective pharmaceuticals. The discovery advances the rapidly growing ...

Earth's magnetic field is generated by the churn of its liquid nickel-iron outer core, but it is not a constant feature. Every so often, the magnetic north and south poles swap places in what are called geomagnetic reversals, ...

Researchers at Wageningen University & Research have developed a new type of plastic that, according to materials theory, should not be able to exist. Its properties sit somewhere between those of glass and plastic: it is ...

A newly discovered comet has astronomers excited, with the potential to be a spectacular sight in early April. C/2026 A1 (MAPS) was spotted by a team of four amateur astronomers with a remotely operated telescope in the Atacama ...

At the 15th UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal, Canada, in 2022, nations committed to reducing the risks associated with pesticide use in agriculture by 50% by 2030. A new study by a research team from RPTUKaiserslautern-Landau, ...

Stanford researchers have created the first-ever global map of a rare earthquake type that occurs not in Earth's crust but in our planet's mantle, the layer sandwiched between the thin crust and Earth's molten core. The new ...

A combination of weakened atmospheric removal and increased emissions from warming wetlands, rivers, lakes, and agricultural land increased atmospheric methane at an unprecedented rate in the early 2020s, an international ...