Phys.org news

When trying to attract and recognize potential mates, animals are known to rely on various signals, traits and behaviors. In the case of birds, these signals can typically include a wide range of sounds—such as trills, whistles, ...

Picture a mouse taking rapid, staccato sniffs of a crumb it's found while foraging for food. Now compare that with a human leaning in for a single, deep inhale to gauge whether a cantaloupe is ripe. New research from Northwestern ...

Werner Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle describes one of the most intriguing features of quantum physics: certain pairs of physical quantities describing a particle, such as position and momentum, cannot simultaneously ...

Diseases spread by insects in the Brazilian Amazon are not randomly distributed but form distinct regional patterns linked to land use, rural economies and environmental change, according to new research led by the Environmental ...

Short-lived sources of radio radiation in the sky, known as radio transients, can originate in the vicinity of supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies. They are the result of processes that take place under extreme ...

A new ancient DNA study published in Science Advances provides evidence that political power among Scythian elites may have been inherited through family lineages that extended across multiple burial sites. By combining archaeology, ...

Scientists have grown wheat containing supersized starch granules—a leap forward in biological engineering with potential benefits for our daily diets and a raft of industrial applications.

Why do people make the choices they do? Researchers from the Center Synergy of Systems (SynoSys) at TUD Dresden University of Technology, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and the University of Basel present ...

Researchers have spent decades—and billions of dollars—sequencing animal and crop genomes, but fungi have historically been the forgotten middle child of genomics, only noticed when they're ruining bread or colonizing toes.

Neutrinos: They have no electric charge, pass through matter like a ghost and are so light they were initially thought to have zero mass. These are just some of the traits that make them so difficult to detect. Research on ...

Patients in hospitals generally trust the nursing staff. After all, they have undergone training and, in some cases, have several years of professional experience. In the case of carpenter ants, it is not nursing expertise ...

The Congo River is the second-largest river in the world, releasing an average of 40,000 cubic meters of water per second into the Atlantic Ocean. This huge discharge rate creates a large plume of fresh water that fans out ...