Phys.org news

Platypuses rescued during a severe drought quickly returned to their old routines after being released back into the wild, suggesting emergency rescues can help protect vulnerable populations.

Baker's yeast is one of biotechnology's most important microorganisms. It has long been used to leaven bread and ferment beer. More recently, advances in synthetic biology have enabled engineered yeast to convert sugar into ...

Toxoplasma gondii, or Toxoplasma, is a parasite that infects hundreds of millions of people around the world. Although cases are often mild, it can cause severe symptoms in people with weakened immune systems and developing ...

In the coastal forests of a tropical Japanese island near Okinawa grows an inconspicuous plant that is easy to mistake for a mushroom. It is a non-green parasite that feeds on the roots of other plants and produces up to ...

Communities living in Colombia thousands of years ago achieved an engineering wonder of the world based on cooperation among family groups without top-down government, a new study shows. Archaeologists argue that policymakers ...

Prediction is the goal and test of all science, one might argue. Meteorologists have been curious about the inherent limits of weather forecasting ever since the dawn of numerical weather prediction in the late 1950s.

Researchers at the University of Basel and the Technical University of Munich have developed a new method to reveal the collective motion of electrons in one of the most elusive states of matter: the Wigner crystal. Using ...

Humans trust dogs to help find missing people, and bees to pollinate their crops. But scientists still don't fully understand how these animals use their extraordinary sense of smell to locate the source of an odor.

Nearly 80 years ago, a British expedition discovered the battered remains of a giant fossil on the peak of an Arctic island. Unable to take it with them, they snapped some pictures, took some bones and left the fossil to ...

El Niños and La Niñas are the third-most dominant influences on Earth's climate, after the sun and the greenhouse effect. But they haven't been easy to decipher or to predict in terms of when they will happen and what exact ...

For decades, astronomers have assumed that the Martian surface froze solid around 3 billion years ago and has stayed that way ever since. If this were really the case, any liquid water would have long since either been locked ...

In his 1927 paper, "A law of comparative judgment," the American psychologist L. L. Thurstone proposed that when people select one option among multiple alternatives, they are picking the one that has the highest value to ...