Phys.org news

Phys.org / SpaceX launches its biggest, most beefed-up Starship yet on a test flight

SpaceX launched its biggest, most powerful Starship yet on a test flight Friday, an upgraded version that NASA is counting on to land astronauts on the moon.

May 23, 2026
Phys.org / Saturday citations: Two T. rexes and new exercise guidance that scientists are not calling 'easy'

John Hammond voice: "Welcome... to Saturday Citations." We're talking about different types of T. rexes today, along with some unwelcome news about cardiovascular health, but this week also brought news about the connection ...

May 23, 2026
Phys.org / Lost elephant calf reunites with family after researchers track herd across Samburu reserve

Colorado State University Professor George Wittemyer and his research team reunited a 4-month-old elephant calf with her family after she wandered into a tourist camp alone. The orphaned elephant calf was disoriented from ...

May 22, 2026
Phys.org / Chimpanzees' unusually protracted and vulnerable adolescences

For all the diversity of the human condition, one experience is almost universally painful: adolescence. It's also unusual. Most other species pass from puberty to adulthood quickly, but humans linger for years in a transitional ...

May 22, 2026
Phys.org / Earth's outer core beneath Pacific reversed direction in 2010, satellite data reveal

The liquid iron in Earth's outer core doesn't always behave as expected. When it changed direction in an unexplained way, ESA satellites provided data on the direction of flow, helping scientists gain better insight into ...

May 22, 2026
Phys.org / AI makes a major breakthrough in a math problem that had stumped experts for decades

For nearly 80 years, mathematicians have struggled to solve a classic geometry puzzle first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946: the planar unit distance problem. The question posed by the legendary Hungarian mathematician was, on ...

May 22, 2026
Phys.org / Astronomers discover a super-Earth orbiting a nearby red dwarf

Astronomers from Italy and Brazil have investigated a nearby red dwarf star known as Ross 318 and have discovered an exoplanet orbiting this star, which is at least six times more massive than Earth. The discovery is reported ...

May 22, 2026
Phys.org / Why the intrinsic quantum effects of axion dark matter are completely undetectable

Dark matter is an elusive form of matter that almost never emits, absorbs or reflects light, while only weakly interacting with regular matter. These properties make it very difficult to detect using conventional experimental ...

May 22, 2026
Phys.org / Hi-res microscopes give biologists petabytes of data. Scientists are creating an AI assistant to make sense of it

In a cramped, windowless room on the University of California, Berkeley, campus, two bespoke microscopes—each a Swiss Army knife for high-resolution imaging—operate around the clock gathering data that will help train a game-changing ...

May 22, 2026
Phys.org / Physicists figure out how to reduce formation of 'viscous fingers'

When they reach the bottom of a soap dispenser, frugal handwashers might try adding water to the bottle to push out the last bit of soap. But usually, the water drills right through the soap and jets out an only slightly ...

May 22, 2026
Phys.org / Why we live alone—and what it means for the climate and our sense of community

Solo living in your own home places a greater strain on the planet's resources than living with others, as everyone needs their own appliances—a toaster, a washing machine and so on. The Nordic countries stand out: Almost ...

May 22, 2026
Phys.org / 'Designer' superconducting diamond: Researchers uncover path to multi-modality quantum chips

Diamond is extremely valuable to science and technology not for its sparkle but for its extreme hardness, high thermal conductivity, transparency to a large fraction of the light spectrum, and a host of other exceptional ...

May 22, 2026