Phys.org news

In a dry shrubland, a gecko sprints toward shelter. Its greatest danger is not a predator, although hawks circle overhead and sand cats wait in ambush. Rather, its most pressing concern is dehydration. Its skin is paper-thin; ...

When one person helps, or refuses to help, another in public, this may change not only the provider's reputation but also the recipient's. A theoretical study led by Kobe University offers a simple explanation for how cooperation ...

Large language models (LLMs) are making writing styles more similar without changing the overall meaning, according to an analysis of more than 880,000 texts across different writing types published in Nature Human Behaviour. ...

To what extent can AI improve our financial decisions or steer us in the wrong direction? Researchers at the University of Bayreuth investigated this question in a new study involving 3,700 participants and fictional investment ...

At the center of our solar system, the sun influences every planet that orbits it. In two recent studies, scientists uncovered how ancient events in the sun's history may have helped create Earth's unique climate and driven ...

Plants might seem helpless when it comes to insect attacks, but they are known to employ various techniques to deter pests. One of these techniques involves sending out signals to recruit parasitoid wasps, and a new study, ...

Astronomers have found a four-star system doing something that has never been confirmed before. The system, TIC 433545934, has two close pairs of stars orbiting each other. While each pair eclipses its own two stars, as usual, ...

For decades, physicists have used a technique called Mössbauer spectroscopy to peer inside solid materials, revealing fine details of their surroundings by studying how their atomic nuclei absorb and re-emit gamma rays.

Up until two years ago, using large language models was still considered a special skill that everyone was encouraged to learn. Now, it is ubiquitous, especially in writing research papers that eventually become part of the ...

When a 10,000-year-old prairie is plowed up to plant corn or a savanna is consumed by a strip mall, these once-grassy expanses, if left to regrow, can eventually look vaguely like they did before. But a growing body of research ...

Researchers with the long-running Harvard–Cornell Archaeological Exploration of Sardis have unearthed a larger-than-life statue estimated to be nearly 2,500 years old.

In a study published in Nature on Aug. 19, a research team has enhanced superconductivity through vacuum fluctuations for the first time. The achievement marks a significant advance in controlling quantum states of matter.