Phys.org news

Fragmented bones and skull pieces found in hearths, beneath floors and in other domestic settings in early Scandinavian settlement sites are providing fresh insights into Iron Age and Viking Age violence.

A Jupiter-sized world just 7.5 light-years away is cloudy, chemically complex and, it turns out, more like home than anyone expected. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, Brittany Miles, assistant astronomer at the University ...

Mountains preserve evidence of ancient oceans, moving continents and tectonic processes that have shaped Earth over millions of years. Later deformation, erosion and burial, however, can obscure important parts of this geological ...

Majestic African antelopes known as gemsbok have been roaming the U.S. Southwest since their introduction in the 1960s and 1970s. Brought to New Mexico as a game species for hunting, gemsbok quickly settled in, expanding ...

Octopuses, squid and cuttlefish, collectively known as coleoid cephalopods, have evolved exceptionally large and elaborately structured nervous systems capable of complex behaviors such as problem-solving and rapid camouflage. ...

The European nightjar (Caprimulgus europaeus) is a nocturnal migratory bird that travels between Europe and southern Africa each year. However, its wings are not only used for long-distance journeys. When hunting insects, ...

The fact that ecosystems change is nothing new. What is new, however, is the speed and scale at which new species communities are emerging as a result of climate change. Processes that once unfolded over centuries or even ...

Earlier this week, OpenAI published a trove of hundreds of mathematical results it claimed could "push the frontier of human knowledge." Produced largely by an unreleased artificial intelligence (AI) model, the 722 papers ...

Every black hole hides a question at its center. Einstein's theory predicts that whatever falls in is crushed into a singularity, a point of infinite density where the theory itself breaks down. Most physicists expect quantum ...

When a dying star runs out of fuel and sheds its outer layers, its remaining core can become an approximately Earth-sized, extremely dense stellar remnant called a white dwarf. For a white dwarf that is not strongly rotating ...

Filmmaker and outdoorsperson Quinn Barabash recently made headlines when he found a swordfish carcass nearly two meters (6.6 feet) long on the remote shores of Haida Gwaii in northern British Columbia.

NASA's SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the universe, Epoch of Reionization, and ices Explorer) space telescope is shedding light on brown dwarfs, celestial objects that blur the line between stars and exoplanets. ...