Phys.org news

Every year, over 100 billion nitrile rubber gloves are produced. They are made from synthetic polymers—a material chemically related to plastic and derived from crude oil. The vast majority is used in the health care sector, ...

Particles in the atmosphere, known as aerosols, cool the climate by acting as cloud condensation nuclei. The more cloud droplets form around these particles, the less sunlight penetrates a cloud. This cools the climate, although ...

Tiny insects trapped in amber could tell us a great deal about their roles in past ecosystems: pollinators, parasites, predators, and prey. But how many of the insects preserved alongside each other reflect interactions during ...

Getting an up-close view of life at the cellular level can be as simple as placing onion skin under a microscope and adjusting the knobs. Peering deeper, into the heart of the atoms within, isn't as easy. It requires peeling ...

Planetary systems such as our solar system take hundreds of millions of years to evolve. Since humanity has only existed for a sliver of that time, astronomers have only observed planetary systems at birth or, more often, ...

Duckweed is the fastest-growing flowering plant, but new knowledge of duckweed genetics discovered by Adelaide University researchers could lead to even faster growing rates. The research team, led by Professor Nikolai Borisjuk ...

A research team at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has analyzed 40 years of data covering about 1,500 tropical cyclones and discovered that average rain rates surge by more than 20% in the 60 hours ...

A research team from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has developed GrainBot, an AI-enabled toolkit that automatically extracts and quantifies multiple microstructural features from microscopy images. ...

Yale junior Donglin Wu leads a new study showing that some of the biggest stars in the universe shed some of the smallest dust particles. It's fitting that Wu's first major scientific journal article as lead author focuses ...

A protein that is a key modulator of fat, glucose and cholesterol levels in the body usually works in tandem with another protein, but new research shows it can also work with an unexpected partner—itself. A team of Penn ...

Cyanobacteria are among the most significant life forms in the history of our planet. As one of the first organisms to produce oxygen through photosynthesis, they shaped early Earth and created the atmosphere in which complex ...

A study reveals how two proteins cooperate in a key early step of antiviral detection, as reported by researchers at Science Tokyo. Using cryo-electron microscopy and high-speed atomic force microscopy, they found that LGP2 ...