Phys.org news

Crystals are usually imagined as rigid objects with flat faces and straight edges. A research team led by the University of Osaka has recently created a porous crystal that grows into a spring-like helix. The team also found ...

Lichens colonize trees and rocks all over the world. They are symbiotic communities between fungi and photosynthetically active green algae or cyanobacteria, in which both partners benefit from each other: The fungal partner ...

Very small biological samples and even individual biomolecules can now be examined under near-physiological conditions with high confidence at the BESSY II infrared beamline using a newly validated and improved technique: ...

By evaluating the health of waterways across the U.S., researchers have identified a network encompassing about one-third of rivers and streams that, if conserved and restored, could sustain the nation's freshwater biodiversity ...

From social media to the streets of Washington, D.C., the organized white nationalist movement has become more visible in the United States over the past few decades. But the extent of this extremist movement's appeal to ...

Whether on a windowpane at home or during the industrial cleaning of computer chips: droplets sliding over solid surfaces become electrically charged. Yet the physical mechanism behind this charging remains a subject of debate. ...

Physicists at Leipzig University and Charles University in Prague have developed a method for changing the swimming style of tiny artificial microswimmers in real time. They can make a single microscopic particle switch at ...

Republicans and conservatives are more likely than Democrats or liberals to justify political violence in 17 surveyed situations, according to a study published in PLOS One by Garen J. Wintemute of the University of California, ...

Breeding crops for farming systems rather than yield alone could exploit untapped genetic potential and help farmers cut fertilizer bills.

Our sense of taste is critical for survival, alerting us to substances that provide vital nutrients and those that might poison us. Now, a team led by researchers from the University of Osaka has discovered how one such taste ...

Through joint research with the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Tokyo, NIMS for the first time experimentally demonstrated friction completely independent of sliding velocity—an ideal that had never been realized—by ...

Soft materials such as colloidal suspensions, emulsions, foams and gels often display complex and unusual behaviors compared with ordinary solids or liquids. From a mechanical point of view, for instance, they can resist ...