Phys.org news

Time is almost up on the way we track each second of the day, with optical atomic clocks set to redefine the way the world measures one second in the near future. Researchers from Adelaide University worked with the National ...

Signs of Sir Terry Pratchett's dementia may have been present in his writing a decade before his official diagnosis, new research has found. Researchers have examined the lexical diversity—a measure of how varied an author's ...

This week, researchers identified the role of the brain's protein clean-up system in dementia. Fecal transplants show promising benefits in treating multiple cancer types. And biologists found that saltwater crocodiles traveled ...

The cells in our bodies move in groups during biological processes such as wound healing and tissue development—but because of resistance, or viscosity, those cells can't just neatly glide past each other.

King cobras are the world's longest venomous snakes. So, imagine seeing one a few feet away as you embark on a train in India. The Western Ghats King Cobra (Ophiophagus kaalinga)—a vulnerable king cobra species found in ...

Astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets around single stars, but few around binary stars—even though both types of stars are equally common. Physicists can now explain the dearth.

Scientists have uncovered a 400-million-year-old genetic secret that gave spiders the ability to produce silk and weave their webs. Spiders didn't begin their journey on Earth in the same way as they are known today. Arthropods ...

When waves are moving across ice-covered seas, they can cause sheets of ice to bend and ultimately break. Understanding the processes underlying these wave-induced ice fractures and predicting when they will occur could help ...

NASA has delayed astronauts' upcoming trip to the moon because of near-freezing temperatures expected at the launch site.

Although DNA is tightly packed and protected within the cell nucleus, it is constantly threatened by damage from normal metabolic processes or external stressors such as radiation or chemical substances. To counteract this, ...

Researchers from Regensburg and Birmingham have overcome a fundamental limitation of optical microscopy. With the help of quantum mechanical effects, they succeeded for the first time in performing optical measurements with ...

Babies and very young sauropods—the long-necked, long-tailed plant-eaters that in adulthood were the largest animals to have ever walked on land—were a key food sustaining predators in the Late Jurassic, according to ...