Phys.org news

For more than a century, chemists have been building complex molecules step by step—bond by bond, atom by atom. But what if, instead of painstakingly reassembling molecules, they could be directly "rewritten"? This is exactly ...

The aftermath of a supernova, a stellar explosion, is usually a slowly fading cloud of hot gas. So when astronomers pointed NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory at the nearby galaxy Messier 83 (M83), they did not expect to find ...

What would it take to instantly transform a material from an electrical insulator into a conductive state without ever touching it? Using ultrafast laser pulses and powerful X-rays, scientists at the National Synchrotron ...

When stars like our sun age, they puff up into red giants. Their bubbling outer mass gradually escapes into space, and their remaining cores contract into white dwarfs. Since most stars end their lives this way, the universe ...

In the early universe, the first galaxies began to take shape roughly a million years after the Big Bang. Within these young systems, stars formed from vast reservoirs of cold gas, gradually building the structures we see ...

In a seismic shift since Kew's inaugural State of the World report 10 years ago, the sixth State of the World's Plants and Fungi report, published June 16, 2026, brings together expertise from more than 400 scientists across ...

Bee species that nest in plant stems appear to be at the greatest short-term risk from increasing temperatures due to climate change, while those that nest in the ground are better able to evade extreme heat, according to ...

A new study finds that plants respond to injury by actively redirecting sugars to damaged tissues, helping fuel the regeneration process. Using a fluorescent sensor to track sugar movement in living plants, researchers have ...

Changes in wind patterns play the leading role in influencing often devastating tropical rainfall changes, rather than simply the warming atmosphere holding more moisture, according to new research.

The warm Gulf Stream is maintained by coldness. The Barents Sea is a cooling machine. To predict how ocean currents in the Atlantic Ocean may develop, one needs to know what drives them. The hunt for driving forces has led ...

A new single-protein analysis technique gives researchers an unprecedented ability to study proteins called scramblases, which have critical roles in biology. The development of the new technique, in a study led by investigators ...

University of Mississippi researchers are studying how plants respond to heat at the molecular level, an important consideration for farmers, businesses and policymakers as global temperatures rise.