Phys.org news

Scientists have discovered that beneficial root-dwelling fungi boost plant resilience to disease by remodeling the plant cell membrane at pathogen infection sites—offering critical new insights into how plants coordinate ...

Over the past 50 years, the lyrics of popular songs in the U.S. have become simpler, more negative, and contain more stress-related words, according to an analysis published in Scientific Reports. The authors suggest that ...

Machine learning is transforming many scientific fields, including computational materials science. For about two decades, scientists have been using it to make accurate yet inexpensive calculations of interatomic potentials, ...

In an age of rising sea levels, as polar ice sheets melt in a climate warmed by fossil fuel emissions, climate modelers are racing to understand what the future might hold for coastlines around the world. But uncertainties ...

Astronomers have produced the first continuous, two-dimensional maps of the outer edge of the sun's atmosphere, a shifting, frothy boundary that marks where solar winds escape the sun's magnetic grasp. By combining the maps ...

Biphenomycins, natural products derived from bacteria, show excellent antimicrobial activity, but have long remained out of reach for drug development. The main obstacle was the limited understanding of how these compounds ...

Killer whales or orca (Orcinus orca) have been observed hunting with Pacific white-sided dolphins (Lagenorhynchus obliquidens) in the waters off British Columbia, Canada, and sharing fish scraps with them after making a kill, ...

Florida State University researchers have created a new crystalline material with unusual magnetic patterns that could be used for breakthroughs in data storage and quantum technologies.

Sea urchins are ecosystem engineers, the marine equivalent of mega-herbivores on land. By grazing and shredding seaweed and seagrass, they control algal growth and promote the survival of slow-growing organisms like corals ...

Using a dual-cation substitution approach, researchers at Science Tokyo introduced ferromagnetism into bismuth ferrite, a well-known and promising multiferroic material for next-generation memory technologies. By replacing ...

The energy that plants capture from sunlight through photosynthesis provides the source of nearly all of humanity's food. Yet the process of photosynthesis has inefficiencies that limit crop productivity, especially in a ...

The perception of a chemist varies. Some might imagine the "mad scientist" from old cartoons—a white-haired older man working with beakers in his lab—but as that cliche fades, the reality of what constitutes a chemist's ...