Phys.org news

People have long said that "bread is life." Now, researchers at Tufts University are using the bubbling mixtures of flour and water known as sourdough starters to explore what shapes life at the microscopic level. Their findings, ...

Astronomers have long searched for life within a rather narrow ring around a star, the "habitable zone," where a planet should be neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water. A new study argues that this ring is too strict: ...

Men assess potential rivals that have a larger penis as more of a threat, both physically and sexually, according to a study by Upama Aich at the University of Western Australia and colleagues, published in PLOS Biology.

The astronauts evacuated last week from the International Space Station say a portable ultrasound machine came in "super handy" during the medical crisis.

Greenland, which has been prominently in the news in recent days, hosts a vast ice sheet. If it melts, it will become one of the largest contributors to global sea-level rise. Under a high-emissions scenario, the Greenland ...

University of Queensland researchers say the discovery of a new stress reduction role for a naturally occurring molecule in the body could lead to new drugs and treatment for metabolic disorders and aging.

Every time we speak, we're improvising. "Humans possess a remarkable ability to talk about almost anything, sometimes putting words together into never-before-spoken or -written sentences," said Morten H. Christiansen, the ...

Many mammal populations in European and North American zoos are aging—a trend that jeopardizes the long-term viability of so-called reserve populations and, with it, a core mission of modern zoos in global species conservation. ...

Inserting, removing or swapping individual atoms from the core of a molecule is a long-standing challenge in chemistry. This process, called skeletal editing, can dramatically speed up drug discovery or be applied for upcycling ...

Scientists analyzing data from heavy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—the world's most powerful particle collider, located at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research—have new evidence that ...

Organic matter carried in rivers to the Russian part of the Arctic Ocean may be creating more clouds and keeping the region cooler, a new study has found.

Scientists have recovered a genome of Treponema pallidum—the bacterium whose subspecies today are responsible for four treponemal diseases, including syphilis—from 5,500-year-old human remains in Sabana de Bogotá, Colombia. ...