Phys.org news

For decades, wildlife traffickers have illegally captured and sold hundreds of thousands of wild parrots native to Mexico. Despite changes to international wildlife laws, the conservation status of these birds has continued ...

Antarctica is one of the driest, coldest places on Earth. Very little life survives its extremes. In the soils scattered around the frozen ice sheets, however, communities of microbes do survive. And one of the keys to their ...

Bacteria, too, depend on good neighborly relations: A new study by the Osnabrück University, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Cambridge in England, shows that soil bacteria live in beneficial communities ...

The Land Institute and HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, in collaboration with key partners, have assembled the first chromosome-scale, haplotype-phased genomes for Silphium integrifolium (rosinweed, silflower) and ...

A new study has reconciled a long-standing paradox in the South Asian summer monsoon cycle. Climate scientists have discovered why geological records from land and sea have told opposite stories about monsoons throughout ...

Under global warming, scientists have widely expected tropical cyclones (including typhoons and hurricanes) to bring more intense and frequent rainfall. The underlying physics seems intuitive: Rising temperatures allow the ...

What happens during a wildfire? The short answer is: much more than we know. As wildfires burn through trees, grasses and other vegetation, heat from the flames sets off thousands of chemical reactions at once. Molecules ...

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have used a theoretical framework to derive design rules for creating new thermoelectric materials. The efficiency of converting thermal energy to electricity is often determined ...

A study conducted in the Swiss Alps by the University of Lausanne and the University of Milan shows that glacier retreat and changing vegetation could influence the spread of certain pathogens between honeybees and wild bees.

The future of Maine's lobster industry may depend on a creature the size of a sesame seed. Researchers at the University of Maine have discovered that planktonic baby lobsters, or larvae, preferentially feed on Calanus finmarchicus, ...

What helps plants cope better with drought? With heat waves and periods of extreme drought becoming increasingly common worldwide, the need for drought-tolerant plants is increasingly urgent. With the help of bacteria, plants ...

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, developing surfaces that can inactivate viruses upon contact has become an important goal in public health care. Ideally, such surfaces would work on their own without requiring chemical disinfectants, ...