Phys.org news

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.

Listening to someone who disagrees with you on a controversial topic, but shares basic values, might not change your mind—but it could moderate an extreme position, reducing polarization, new Cornell economics research finds.

A new technology allows metal circuits floating on water to be transferred directly onto any desired surface. A South Korean research team has introduced a novel technique capable of transferring ultra-fine nanocircuits onto ...

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 ...

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 ...

Most people have seen nylon listed as a material on their clothing tags, but nylon is used in an array of other products, too, including automotive parts, wire insulation and medical supplies. Unfortunately, one of the building ...

Archaeologists digging at an Inca site on the arid coast of southern Peru have unearthed two rare, roughly 500-year-old freeze-dried potatoes. The potatoes are among the only ones found in more than a century and would have ...

Digital matching platforms—from professional networking to ride-sharing and accommodation services—add value by bringing supply and demand into balance. But deep-seated asymmetries can prove difficult to expunge, causing ...

Many insects will eat almost anything in their sight, such as certain beetles, grasshoppers and locusts, while others are remarkably picky eaters. For example, numerous insect herbivores will feed only on a single plant family ...

Citizen science data from the popular platform iNaturalist has helped uncover the evolution of parental guarding behavior in harvestmen spiders, as shown in research published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

One of the most fascinating aspects of physics is that nature often behaves in ways that seem completely counterintuitive. A good example comes from ultrathin materials. If I take a sheet of material and make it thinner ...

A method to interpret artificial intelligence (AI) models used in materials discovery by analyzing their learned features has been developed by researchers from Japan. The method extracts key features from an AI model trained ...