Phys.org news

Right whales forage near the water's surface at night, putting them at greater risk of potentially fatal collisions with boats, Jay Kirkham at Dalhousie University, Canada, and colleagues report Sept. 16, 2026, in the journal ...

Put a drop of water into a very hot pan, and it can skitter across the surface on a cushion of vapor. This is known as the Leidenfrost effect. Now, scientists have observed a related phenomenon involving ice and an extremely ...

Sir John Gage, a key figure in Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, saved a dangerous Catholic book from likely destruction, a new study suggests. The identification of six lost pages of a medieval bestseller—illicitly ...

Crystals are usually imagined as rigid objects with flat faces and straight edges. A research team led by the University of Osaka has recently created a porous crystal that grows into a spring-like helix. The team also found ...

Archaeologists have analyzed insect remains preserved in the 7th to 9th centuries AD funerary cave of Cruz de la Esquina, Gran Canaria, and found that it was used by the island's Indigenous people for food storage before ...

A new species of snake that feeds exclusively on birds' eggs has been discovered in the Harenna Forest in Ethiopia, one of the last substantial tracts of natural forest left in the Horn of Africa.

Scientists have discovered several 518-million-year-old fossils that reshape understanding of the origins of the animal group containing starfish. The fossils show that these animals ate using tentacles rather than passively ...

The ocean's aphotic zone—the dark, high-pressure region below the surface, where sunlight cannot reach—is home to a vast wealth of microbial life. Yet scientists know relatively little about the genetic makeup, growth and ...

Lichens colonize trees and rocks all over the world. They are symbiotic communities between fungi and photosynthetically active green algae or cyanobacteria, in which both partners benefit from each other: The fungal partner ...

Sexual reproduction usually reshuffles genetic information, creating offspring that differ from their parents. But one small plant takes an unexpected route. In a new study published in Nature, an international team led by ...

A 178-year-old mystery surrounding one of the earliest recorded examples of space weather affecting technology has been solved by an international team led by Lancaster University.

As the climate warms, people are more exposed to heat stress, which depresses productivity and the global economy. A study from the University of California, Davis, quantifies the cost of heat stress on global labor.