Phys.org news
Phys.org / Ig Nobel Prize winners reveal why babies smell better than teenagers
Babies smell wonderful—at least to their parents. An international research team of Ilona Croy, Tomasz Frackowiak, Thomas Hummel and Agnieszka Sorokowska investigated why teenagers lose this special olfactory advantage and ...
Phys.org / From peas to potatoes, AI identifies nearly 800 promising plant proteins for food and cosmetics
Scientists from Leeds' School of Food Science and Nutrition have developed an advanced AI process that can rapidly identify plant proteins capable of acting as emulsifiers from tens of millions of initial candidates. To date, ...
Phys.org / The Arctic melt season is a week longer now than it was in the 1980s, new research on sea ice trends shows
Relatively few people have been to the Arctic, and even fewer have set foot in Antarctica. Most people rely on imagination and the media to visualize these landscapes and the ways they are changing.
Phys.org / Microbes—dead or alive—can be early indicators of soil health under regenerative farming
Researchers have demonstrated a series of biological tests that could serve as "proxies" for measuring how different regenerative agriculture practices could improve soil carbon—years before it would be possible to measure ...
Phys.org / Nanoscale multiferroic materials open the path to efficient magnetic memory technology
With the rapid spread of cloud computing, artificial intelligence and data centers, global energy consumption is rising to new heights. A promising way to reduce this burden is to develop memory devices that store information ...
Phys.org / 'Green thumb' molecule helps leaf stalks grow in crowded conditions
Potassium (K) is one of the three essential nutrients for plants. It plays a critical role in a wide range of processes, including cell growth, photosynthesis and regulation of water balance. Plants take up K from the soil ...
Phys.org / Built to last or break down: Ring size tunes biodegradable plastic lifetimes
Biodegradable plastics should be tough enough for use yet able to break down at an appropriate rate afterward. Researchers at the University of Osaka show that changing the size of rings threaded onto a biodegradable polymer ...
Phys.org / Predictive tools can confuse rare mutations with dangerous ones
When a patient's DNA is read, it is compared with a reference version of the human genome. This allows geneticists and rare disease experts to look at a list of places where the patient's DNA differs. Most variations will ...
Phys.org / Why doesn't Venus have a moon? A new study may have the answer
Venus is one of the solar system's most unusual planets. It may sometimes be called "Earth's twin" because of its similar size and density, but it rotates on its axis in the opposite direction of most planets, has surface ...
Phys.org / Salt may have helped turn Earth into a frozen world 700 million years ago
Earth may have been pushed deeper into a global deep freeze by something surprisingly ordinary: salt. Around 700 million years ago, Earth entered periods of extreme glaciation known as Snowball Earth, when ice is thought ...
Phys.org / Antarctic expedition reveals why Southern Ocean clouds remain one of climate science's greatest challenges
The Southern Ocean plays a pivotal role in regulating Earth's climate, yet the clouds that blanket this remote region remain among the least understood features in atmospheric science. By controlling both incoming sunlight ...
Phys.org / Away from grand temples, a recycled Bronze Age burial mound became the focus of a Roman religious complex
The Romans were master engineers, building sprawling road networks, towering aqueducts and arenas across their empire. They were also good at recycling. New research has revealed that they turned the remains of a 4,000-year-old ...
