Phys.org news
Phys.org / Cast away: Tracing the voyage of a plastic bottle cap and its hitchhiking marine species
Researchers have traced the journey of a plastic bottle cap recovered near the waters of southern Japan by combining data from the label, chemical clues in tiny shells and ocean current simulations. They found 307 organisms, ...
Phys.org / Heavy traffic can turn flower-rich verges into bumblebee traps, study finds
Flower-rich road verges may attract hungry bumblebees, but at the same time, they can be dangerous for the buzzing insects—if traffic is too heavy. The new research from Lund University in Sweden examined the role roadsides ...
Phys.org / Ribosome-based gene circuit lets cells read six signals and trigger responses
The molecular machinery that normally builds proteins inside cells has now taken on a new role as a "switch." A research team at POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology) has developed a new 'RNA-based smart gene ...
Phys.org / When species are forced to move: Prediction models underestimate climate-related extinction risk
Climate change threatens many plant and animal species not only when their habitats disappear as climatic conditions change, but also when those habitats shift. In a new study, a team of University of Potsdam researchers ...
Phys.org / A robot that reads bacteria by touch, without staining or chemical labels
Fast identification of bacteria is important in health care, food safety, environmental monitoring and infection control. One of the most common first steps is gram classification, which separates bacteria into gram-positive ...
Phys.org / Grasses provide most of the world's calories—but we're only now starting to learn how they grow
If we want to dismiss something as irrelevant, we'd say that it's "as boring as watching the grass grow." And yet grasses—including corn, wheat and rice—make up most of the plant-based calories humans eat, as well as most ...
Phys.org / Tiny worms reveal backup circuits that keep survival reflexes from failing
A research team led by Professor Chaogu Zheng from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), in collaboration with scientists from Princeton University and Columbia University, has discovered ...
Phys.org / Intricate molecular mechanisms help bacteria evade immune detection
Northwestern Medicine scientists have identified a novel mechanism used by the bacteria responsible for gonorrhea to evade immune detection and achieve widespread infection, according to a recent study published in the Proceedings ...
Phys.org / Capturing the cosmic 'drift' before a star is born
Stars like our sun are formed from the collapse of stellar objects called prestellar cores, cold and dense concentrations of gas and dust held together by gravity. While many questions remain about the exact mechanisms of ...
Dialog / Dark energy flips its sign, but the Hubble tension refuses to budge
For nearly a century, astronomers have known that the universe is expanding. In the late 1990s, two independent teams, the Supernova Cosmology Project, led by Saul Perlmutter, and the High-Z Supernova Search Team, led by ...
Phys.org / Darwin's 150‑year‑old hillside steps mystery may have a new answer from virtual grazing animals
Steep hillsides and mountainsides in many regions worldwide are often covered in characteristic step-like patterns, also known as terracettes. These repeating landforms have fascinated scientists for more than a century, ...
Phys.org / Why natural forests survive heat waves better than planted forests
When a record-breaking drought and heat wave swept across China's Yangtze River Basin in 2022, forests across the region faced an extreme test. The event provided a rare opportunity for researchers to test how different forests ...
