Phys.org news

Prediction is the goal and test of all science, one might argue. Meteorologists have been curious about the inherent limits of weather forecasting ever since the dawn of numerical weather prediction in the late 1950s.

Communities living in Colombia thousands of years ago achieved an engineering wonder of the world based on cooperation among family groups without top-down government, a new study shows. Archaeologists argue that policymakers ...

Researchers at the University of Basel and the Technical University of Munich have developed a new method to reveal the collective motion of electrons in one of the most elusive states of matter: the Wigner crystal. Using ...

In the coastal forests of a tropical Japanese island near Okinawa grows an inconspicuous plant that is easy to mistake for a mushroom. It is a non-green parasite that feeds on the roots of other plants and produces up to ...

For decades, astronomers have assumed that the Martian surface froze solid around 3 billion years ago and has stayed that way ever since. If this were really the case, any liquid water would have long since either been locked ...

Nearly 80 years ago, a British expedition discovered the battered remains of a giant fossil on the peak of an Arctic island. Unable to take it with them, they snapped some pictures, took some bones and left the fossil to ...

El Niños and La Niñas are the third-most dominant influences on Earth's climate, after the sun and the greenhouse effect. But they haven't been easy to decipher or to predict in terms of when they will happen and what exact ...

Reproduction is central to the survival of all living organisms. Over millions of years, animal species on Earth have evolved a remarkable variety of mating strategies, ranging from physical fights with competitors to mesmerizing ...

In a world first, scientists led by a team from Stanford University have created 16 viable viruses that do not exist in nature and were designed by AI. Their experiment, which is published in Science, could help in the fight ...

Tropical cyclones are among the most destructive natural forces on the planet, but predicting where they will go and how strong they will become is beset by challenges. Current methods are often good at tracking storm paths ...

Hold on to your telescopes: The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team has released the largest-ever 2D color map of the universe. The 5.6-trillion-pixel map contains nearly 4 billion celestial objects, primarily stars and galaxies. ...

In his 1927 paper, "A law of comparative judgment," the American psychologist L. L. Thurstone proposed that when people select one option among multiple alternatives, they are picking the one that has the highest value to ...