Phys.org news

The European Space Agency's Swarm mission detected a large but temporary spike of high-energy protons at Earth's poles during a geomagnetic storm in November. It did this not with the scientific instruments for measuring ...

Over the past 50 years, the lyrics of popular songs in the U.S. have become simpler, more negative, and contain more stress-related words, according to an analysis published in Scientific Reports. The authors suggest that ...

Killer whales or orca (Orcinus orca) have been observed hunting with Pacific white-sided dolphins (Lagenorhynchus obliquidens) in the waters off British Columbia, Canada, and sharing fish scraps with them after making a kill, ...

Researchers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have detected the strongest evidence yet for an atmosphere on a rocky planet outside our solar system.

Researchers at the University of Jyväskylä have discovered a simple way to program synthetic molecules so they can form specific spiral-like structures by embedding instructions directly into their sequence. This breakthrough ...

Florida State University researchers have created a new crystalline material with unusual magnetic patterns that could be used for breakthroughs in data storage and quantum technologies.

Red-backed shrikes fly thousands of kilometers to reach Africa—and they do so with astonishing precision. Aided by new technology, researchers at Lund University in Sweden have been able to track the birds' journeys in ...

Spillovers from protected areas such as national parks and wildlife reserves can play a significant role in boosting biodiversity beyond their boundaries with potential benefits to people through ecosystem services such as ...

Sea urchins are ecosystem engineers, the marine equivalent of mega-herbivores on land. By grazing and shredding seaweed and seagrass, they control algal growth and promote the survival of slow-growing organisms like corals ...

Dark matter is an elusive type of matter that does not emit, reflect or absorb light, yet is estimated to account for most of the universe's mass. Over the past decades, many physicists worldwide have been trying to detect ...

The cosmos has served up a gift for a group of scientists who have been searching for one of the most elusive phenomena in the night sky. Their study, presented in Science Advances, reports on the very first observations ...

Plastics are made from crude oil and petroleum by-products, so a team of scientists decided to explore if they could turn waste cooking oil into a useful plastic material, and they succeeded.