Phys.org news

In the deepest region of the Earth's mantle, just above the core, much of the material consists of crystals of magnesium oxide. In larger rocky exoplanets called super-Earths, the higher pressures in the lower mantle may ...

Identifying individual animals in the wild has long meant tagging, branding or clipping. For amphibians, the standard approach has often been toe-clipping, a procedure that can affect survival, physiology and behavior. A ...

A mother bat has one crucial challenge: find her own babies among hundreds of other bats in the colony. Making sure she cares for and nurses only her own offspring is important to ensuring their survival. Among Japanese house ...

Unlike classical physics, quantum mechanics generally cannot tell us exactly what will happen in an individual event. Instead, it predicts the probabilities of different outcomes. As one of the theory's early pioneers, Erwin ...

Two thousand years ago, the Arctic remnants of a once-vast ice sheet started to grow again. It was the beginning of a new glacial period, more conversationally known as the next ice age—but by the 1960s, summer temperatures ...

Female mosquitoes need blood to produce eggs. While much research has focused on how these hungry mosquitoes find their targets, less is known about what happens after they land on skin. Yet, a better understanding may allow ...

A new study suggests that some of the heaviest rocky planets ever reported may not be as heavy as they look. These so-called 'mega-Earths,' rocky planets weighing more than about 10 Earths, could be an illusion created by ...

Every storybook opens a window for our imagination to be freed from the reality of the world around us and escape into the fictional world. While the author's words act as a guide, everyone experiences fiction in their own ...

Semiconductors with wider bandgaps could pave the way for smaller, more efficient electronics that can handle far higher voltages, but the wider this gap becomes, the harder it is to control how well a material conducts electricity. ...

Ten years ago, in 2016, a metal detectorist came upon a hoard of gold. It had been buried in the dirt for around 1,800 years and consisted of around 396 grams (14 ounces) of gold rings. The detectorist handed in his finds ...

Ever since quantum mechanics first described particles, like electrons, as rippling waves, researchers have wondered if those waves could be trapped in place. Writing today in Science a century later, a team of Columbia University ...

A new study led by researchers in the Eco-Evo-Devo lab at the University of Ottawa finds that ants can decouple antenna size from both head and body size as they develop into different social castes, revealing how social ...