Phys.org news
Phys.org / Free radicals caught in the act with slow spectroscopy
Why does plastic turn brittle and paint fade when exposed to the sun for long periods? Scientists have long known that such organic photodegradation occurs due to the sun's energy generating free radicals: molecules that ...
Phys.org / AI can dramatically speed up digitizing natural history collections
A new study from UNC-Chapel Hill researchers shows that advanced artificial intelligence tools, specifically large language models (LLMs), can accurately determine the locations where plant specimens were originally collected, ...
Phys.org / X-ray spikes reveal electron beam size
While synchrotron radiation is often thought of as "stable," the electromagnetic field exhibits pronounced randomly fluctuating distributions both temporally and spatially. These fluctuations encode spatial information about ...
Phys.org / Social justice must guide global ecosystem restoration for lasting success, say researchers
Social justice must be at the heart of global restoration initiatives—and not "superficial" or "tokenistic"—if ecosystem degradation is to be addressed effectively, according to new research.
Phys.org / Astrobee: AI-guided robot navigates space station corridors with improved speed and safety
Stanford researchers have become the first to demonstrate that machine-learning control can safely guide a robot aboard the ISS, laying the groundwork for more autonomous space missions.
Phys.org / Visual system of butterflies changes with seasons, research reveals
The shift from warm summer to cool fall conditions can be stressful for many animals. Surviving each season requires a multitude of different physiological and behavioral traits that scientists are still working to understand.
Phys.org / Physicists provide key mass data for determining X-ray burst reaction rate
A research team from the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has directly measured the masses of two highly unstable atomic nuclei, phosphorus-26 and sulfur-27. These precise measurements ...
Phys.org / Yeast cell factory converts methanol into L-lactate for biodegradable plastics
Methanol is an ideal feedstock for bio-manufacturing. Converting it into lactate, a monomer for biodegradable plastic, offers a promising strategy for addressing the challenge of white pollution. However, it remains difficult ...
Phys.org / Earlier ultra-relativistic freeze-out could revive a decades-old theory for dark matter
A new theory for the origins of dark matter suggests that fast-moving, neutrino-like dark particles could have decoupled from Standard Model particles far earlier than previous theories had suggested.
Phys.org / Unbee-lievable: Botswana elephants not easily fooled as scientists seek solution to human-elephant conflict
In Botswana, coexisting with the country's 130,000 elephants can be a daily negotiation. For rural families, tending a crop means hoping these "gentle giants" don't wander through and cause damage while searching for food ...
Phys.org / Human hair grows through 'pulling' not pushing, study shows
Scientists have found that human hair growth does not grow by being pushed out of the root; it's actually pulled upward by a force associated with a hidden network of moving cells. The findings challenge decades of textbook ...
Phys.org / CERN's ATLAS detects evidence for decay of Higgs boson into muon–antimuon pair
Although its existence had been theorized for decades, the Higgs boson was finally observed to exist in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Since then, it has continued to be heavily studied at the LHC. Now, ...
