Phys.org news

The Kakhovka Dam in southern Ukraine was destroyed on June 6, 2023. The event unleashed a catastrophic flood that forced thousands of residents to evacuate their communities as water levels rose 10 feet (3 meters) above normal.

Optical fibers are already the backbone of global communication systems. Recently, however, physicists have started to explore how their functionality could be boosted further by conveying information via entangled quantum ...

A team of researchers reports that they may have found rock containing some of the earliest forms of microbial life on Earth. Their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes the biosignatures ...

Between 29,000 and 19,000 years ago, the planet experienced some of its coldest temperatures and drastic landscape changes at the peak of the Ice Age, during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), the period of most extensive global ...

So far, most of the minerals found on Mars tell a story of lava poured out by ancient volcanoes, followed by long stretches in which water trickled through and slowly reshaped the rock. However, some rocks scattered across ...

Superconductors are materials in which electrical current flows with a resistance of zero, typically below specific temperatures. In conventional superconductors, this state of matter emerges when two electrons bind together ...

Quantum sensors, devices that collect measurements by exploiting quantum-mechanical phenomena, could potentially detect extremely weak magnetic, gravitational and electromagnetic signals with greater sensitivity than classical ...

Biologists, zoologists and psychologists have been trying to trace the origins of human language for centuries. One well-known theory, known as the social brain hypothesis, suggests that increasingly complex social lives ...

Astronomers have discovered that the most massive galaxies in the early universe contain far more small stars than expected. As a result, these early galaxies were likely much more massive than initial measurements suggested. ...

Bubbles are round, and we know surface tension does that. But squeeze that gas-liquid boundary into a space only a few tens of nanometers wide—could other forces be at work?

Deimos, the smaller and outermost of Mars' two moons, is roughly oval in shape and has a deep depression at its south pole. Unlike its heavily scarred sister moon, Phobos, Deimos is covered by a loose layer of dust and rubble—a ...

Eight years of painstaking research on the virtually unknown Wolffsohn's viscacha have helped to shine the spotlight on this super-rare South American rodent and catalyze the conservation action it so urgently needs.