Phys.org news

Crystals are usually thought of as rigid and brittle. Yet some molecular crystals can bend, jump, twist or even change shape when exposed to light. Understanding how tiny molecular movements inside an ordered crystal can ...

Flies, mice and humans move in different ways because of their very different physiques, but their movements follow a common pattern— joints farther from the center of the body move faster than those closer to the body. This ...

Smoke from African agricultural fires brightens clouds over the southeast Atlantic—but new research from scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science shows that the same ...

The human brain is terrible at healing itself from injury or disease. But some animals can harness their own cellular abilities not only to repair injuries but also to regrow their brains entirely. Researchers from the University ...

Social technologies, digital tools that allow people to communicate and share content with each other online, have become a central way of communicating for many people worldwide. Yet the possible effects of these technologies ...

Stand on the damp sand on a California beach and chances are you're standing on top of an active earthworks site. Sand hoppers (Megalorchestia spp.), the tiny, shrimp-like creatures commonly found eating away at kelp on the ...

Analysis of a "rusty treasure" excavated during industrial gravel extraction at Deinham, Austria, reveals it is the largest mass find of prehistoric iron bars in Europe, pointing to iron production and trade during the Iron ...

Scientists have long speculated why Venus, with a size, mass and structure similar to Earth's, doesn't have a moon. New UC Riverside research shows that our hungry twin likely swallowed it.

Mitochondria—tiny structures that convert nutrients into energy—are often depicted as discrete kidney bean-shaped objects. But in reality, they form a dynamic, interconnected network throughout the entire cell, rapidly splitting ...

The electronic properties of materials are typically determined by their structure under normal, undisturbed conditions, when they are in a state known as equilibrium. Intense light beams, however, can temporarily reshape ...

For decades, an idea has grown in paleontology that, long before scientists began digging up and reconstructing dinosaur bones, the Indigenous San and Basotho in southern Africa noticed them too, incorporating them into songs, ...

Researchers at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have released LandScan Mosaic, a next-generation global population distribution dataset that estimates where people are by modeling how ...