Phys.org news

Phys.org / Southern right whales are facing climate-driven decline in Australia

The tide has turned on the conservation success story of the southern right whale. Once considered a global conservation success story, the species is now emerging as a warning signal of how climate change is impacting threatened ...

15 hours ago in Biology
Dialog / Old galaxies in a young universe?

The standard cosmological model (present-day version of "Big Bang," called Lambda-CDM) gives an age of the universe close to 13.8 billion years and much younger when we explore the universe at high-redshift. The redshift ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Astronomy & Space
Phys.org / Football-sized fossil creature may have been one of the first land animals to eat plants

Life on Earth started in the oceans. Sometime around 475 million years ago, plants began making their way from the water onto the land, and it took another 100 million years for the first animals with backbones to join them. ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Biology
Phys.org / Experiment relies on pulsars to probe dark matter waves

Dark matter is a type of matter that is predicted to make up most of the matter in the universe, yet it is very difficult to detect using conventional experimental techniques, as it does not emit, absorb, or reflect light. ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Astronomy & Space
Phys.org / China's emissions policies are helping climate change but also creating a new problem

China's sweeping efforts to clean up its air have delivered one of the biggest public health success stories of recent decades. Since the Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan was launched in 2013, coal-fired power ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Earth
Phys.org / Current flows without heat loss in newly engineered fractional quantum material

A team of US researchers has unveiled a device that can conduct electricity along its fractionally charged edges without losing energy to heat. Described in Nature Physics, the work, led by Xiaodong Xu at the University of ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Physics
Phys.org / Oldest known sewn hide and other artifacts from Oregon caves shed light on early clothing in harsh climates

In 1958, an amateur archaeologist named John Cowles excavated the Cougar Mountain Cave in Oregon and retained many of the artifacts found there. Upon his death in the 1980s, these items were transferred to the Favell Museum ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Other Sciences
Phys.org / Fossil discovery suggests giant pythons once roamed Taiwan

Pythons are a common sight across much of Asia, especially in the tropical jungles and wetlands of countries like Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia. But one curious exception has been the main island of Taiwan, where there ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Biology
Phys.org / Machine learning reveals hidden landscape of robust information storage

In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, researchers used machine learning to discover multiple new classes of two-dimensional memories, systems that can reliably store information despite constant environmental ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Physics
Phys.org / Social media feeds: Algorithm redesign could break echo chambers and reduce online polarization

Scroll through social media long enough and a pattern emerges. Pause on a post questioning climate change or taking a hard line on a political issue, and the platform is quick to respond—serving up more of the same viewpoints, ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Other Sciences
Phys.org / Bacterial hitchhikers can give their hosts super strength

A Dartmouth study finds that molecular hitchhikers living within bacteria can make their hosts extra resistant to medical treatment by corralling them into tightly packed groups. The findings introduce a previously unknown ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Biology
Phys.org / Female scientists wait longer to have papers published in life and biomedical sciences

If you are a woman working in biomedical and life sciences, you may have longer to wait for your academic paper to appear in print than a comparable paper authored by a man. According to research published in the journal ...

Feb 10, 2026 in Other Sciences