Phys.org news

From brightly colored textile dyes to persistent pesticides and antibiotics, many modern pollutants dissolved in water—such as Bisphenol A—resist traditional treatment methods. A promising approach uses electricity to ...

All complex biological systems—like the DNA, RNA and proteins constantly being copied and built within our cells—are prone to errors. That means as life evolved to be more elaborate, it also had to evolve error-correcting ...

Biology textbooks explain that cells follow a universal rule when processing gene transcripts to make proteins. Non-coding snippets of RNA are bracketed by a guanine-thymine (GT) nucleotide sequence on one end and an adenine-guanine ...

Genes that play a key role in the formation of an infectious organ used by parasitic plants have been identified by plant scientists at RIKEN. This discovery fills a gap in our understanding of how parasitic plants infect ...

For more than a decade, Evan Economo's lab has been using micro-CT machines to scan insect specimens. The resulting X-ray images help researchers study the form and structure of insects—a subfield of entomology known as ...

Japanese red elder plants safeguard their own survival when they drop fruits infested by Heterhelus beetle larvae, as well as the survival of these larvae. A Kobe University study changes the narrative on how a plant and ...

What happens when a solar superstorm hits Mars? Thanks to the European Space Agency's Mars orbiters, we now know: glitching spacecraft and a supercharged upper atmosphere.

In the face of climate change, permafrost peatland wildfires could play more of a role in the destructive cycle of global warming, University of Alberta research suggests.

Protein activity can be precisely regulated via subtle changes in temperature using heat-sensitive switches. Underlying this capability is a novel modular design strategy developed by researchers at the Institute of Pharmacy ...

Catalysts are essential to modern industry, accelerating reactions used to produce everything from fertilizers and fuels to medicines and hydrogen energy. But until now, scientists could not directly observe how reactions ...

Crystals have repeatedly been found at archaeological sites alongside Homo remains. Evidence shows that hominins have been collecting these stones for as long as 780,000 years. Yet, we know that our ancestors did not use ...

Walking on two legs has long been considered a milestone in human evolution and one of our most defining characteristics. Until now, researchers assumed that the first humans originated in Africa and that bipedalism developed ...