Phys.org news

Phys.org / Four more belugas arrive at Chicago aquarium from shuttered Canadian theme park

Four more belugas have arrived at a Chicago aquarium as part of a plan to move Canada's last remaining captive whales from a shuttered theme park to aquariums in the United States and Spain.

Aug 15, 2026
Phys.org / Black-box technologies could undermine confidence in scientific findings

Scientists are increasingly relying on powerful data sources and tools that they often cannot fully understand, inspect or verify, according to a new study.

Aug 15, 2026
Phys.org / Scientists simulating ant swarms find a 'first mover' can set the colony in motion

In ant colonies, a single ant can be the catalyst for a wave of mob activity, launching brief bursts of coordinated movement involving hundreds or even thousands of swarming workers, according to new simulations from New ...

Aug 15, 2026
Phys.org / Quantum Latin squares cannot solve Euler's 36 officers problem without entanglement

Latin squares are arrangements of symbols in a grid in which every symbol appears exactly once in each row and column. These symbol arrangements, which were first studied more than three centuries ago, are now widely used ...

Aug 14, 2026
Phys.org / Mysterious Cygnus Bubble may trace back to microquasar, astronomers suggest

Astronomers have proposed a new explanation for the mysterious Cygnus Bubble, a vast cloud of ultra-high-energy gamma rays stretching thousands of light-years across the sky. While the bubble has generally been linked to ...

Aug 14, 2026
Phys.org / Rings forged from meteorites may have been fashionable among ancient Greek elites

Meteorites provided a rare but ready source of iron for ancient Bronze Age cultures before smelting became common. A new study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, sheds light on how the ancient Minoan and ...

Aug 14, 2026
Phys.org / Human blood may have helped preserve ancient Chinese rock art for 2,000 years

The Huashan rock art landscape in southern China, close to the border with Vietnam, is a remarkable UNESCO World Heritage site. Thousands of images are painted on river cliffs across more than 80 locations stretching 260 ...

Aug 14, 2026
Phys.org / Guangzhou crucibles provide earliest direct evidence of brass-making in East Asia

For centuries, scholars have read ancient documents describing the production of brass in 10th-century A.D. China. The problem was that the earliest physical evidence of brass production would be found nearly 600 years later, ...

Aug 14, 2026
Phys.org / Quality vs. quantity: Why 'super-shedders' may not be the superspreaders of disease outbreaks

A host that sheds an abundance of parasites might seem like an obvious disease-spreading threat. But new research suggests that shedding large volumes of parasites does not dictate transmission efficiency—and "super-shedders" ...

Aug 14, 2026
Phys.org / New findings overturn 100-year-old assumption about common bacteria in the lungs

The human body is teeming with more than 35 trillion bacteria, coexisting in microbiomes inside the gut, mouth, lungs, skin and urogenital tract. While it's now clear these microbes are associated with health and disease, ...

Aug 14, 2026
Phys.org / Early settlement dynamics in the Pacific revealed through ancient DNA

New genetic analyses of ancient human skeletons from western Remote Oceania are shedding light on the complex history of settlement in this vast Pacific region over the past 3,000 years. With island nations such as Vanuatu, ...

Aug 14, 2026
Phys.org / Engineered microbe speeds CO₂ capture and recovers critical metals

A genetically engineered bacterium can rapidly break down one of Earth's most abundant minerals, opening a promising new pathway for simultaneously removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and recovering critical elements ...

Aug 14, 2026