Phys.org news

Researchers at the University of Jyväskylä have discovered a simple way to program synthetic molecules so they can form specific spiral-like structures by embedding instructions directly into their sequence. This breakthrough ...

Red-backed shrikes fly thousands of kilometers to reach Africa—and they do so with astonishing precision. Aided by new technology, researchers at Lund University in Sweden have been able to track the birds' journeys in ...

From small ions to large molecules, cellular gates control what can pass in and out of cells. But how one such gate, called pannexin-1 (PANX1), can handle vastly different cargo sizes has remained a long-standing mystery.

Spillovers from protected areas such as national parks and wildlife reserves can play a significant role in boosting biodiversity beyond their boundaries with potential benefits to people through ecosystem services such as ...

Sea urchins are ecosystem engineers, the marine equivalent of mega-herbivores on land. By grazing and shredding seaweed and seagrass, they control algal growth and promote the survival of slow-growing organisms like corals ...

Dark matter is an elusive type of matter that does not emit, reflect or absorb light, yet is estimated to account for most of the universe's mass. Over the past decades, many physicists worldwide have been trying to detect ...

The cosmos has served up a gift for a group of scientists who have been searching for one of the most elusive phenomena in the night sky. Their study, presented in Science Advances, reports on the very first observations ...

Plastics are made from crude oil and petroleum by-products, so a team of scientists decided to explore if they could turn waste cooking oil into a useful plastic material, and they succeeded.

Neutrinos are one of the most mysterious particles in the universe, often called "ghost particles" because they rarely interact with anything else. Trillions stream through our bodies every second, yet leave no trace. They ...

A new study by researchers from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and the University of Naples Federico II shows a domestic cat's purr reveals far more about its individual identity than its meow. While meows are highly flexible ...

Scientists have long been trying to reconstruct the appearance of dinosaurs. The tidbits they are able to piece together from fossils and other analysis are displayed in museums, educational materials, and media, lending ...

To boost our understanding of a little-known civilization that thrived more than 3,000 years ago, scientists have built an easy-to-use digital catalog of 483 Bronze Age sites in western Anatolia.