Phys.org news

For decades, scientists have relied on a chemical fingerprint inside water molecules to determine where plants get their moisture. The method shaped our understanding of drought resilience, groundwater use, and ecosystem ...

For years, the Prairie Pothole Region has bothered me in a very specific way. On a map, it looks like a normal landscape: fields, gentle slopes, small streams. But hydrologically, it behaves like something else entirely. ...

There are many open questions about how our planet formed 4.55 billion years ago: When did plate tectonics start? When did the Earth's mantle begin to vigorously circulate in a process called convection? What was Earth like ...

Many large herbivores that once roamed modern-day Panama have declined or died out—including the 6-meter-long giant ground sloth and elephant-related creatures called Cuvieronius. New research suggests that introducing ...

Diastereomers are structurally identical molecules that are not mirror images of each other. Diastereomers can have different biological activities, potencies or toxicities, which means they can influence biological systems, ...

When you reach the bottom of a container of milk or honey, you might be tempted to tip the container over to get that last pesky little bit out. After all, you only need another teaspoon for that recipe, and you're sure it's ...

Astronomers with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) have used data from the project to make the largest, most accurate 3D map yet of the light emitted by excited hydrogen in the early universe, 9 billion ...

Tiny life forms tucked into debris from an asteroid hit could catapult to other planets—including Earth—and survive, a new Johns Hopkins University study finds. The work demonstrates that a certain hardy bacterium easily ...

The best candidate for next-generation magnetic devices—technology that can power, store, sense or transport information—may be, counterintuitively, antiferromagnets. Today, the most widely used magnetic materials are ...

In recent years, van der Waals crystals have evolved from scientific curiosities into a versatile platform for exploring novel quantum phases and unconventional nanophotonic phenomena. Their layered nature allows stacking, ...

Almost all plants live in close symbiosis with so-called mycorrhizal fungi—an important symbiosis for absorbing essential nutrients. In their new study, a team led by ecologist Christina Kaiser from the Center for Microbiology ...

A new catalyst strategy developed at Institute of Science Tokyo uses BaSi2 as a support for nickel and cobalt to decompose ammonia at lower temperatures. By forming unique ternary transition metal–nitrogen–barium intermediates ...