Phys.org news

Encouraging people to contribute to a common good can have a surprising drawback: a risk that rewards become concentrated among a smaller group, putting the rest at a disadvantage. Put more simply, "equality and cooperation ...

Scientists at Houston Methodist Research Institute have developed a biodegradable implant designed to deliver cancer-fighting immunotherapy drugs directly into tumors over an extended period, a strategy that could improve ...

Human color vision depends on three types of cone cells in the retina. Although all three contain the same light-absorbing molecule, 11-cis-retinal, differences in the surrounding protein determine sensitivity to red, green ...

The way to make a plant grow more may be to take something away. Trimming a section off a plant gene raised rice harvests by up to 25% in new tests by University of Chicago scientists. The plants also showed a better tolerance ...

A fleeting photoinduced electronic state and the subsequent formation of a photoinduced hidden state in a metal–organic framework were captured in just 30 femtoseconds by researchers at Science Tokyo, Tohoku University and ...

Invasive alien species are among the world's leading drivers of species extinction. However, previous global assessments of the geographic distribution of this damage suffered from a systematic "research bias": Because significantly ...

The dangers of antibiotic overuse have become increasingly clear in recent decades. Excessive use accelerates the evolution of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, raising the alarming prospect of infections that no longer ...

For the first time, researchers can witness nanometer-scale thickness changes across a melting snowflake with a compact, lensless chip that captures gigapixel video at 30 frames per second across centimeter-scale fields.

There are countless cultures and societies around the world, spanning thousands of years. One thing they all have in common is that death is a part of everybody's life. Examining how different societies commemorate their ...

The fossilized spines of saber-toothed cats in the La Brea Tar Pits reveal evidence of an unexpectedly high prevalence of rare spinal nerve tumors, suggesting that the species became inbred just before extinction. These tumors, ...

Biomolecular condensates are ubiquitous in living cells, including bacteria, viruses, plants and mammalian systems. These membraneless bodies, or molecular communities made up of DNA, RNA and proteins, are where molecules ...

The descriptions of the two new additions to the European snail fauna, named Cochlostoma komarnica and Cochlostoma dobrido, have been published in the open-access Biodiversity Data Journal.