Phys.org news

Quantum technologies are devices and systems that exploit the laws of quantum mechanics and could perform tasks that are difficult or impossible to tackle using their classical counterparts. These technologies process and ...

As NASA's Curiosity rover recently began climbing a Martian valley nicknamed "Valle Grande," it sent back images that were a familiar sight to mission scientists: honeycomb-like textures called polygonal fractures, each about ...

Excavations at Hohle Fels Cave in the UNESCO World Heritage area of the Swabian Jura in southwestern Germany have again yielded two spectacular 40,000-year-old depictions of birds carved from mammoth ivory. The two figurines ...

Extant and ancient cephalopods—including octopuses, squids, extinct ammonites, cuttlefish and nautiluses—have all had to solve the problem of buoyancy, whether they have hard external shells or not.

Deploying ocean iron fertilization—a strategy for carbon dioxide capture—in higher latitudes rather than near the equator could reduce environmental impacts while still achieving removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, ...

For decades, a 30 million-year-old fossil sat entombed in rock in an Oregon museum collection. When it was first found, paleontologists thought it might be an early relative of sheep, camels and pigs, whose fossilized skeletons ...

Since their discovery by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope in 2022, little red dots (LRDs) have been the subject of great interest to astronomers. Understanding the nature of these extremely distant, compact red sources has ...

Hundreds of feet below Earth's surface, rocks and water teem with fungi and support complex ecosystems of tiny organisms, according to a University of Michigan study that finds fungi are far more abundant deep underground ...

A team of researchers has discovered that winds generated by supermassive black holes are 100 times more powerful than previously thought, carrying energy across distances of approximately 300,000 light-years. The discovery ...

A remarkably preserved fossil from Mongolia's Gobi Desert is reshaping scientists' understanding of mammal evolution during the age of dinosaurs.

The creation of fully artificial organs is a sci-fi dream, and researchers in Japan may have brought it one step closer to reality by developing a new photofabrication technique (i.e., a light-controlled synthetic method) ...

The octopus is a biological oddity. It can use tools, open jars, and its complex nervous system supports as many neurons as a small primate. Now Harvard biologists have discovered a mysterious distinction in octopuses' core ...