Phys.org news

From household plastic packaging to the flexible frameworks that support wearable electronics, polymer materials form the invisible backbone of modern life. At a microscopic level, polymers consist of long, ribbon-like molecular ...

A team of researchers led by Luigi Naldini at the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy (SR-Tiget) has developed a new strategy to significantly improve the precision and safety of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing in human ...

Many diseases are driven by proteins interacting with each other inside cells. But blocking these interactions with drugs is difficult because typical "small-molecule" drugs often prove to be too small to grip the broad, ...

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have discovered a stellar bar in GN20, a massive galaxy seen just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. The new paper was submitted to the preprint server arXiv on May ...

Supermassive black holes are the largest known black holes in the universe, sitting at the center of most large galaxies. They are sometimes described as cosmic monsters because they feed on surrounding gas and dust when ...

Ancient Egyptians are often depicted wearing black eyeliner, known as kohl, which was stored in small containers. While kohl containers are typically found throughout Egypt and Sudan (Nubia), their presence beyond these areas ...

Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the nineties shooter game "Doom" and say they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing.

Deer keds—biting flies found across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas—use their eyes and flight to locate a host, typically deer, but occasionally humans or other mammals. Once they land, however, they shed their wings ...

A new analysis of global wildfire activity in 2025 reveals the world experienced some of the most destructive and deadly fire events in recent history, despite the second lowest area burned since 2002. It highlights a continued ...

Discovering new catalysts is one of the central challenges in developing clean-energy technologies such as green hydrogen production. Yet catalyst discovery has traditionally remained confined within individual material families, ...

Scientists have uncovered how the interplay between cell shape and mechanical stress influences the orientation of stomata (microscopic pores on the leaf surface) during early plant development.

Many soybean farmers use seeds treated with fungicides to ward off disease, but the profits from these increased yields might not offset the cost of the treatment in most cases, according to a study published in Scientific ...