Phys.org news

What did the very first complex vertebrate brain look like? To find out, scientists turned to an unlikely time traveler: the lamprey, a jawless, eel-like fish whose body plan has barely changed in roughly 360 million years.

Scientists have spotted two humpback whales that made separate, record-breaking crossings between Australia and Brazil.

Howdy, pards, here's a quick roundup of the week's science news: Moose, previously thought to be a transplanted species, are actually native to Colorado. A digital twin of a two-year-old child's brain revealed neural signatures ...

Enzymes are regarded as the key to sustainable chemistry. Despite major advances in protein design, creating artificial enzymes from scratch has so far remained a grand challenge. A research team at the University of Bayreuth, ...

A chemical analysis of residential soils and ash around California homes burned by the Eaton and Palisades wildfires in early 2025 revealed wide variation in contamination by potentially harmful elements, including lead, ...

A large asteroid will zip past Earth this weekend, but don't worry: It poses no danger.

In May 2024, auroras were observed at unusually low latitudes across the globe, lighting up skies that rarely see such displays. Inside Earth's magnetosphere, the region of space surrounding our planet and dominated by its ...

Controlling and trapping molecules, units of a substance consisting of two or more chemically bound atoms, with laser light is significantly more challenging than trapping individual atoms. This is because molecules exhibit ...

Lurking at the heart of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) is a supermassive black hole four million times the mass of the sun, surrounded by a puzzling collection of young, massive stars whose orbits have long defied ...

The Himalayas are often seen as one of Earth's great natural barriers, separating the heavily populated and industrialized regions of South Asia from the remote Tibetan Plateau. But new research, published in Geophysical ...

Over recent decades, harmful algal blooms have become increasingly common. These blooms often consist of bacteria called "cyanobacteria" in freshwater ecosystems. They can produce debilitating toxins, suffocate marine life ...

Astronomers from Germany and Turkey have analyzed available data from various space telescopes to investigate an ultraluminous X-ray source designated X-4, which is located in the nearby galaxy NGC 4631. Results of the new ...