Phys.org news

Phys.org / Radar echoes from Europa reveal secrets beneath the ice

A team of scientists has used NASA's Goldstone Solar System Radar and the U.S. National Science Foundation Green Bank Telescope (NSF GBT) to carry out the most extensive radar study to date of Europa, the ocean world orbiting ...

Jun 17, 2026
Dialog / 'Contaminated' cultures: Can conservation protect nature while excluding Indigenous peoples?

At an international heritage symposium in Japan, I heard a word that stayed with me: "contaminated." The discussion concerned whether Indigenous peoples needed to be named explicitly in a new World Heritage framework. One ...

Jun 17, 2026
Phys.org / Comb jelly embryos reveal embryonic signaling center shared across early animal evolution

In order for vertebrate embryos to develop their body axes, they require what is known as an embryonic signaling center. This group of cells provides the instructions that determine where up and down, left and right, and ...

Jun 17, 2026
Phys.org / Dark matter cannot be ruled out as cause of gamma ray glow at the Milky Way's center, machine learning shows

An international research collaboration between the University of Vienna and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the United States has used machine learning to re-examine one of the most debated signals in astrophysics. ...

Jun 17, 2026
Phys.org / Superconducting TES array X-ray spectrometer goes into operation at BESSY II

Europe's first and only TES spectrometer at a synchrotron source is now in operation at BESSY II, developed within a collaboration between the HZB, the MPI-CEC (Mühlheim-an-der-Ruhr, Germany) and the NIST (Boulder, Colorado, ...

Jun 17, 2026
Phys.org / LOFAR reveals spike-like repeating radio burst pairs in the solar corona

The solar atmosphere is a turbulent and magnetized environment, with the release of magnetic energy readily manifesting as emission across the electromagnetic spectrum. Solar radio emission dominates the radio sky, with the ...

Jun 17, 2026
Phys.org / Thawing permafrost may trigger overlooked carbon sink in rivers

A new study published in Nature shows that rock weathering increasingly counteracts river CO2 emissions as permafrost degrades. The study was carried out by a collaborative team of researchers from Umeå University in Sweden ...

Jun 17, 2026
Phys.org / How evolution can make cells smaller without slowing down their growth

A new study led by Marco Fumasoni, principal investigator at Fundação GIMM, shows that evolution can substantially reduce cell size without significantly compromising cells' ability to grow. The work, carried out in yeast ...

Jun 17, 2026
Phys.org / Bees avoid too much of a good thing by balancing nutrients in pollen, study reveals

New Oxford University-led research reveals that bees can regulate their feeding to avoid overconsuming certain essential nutrients, and that honey bees make a specialist "baby food" that gives their larvae a better-balanced ...

Jun 17, 2026
Phys.org / Frozen Greenland middens preserve 4,500 years of farms, seal hunts and toilets

Greenland has a long and checkered history of human settlement: several Paleo-Inuit cultures since approximately 2,500 BCE, descendants of Vikings between the 10th and 15th centuries, and early modern Danes since 1721. All ...

Jun 17, 2026
Phys.org / Oddball exoplanet challenges what it means to be a hot Jupiter

New research led by a scientist at IPAC—a science and data center for astrophysics and planetary science at Caltech—studying the hot Jupiter CoRoT-2 b has settled on one of the three leading hypotheses explaining why its ...

Jun 17, 2026
Phys.org / New heat-regulating fabric feels fluffy like cotton—but doesn't get wet

Once cotton gets wet, it pulls heat from your body. This is helpful when you're exercising or outside on a hot day, but dangerous in the bitter cold. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Energy Letters have created an ultralight ...

Jun 17, 2026