Phys.org

A push for landmark U.S. cryptocurrency legislation collapsed on Tuesday after Republicans and Democrats in Congress failed to bridge months-old differences over ethics, banking and how the fast-growing industry should be regulated.

The mammalian gut microbiome teems with a delicate balance of bacteria and the viruses that keep them in check, called bacteriophages, or phages. Each bacterial species usually has its own set of phage partners.

Soft materials such as colloidal suspensions, emulsions, foams and gels often display complex and unusual behaviors compared with ordinary solids or liquids. From a mechanical point of view, for instance, they can resist deformation like solids, but they can also start to flow like liquids when a sufficiently strong external drive is applied. This transition from solid-like to liquid-like behavior, known as

The longest satellite record ever assembled shows that Greenland and Antarctica have lost 11.3 trillion metric tons of ice since the 1970s, raising global sea level by more than 3 centimeters (1.2 inches)

Laser scanning, often referred to as lidar, has rapidly transformed how tropical forest regions are studied, monitored and understood across academic disciplines. The technology enables researchers to peer through dense forest canopies, rapidly providing high-resolution scans of the landscape below. This growing observational power is central to the scientific value of remote sensing technologies but also brings into focus the conditions, interests and power structures under which they are used.

Critically endangered Sumatran elephants are being pushed closer to the brink as wildfires raze vast swaths of their habitat on the western island of Sumatra, Indonesian conservation group Geopix told AFP on Wednesday.

Brigid Lynch was working along a wooded creek in a mountainous part of the San Francisco Bay Area when something that didn

Scientists from Trinity College Dublin have developed a way to unravel changing weather patterns on distant worlds. Using this approach, they discovered that the weather on a well-studied brown dwarf, SIMP 0136, previously linked to northern lights-like phenomena, is largely shaped by just two dominant processes: changes in temperature and the vertical structure of its clouds.

Two-thirds of a century after Jane Goodall observed

Smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa adopt agricultural inputs, including fertilizer, at low rates, contributing to low agricultural productivity. Previous research has shown that insufficient information and distrust in the quality of products for sale in local markets are among the reasons for low rates of fertilizer adoption and application. In a new study published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers examined the agricul

Neurons in humans and other mammals express many exceptionally long genes, ranging from more than 100 kbp to more than 2 Mbp, that are important for forming synapses and neural circuits. In general, genetic information is read from DNA into RNA. This process is called transcription. The longer a gene is, the more time it takes to read from beginning to end. In addition, gene expression must be regulated at several steps. Neurons are therefore thought to require special mechanisms to read long ge

Light is traditionally described by properties such as wavelength, amplitude, phase and polarization. Advances in optics have shown that light can also be shaped into complex spatial patterns known as structured light, enabling new ways to carry information and interact with matter for applications in imaging, optical communications and information processing.

This year, greyhound racing in Britain turns 100 years old. The first race took place on July 24, 1926, in Manchester, where six dogs chased a mechanical hare around a track.

Heat stress is a leading cause of weather-related deaths and can be especially dangerous in cities, where phenomena like urban heat islands drive temperatures higher than in surrounding rural areas. Now, a new dataset developed by the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR) aims to provide city governments and health officials with information that could minimize heat impacts on residents.

A new prehistoric animal species from Tanzania dating to around 240 million years ago, during the Triassic period, has been described by an international team of researchers. Led by the University of Bristol, the new species, named Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda, could help scientists refine the age of one of the world

Weather forecasts inform countless everyday decisions

New cases of New World screwworm have recently surfaced in the United States, highlighting the critical need to track its paths to determine where future infestations may occur. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture

No, President Joe Biden did not engineer Hurricane Milton. No, the ice crystal contrails left behind by high-altitude aircraft are not

A new collaborative report from University of Utah researchers and coordinated by the Wilkes Center for Climate Science

The same amount of rain falling on the same landscape at different times can send very different amounts of water into its rivers, according to a new study in Nature Water. The research offers a global picture of how catchments behave

Scientists have found how a protein produced by bacteria disrupts the mechanism that controls flower development in plants, turning reproductive organs into leaf-like structures. These findings shed light on a plant disease that is expected to spread as climate change expands the range of its insect vectors in northern latitudes. They used a synchrotron technique at ESRF, the European Synchrotron in Grenoble, France. The results are an Editor

Helicobacter pylori bacteria infect around half the global population and are a leading cause of stomach ulcers and gastric cancer. While antibiotics remain the standard treatment, they often fail to reach bacteria hidden beneath the stomach

Chemical separation can be energy-intensive when molecules have similar sizes and properties. Researchers from Shibaura Institute of Technology, Japan, have now developed an interlayer adaptive crystal that changes its spacing to recognize specific molecules.

Xufeng Zhang is using magnets to make computers more power efficient at the quantum level. The Northeastern professor of electrical and computer engineering recently published two papers highlighting small-scale magnetic systems he and his team developed that could help make computers much more power efficient in the future.

Shorebirds are capable of some of the longest migrations on Earth, yet most return year after year to the same area to breed. Coming back has distinct advantages, including knowing the best spots to feed or roost, having information about where predators lurk, and

From a mountainside overlooking Utah

An international team that includes researchers from Murdoch University

The European Union is set to propose curbing access to social media, video-sharing platforms, chatbots and online games for children younger than 15, according to a draft legal document seen by AFP.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark, Queen Mary University of London and other European institutions analyzed a data set representing almost 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) of Roman roads across the former empire, creating the most detailed quantitative picture yet of how the Roman road network was structured.

As artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots become more popular and more humanlike in the way they communicate, users are increasingly turning to them as trusted sources of information on topics ranging from personal finance to health. That may be problematic, according to Penn State researchers, who found in a recent study that the more conversational an AI chatbot is, the more likely users are to trust it

Climate change is increasing the frequency of both droughts and floods, meaning back-to-back extreme events are also on the rise. These rapidly alternating crises can harm people in complex ways. For example, back-to-back climate extremes can stress crops, reducing yields.

When two popular science magazines

For more than a decade, it was thought that the world

Rice and lentils are a pairing that goes a long way back, whether as khichdi in India or mujaddara in the Middle East. On its own, each is a source of incomplete protein, short on certain essential amino acids

Have you ever bought something not because you wanted it, but because you were afraid of what might happen if you didn

African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) travel incredibly long distances to search for a mate and new places to breed. They typically embark on these mammoth treks as young adults and often face numerous hazards along the way. These include busy highways, expanding human settlements and deadly wire poaching snares.

Messenger RNA, or mRNA, is best known for carrying genetic instructions from DNA to the cellular machinery that makes proteins. But all RNA molecules have another, less appreciated property: They are naturally sticky.

Safety and security challenges are creating unprecedented strain for frontline property management professionals, according to a new bilingual survey conducted by Portland State University

The sun is the reason life exists on our small, blue planet. It provides solar radiation that warms the planet and ignites intricate biochemical processes like photosynthesis, producing oxygen for life to breathe. However, while the sun is known for giving life, it can also take it away with solar flares, geomagnetic storms and solar radiation storms, collectively referred to as space weather.

Researchers have developed an innovative imaging technique to visualize the transition of single cells into multicellular organisms in new detail.

While people across the globe are experiencing various impacts of climate change, governments and communicators often use top-to-bottom, uniform communication strategies to inform people about climate change.

A recent United Nations report has stated that the world will likely overshoot the 1.5

Proteins are high-performance molecular machines that carry out nearly every biochemical function inside living cells. To understand how they achieve this, scientists often examine their detailed atomic structure, which holds important clues to their activity. The more precision they achieve, the deeper the insight they may gain into the chemical principles that underlie protein structure and, ultimately, function.

AI-generated texts are increasingly perceived as human, but people can still recognize human writing as such. However, this distinction becomes much more difficult once AI is explicitly instructed to come across as human. This is shown by research involving, among others, Tilburg University, published in the journal Nature Communications. Several experiments involving more than 3,000 participants examined how human and empathetic people perceive relationship advice generated by AI and humans.

A new study led by the University of Turku provides new insights into the population history of Finland during the Late Iron Age and the Middle Ages. The researchers analyzed the genomes of people who lived in southwestern Finland and H

Have you ever found your lawn riddled with holes or heard a little sneeze from your backyard bushes? Those are signs you might have a resident bandicoot. Bandicoots are nocturnal, rabbit-sized marsupials known for their pointy snouts, thin tails and large hind feet. Due to these features, they were originally misnamed after a type of rat from India, the pandi-kokku, or

Chemical reactions are often written as simple equations: Starting materials go in, and a product comes out. In reality, the same substrates can follow many different pathways depending on their concentrations, temperature, catalysts and other conditions.

An international team of researchers, including professor David Oswald from our Department of Computer Science, has discovered a security vulnerability that could put sensitive data stored in cloud computing systems at risk.

Should I stay or should I go? What determines whether birds migrate for the winter? This is one of the questions explored in a new doctoral thesis by Cassandra Ugland from NTNU

Last week, the peak body for Australian universities called on the federal government to introduce concession cards and further discounts for all domestic university students.