Phys.org

The pressure to be the perfect parent can be overwhelming, but social media and perceived world threats are causing some to become overprotective parents, negatively affecting young people.

Over a third of U.S. adults (35%) cannot name all three branches of the government, and under half can name four of the five rights protected by the First Amendment, according to the 2026 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania. Of the five First Amendment rights, only freedom of speech is identified by more than half of survey respondents.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have measured the most powerful gas outflow ever recorded from a

Solid-state drives (SSDs), which store data in computers and servers, are critical to data center reliability. When they fail, they can contribute to service disruptions, data loss and high maintenance costs, making early failure prediction important.

Some of the most vulnerable children and young people are failing to access mental health support despite having much higher levels of need, according to new research from the University of Cambridge.

While parents

Breeding crops for farming systems rather than yield alone could exploit untapped genetic potential and help farmers cut fertilizer bills.

Americans are heading into the 2026 midterm elections with widespread uncertainty about the integrity of the vote, according to a new national survey from the University of California San Diego.

Humpback whale mothers may experience grief when their calves die, a rare research observation led by Griffith University and Sea World Foundation has found.

Nearly nine in 10 (86%) UK-licensed online gambling websites are operating in breach of the General Data Protection Regulation, according to new research from the Gambling Research, Education and Treatment (GREAT) Center at Swansea University published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior Reports.

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.

EU chief Ursula von der Leyen will on Wednesday unveil long-awaited plans to protect children from online harm by curbing access to social media, video-sharing platforms, games and AI chatbots for under-15s.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

From a mountainside overlooking Utah

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.

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

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

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

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.

Most of our experience with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has focused on capturing radio signals that alien species have sent out, whether intentionally or unintentionally. That creates a huge

Half smiling through crinkled eyes, Moussa Ndiaye, in his long tunic and skullcap, watched a combine harvest his northern Senegal rice paddy, where he expects a good haul

Do you think that a person who reorganizes their life so that their aging parents can live with them would be likely to push another out of the way on the subway? What about greeting strangers with a smile? The answers to these questions are at the heart of a puzzle social psychologists have been debating for 30 years: how to best understand differences among cultures.

Australia had a much larger Indigenous population before the arrival of Europeans than previously thought, according to new research. The research also demonstrates much larger population losses resulting from colonization than previously believed, with an estimated 93% of the pre-European population lost in less than 80 years following the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet.

Eighty years ago, a massive tsunami devastated parts of Hawaii, Alaska, Washington and Oregon following an earthquake off the coast of Alaska. A Michigan State University team is launching a project to study the underwater fault system where it originated

Within the next five years, global warming is set to breach the 1.5

When JWST

Choosing an orbit for a satellite always comes with trade-offs. Very low Earth orbit (VLEO), between 100

Monitoring marine life helps scientists track ecosystem health, improve conservation and manage fisheries. A promising approach is environmental DNA (eDNA), which refers to trace genetic material naturally released into the water by organisms, such as skin cells, mucus and excreta.

Have you ever wondered what Earth observation satellites see when they look down at the deep ocean or a dense tropical forest during the dead of night? The answer, for the most part, is nothing. Standard optical sensors require a steady stream of light to function, and in these photon-limited regions, they hit a hard physical boundary. But what if we could rewrite the rules of optical imaging? By borrowing techniques from quantum photonics, we can push beyond these classical limits and unlock a

Picture yourself in a manufactured colony that orbits between Earth and the moon. It might sound like science fiction, but it

In a study of monk parakeets, researchers at the University of Cincinnati and Duke University found that sex has little to no impact on who initiates fights, who is targeted or who rises in the dominance hierarchy.

Emotional mechanisms are frequently used to inspire good environmental behavior. But how effective are they at inspiring actual sustainable change? Perhaps not as much as previously believed, according to a new study that challenged participants to put their money where their mouths are.

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have identified how certain dangerous bacteria spread. They studied chain-like adherence pattern (CLAP) varieties of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC), finding that single bacteria attach to a surface and elongate before dividing, producing chains without ever separating.

How can we predict the way a real material, such as a polymer, responds mechanically over timescales ranging from the ultrafast motion of atoms to the slow deformations measured in a laboratory? This is a deceptively difficult problem.

Access to clean water depends not only on preventing pollution but also on being able to detect contaminants quickly and reliably. Among the pollutants of concern are metal ions such as mercury, lead and zinc, which can enter aquatic environments through industrial and other human activities.

Researchers at Stanford Medicine have developed two new artificial intelligence models of the biological cell. The first, called universal cell embedding, paved the way for a second-generation model called TranscriptFormer, which has been trained on data from 112 million cells representing 12 species, ranging from single-celled yeast to humans.

Laboratory animals are anesthetized to avoid pain during invasive procedures. Anesthesia is necessary for these animals