Phys.org

Skip-level meetings (SLMs) seem common in some work environments but unheard of and norm-breaking in others. They entail both benefits and risks for employees, bypassed and skip-level managers, and organizations. Their effects also depend on context, as my qualitative exploratory study, published in IEEE Engineering Management Review, suggested.

Two of the most famous experiments in psychology, the Stanford prison experiment and Stanley Milgram

Social media communication on online travel platforms may contribute to customer well-being when it encourages participation and positive emotional experiences, according to a study of 210 Generation Z users reported in the International Journal of Electronic Marketing and Retailing.

Small and medium-sized cities (SMCs) are essential for balanced national development, yet many are now facing prolonged population loss, aging and weakened labor markets. Japan has addressed this challenge for more than half a century through the Depopulated-Area-Designation (DAD) policy, a national framework that identifies municipalities facing population loss and supports them through infrastructure, fiscal, industrial and social measures. However, it has not been determined whether such a de

Many of the world

In a new study published today in Plants, People, Planet, scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and their international collaborators clarify the distinction between Ganoderma lucidum, a European bracket fungus described in 1781, and Ganoderma lingzhi, the East Asian species widely associated with medicinal lingzhi or reishi.

Western Australian businesses can now make better-informed decisions about reducing food waste and turning discarded materials into valuable products, thanks to a new online toolkit.

More than 25 years after it was first discovered, a new species and genus of dinosaur have been named from the fossil collections cared for by the Natural History Museum. Paludohadros proudlovii was discovered at wienerberger

The Lazuli Space Telescope will be the first private space telescope. It

Our bodies are composed of many different types of cells that work together to build and maintain normal physiological functions. In the central nervous system, for example, neurons transmit information, while glial cells such as astrocytes regulate the environment surrounding neurons and support their function. Understanding how these cell types influence one another is essential for uncovering how our bodies develop and function.

Climate change is amplifying extreme weather conditions across southern Africa. Dry seasons are getting hotter and drier, while rains are becoming heavier and more concentrated. This means greater swings between production surplus and scarcity for rural communities that make their living from the land.

Many people have narcissistic traits to some degree, for example, confidence in one

Generating hydrogen without releasing carbon dioxide sounds simple: pass electricity through water, split water molecules and generate green hydrogen. The hard part is the electrocatalyst. The best ones rely on platinum, ruthenium and iridium, which are scarce and expensive. We wanted to know whether a small amount of iron and nickel oxides, anchored on carbon nanofibers grown by chemical vapor deposition the right way on the right scaffold, could do the job instead. Our results are published in

In November 1857, during a s

Ongoing research is providing a clearer picture of how climate change can affect different aspects of the Coorong in South Australia

Producers, consumers, and decomposers play different roles in today

Hemp has long been pitched to Kentucky farmers as a way to diversify their income. Research now suggests it could diversify the landscape itself, with measurable benefits for the state

Just as it is difficult for a camera to keep both a nearby flower and a distant mountain sharply focused at the same time, conventional optical microscopes face a similar challenge when imaging structures located at different depths inside the body. Tighter focusing of light improves spatial resolution, but at the same time reduces the depth range over which the image remains sharply focused.

Designing structural high-entropy alloys (SHEAs) means solving a problem with an enormous number of moving parts: which combinations of composition and processing conditions will yield the phases, microstructures, and mechanical properties a given application demands? Because these alloys mix multiple principal elements in comparable proportions, that question spans length and time scales that no single experiment or model can cover on its own.

Natural products produced by microorganisms are a promising source of new drugs. Researchers at the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research (HZI) and its Saarbr

A new doctoral dissertation by Omar Anwar Elkadi in the field of Applied Physics on near-infrared spectroscopy for the continuous monitoring of tissue-engineered cartilage will be defended at the Faculty of Science, Forestry and Technology, Kuopio campus, of the University of Eastern Finland on Oct. 30.

In response to a recent article on vegan diets for cats, Phys.org received numerous messages from concerned readers. People raised a lot of concerns, mainly arguing that cats are obligate carnivores and that vegan diets could be very harmful to their health. Now, we have collected all these comments, questions and concerns and asked the researcher behind the original paper to address them. Andrew Knight, Veterinary Professor of Animal Welfare and Associate Professor at Murdoch University School

In 2020, our research published in New Phytologist showed how the height growth of Aleppo pine populations responded to climate gradients across the Mediterranean, and how these populations were expected to respond under future climate change based on decades of common-garden experiments. Since then, multiple studies on Pinus halepensis have documented diverse and often rapid growth and survival responses to recent climatic extremes.

An international research team from Germany, Switzerland and Japan has demonstrated in a recent study that a single reflection zone plate (RZP) can perform both soft X-ray imaging and resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) mapping. The approach could simplify future instruments that need to determine both where structures are located in a material and how their electronic properties vary.

DNA-nano/microparticle motors are among the fastest artificial molecular motors reported to date, moving at approximately 30 nm per second. However, they are still slower than natural motor proteins (approximately 100

Groundwater depletion and groundwater-dependent irrigation tend to concentrate close to international borders within aquifers shared by two or more countries, where pumping on one side is more likely to affect users on the other, according to a publication by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH).

Carbon is inexpensive, conductive, and widely used in technologies such as fuel cells and water electrolyzers. But under strongly oxidizing conditions, carbon electrodes gradually corrode.

Using a range of advanced characterization techniques, researchers say they have developed a novel method with the potential to produce hydrogen from seawater using a process that requires less energy, resists corrosion and could support more economical hydrogen production.

A new study with unprecedented access to Atlantic salmon farms in British Columbia raises urgent questions about the federal government

Smartphones and computers process information by switching the current that flows inside semiconductors on and off. The gate electrode delivers the signal that controls this switching. Until now, gate electrodes have typically been made from metals whose electronic properties are fixed.

Each year, Gabon

Science often advances in small steps, with researchers gradually building on previous discoveries. But every now and then, a breakthrough comes along that challenges conventional thinking and changes the direction of a field.

Almost every cell in our body contains around two meters (6.6 feet) of DNA, packed into a tiny nucleus. Yet for the cell to function, this enormous amount of genetic material must remain organized and accessible. Researchers at the University of Basel have now discovered three distinct types of large chromosomal domains that help organize DNA in nuclei.

I never thought my shoelaces would get stolen.

Halloween kicks off a series of religious and cultural festivals to honor the dead, including All Saints

Researchers have developed a self-driving laboratory that combines artificial intelligence and robotics to automate laboratory tasks, from accurately measuring and mixing chemical ingredients to high-temperature furnace processing and sample retrieval.

Humans and other vertebrates go through various stages of sleep, including REM (rapid eye movement) sleep characterized by rapid eye movements and muscle twitches. Can a similar sleep state be observed in spiders? Researchers from the Institute of Organismic Biology at the University of Bonn investigated this in the Australian jumping spider Portia fimbriata. The work is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Months after a Columbia University School of Nursing

New Monash University research has revealed how countries could strengthen their conservation networks by looking beyond the boundaries of national parks and protected areas

Death has never entirely stopped the living from trying to continue a conversation with their loved ones.

Australian medtech company Sleeptite and RMIT University researchers have secured a U.S. patent for smart bedding technology designed to monitor residents

We tend to think of our bones as solid, unchanging support structures inside our bodies, but a recent study from the University of Chicago shows just how much they can change depending on how we use them.

As urbanization spreads worldwide, the loss and fragmentation of habitats are driving the global decline in biodiversity. At the same time, urban green spaces like parks, meadows and forests have the potential to contribute significantly to biodiversity conservation at the local and regional levels.

As the climate changes, protecting wildlife increasingly depends on both the conditions within protected areas and the connections between them. A new study published in Conservation Letters identifies where climatic stability and opportunities for movement coincide in Europe, and where gaps could undermine conservation.

Polymer brushes are dense layers of polymer chains that can be engineered to change how a surface interacts with its surroundings. By controlling interactions with water, ions, proteins and other materials, they can reduce friction, prevent unwanted materials from sticking, improve separation and support the functionality of sensors and other devices.

Phase transitions are strongly constrained by spatial dimension. In conventional one-dimensional systems with short-range interactions, thermal fluctuations generally prevent continuous degrees of freedom from maintaining order over long distances.

In Lewis Carroll

A rocky lava planet once thought to be too extreme to have an atmosphere appears to be wrapped in one with a reflective layer of vaporized silicate mineral clouds, the same family of compounds that make up quartz and sand.

From its visible surface, the sun radiates heat at a relatively cool temperature of 5,800 Kelvin. Yet within the thin outer layer of the sun

Deleting a conversation with an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant may not erase everything the assistant remembers. Georgia Tech researchers have developed a tool that can recover deleted conversations from AI assistants running on Android phones. The tool, called ORISA, can also rebuild the recovered information into a working AI session.