Phys.org · 实时热榜

Currently popular biographies of famous scientists may demotivate—rather than inspire—children's desire to study or pursue careers in science, according to researchers who studied the messages in 422 bestselling children's books. Study leader Jessica Gladstone, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said that while parents and educators often use these books to try to spark children's interest in science through exposure to role models, their narrat

An ancient marine 'crime scene' discovered near Richmond captures the world first evidence of a flying reptile being eaten by a sea monster… before that predator became dinner itself.

Female sweat bees need to make a pivotal life decision: remain in the nest to help their mother raise more offspring or leave to establish nests of their own. New research from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) found that queen pheromones help influence that choice, offering new insight into how cooperation evolved in insect societies.

Archaic human parents had to look after helpless infants like modern-day parents do, according to new research. Human babies are born less developed than those of other great apes and are therefore unable to move as freely. A common result is deformational plagiocephaly, also called flat head syndrome.

Researchers have described a new species of shrimpgoby from the coastal waters off Banyuwangi, East Java, and given it a name that pays tribute to both its fiery coloration and its birthplace.

A research team led by Dongwoo Lee, an associate professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), and Yanhui Liu of the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has developed a new electrical resistivity-based indicator for rapidly screening alloy compositions with high glass-forming ability.

For nearly two centuries, the Galapagos Islands have inspired scientific discovery. While some might think only of Charles Darwin and his journeys on the HMS Beagle, there is much more to discover. Today, María Antonia Izurieta Burbano De Lara, a master's student in Dr. David Wells' Shark Biology and Fisheries Science Lab at Texas A&M University at Galveston, is building on that legacy by studying one of the archipelago's most elusive predators—the smooth hammerhead shark (Sphyrna zygaena).

Changing patterns of heat and daylight in urban environments are creating growing inequalities, with climate-related shifts reshaping daily life and disproportionately affecting vulnerable communities.

Could the 2008 financial crisis strike again? How would today's banks react? One way for government regulators to findout is to stress-test large financial institutions: analyze how their balance sheets would weather possible calamities.

Whether a region manages its land sustainably cannot be measured by land-use change alone. Sustainability is a delicate balance: it must be ecologically sound, legally secure and socially just. Yet capturing this interplay in practice has proven difficult. A research team from Justus Liebig University Giessen (JLU) and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá has developed a model to understand the complexity of sustainable land use.

When the Palisades Fire tore through Los Angeles in January 2025, it didn't only destroy homes. It took the Will Rogers Ranch House—a beloved California landmark—with it. Six months later, the Dragon Bravo wildfire burned through Grand Canyon National Park and destroyed the Grand Canyon Lodge, originally built in 1927. Whether either landmark will ever be meaningfully restored remains uncertain.

Understanding marine life, ecosystems and processes depends on high-quality, publicly available data. The Argo Program is the dominant source of ocean data, helping scientists worldwide assess and track global ocean health.

Every summer, algal blooms turn rivers and lakes green. Although they are widely known as a major form of water pollution that makes water murky, a KAIST research team has now shown for the first time that algal bloom conditions can make discarded plastics, such as plastic bags, more prone to breaking apart, potentially accelerating the formation of microplastics. The study points to a new direction for the era of climate change: water pollution and plastic pollution need to be managed together

Video gaming is a valued leisure activity in Australia. The latest data show 74% of Australian households own at least two gaming devices.

Evolution is a fact of life. So much so that even the theory of evolution is evolving. Lately, a centuries-old discredited idea has been making a strong comeback. It helps us explain scientific observations that, according to standard evolutionary theory, should be impossible.

A study published in Royal Society Open Science reveals striking trade-offs when it comes to different methods of egg production. Using UK data, the study compared several possible scenarios for the egg industry, including shifts to barn, free-range and organic systems, while keeping egg output constant.

In the much-loved 1980s sitcom, still in perpetual reruns, the four wisecracking women who share a house in Miami met through an ad on a supermarket bulletin board.

Built from stones weighing between 2 and 25 tonnes (2 to 28 tons), the structure of Stonehenge demonstrates a scale of construction hard to imagine before the invention of the wheel. The mystery deepens when you consider that the stones are not from the local bedrock. So why these stones, and how did they get there?

Nitrate contamination originating from agricultural runoff, industrial wastewater and municipal effluents is a growing global environmental problem. At the same time, ammonia has emerged as a key chemical feedstock and an attractive carbon-free energy carrier for a sustainable society.

Researchers have developed a new cell-based approach to produce several sugars naturally found in human breast milk. Human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) are complex sugars in human milk that can act as prebiotics and influence the infant gut environment. They can promote the growth of beneficial gut bacteria and may help limit the attachment or growth of certain pathogens.

As temperature and precipitation fluctuations continue to influence crop production worldwide, it is important to understand where crops are most vulnerable to these environmental stressors.

The income gap between the global north (the advanced economies of the core) and the global south (the developing economies of the periphery) has increased by between 170% and 270% since 1960, according to a study by ICTA-UAB recently published in the journal New Political Economy.

Diets rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids—a type of fat that supports brain function, cell growth and heart health—may help protect honey bees against the toxic effects of pesticides, according to a study led by researchers at Penn State.

In August 2023, communities across Southern California braced for Tropical Storm Hilary—the first tropical storm to directly impact the region this century. Although the storm weakened from a Category 4 hurricane before making landfall, it still brought damaging winds, record rainfall and widespread flooding across the southwestern United States and parts of Mexico.

Spin waves (SWs), or magnons, are collective excitations of magnetization in magnetic materials arising from electron spins. They have attracted considerable attention as information carriers and have shown promise in logic circuits, memory devices and physical neural networks. Among the emerging platforms for manipulating SWs are magnonic crystals (MCs), engineered magnetic materials with periodic structures designed to control magnon propagation. These periodic structures give rise to magnonic

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is regaining prominence in climate policy debates in Germany. A study published in Environmental Politics examines the reasons behind this comeback and shows that the strict limits originally envisaged for CCS were progressively relaxed throughout the political process. This increases the risk that the lifespan of fossil fuel infrastructure will be prolonged, potentially sidelining other climate protection measures.

University of Canterbury (UC) computer science professor Richard Green leads UC Vision, with researcher Dr. Richie Ellingham developing AI and computer vision technology that can identify, measure and track fruit hidden behind dense foliage.

Traditionally, public health programs have relied on chemicals for mosquito management, which may be why combating mosquitoes is becoming more difficult. Over time, insecticides trigger biochemical and genetic variations that confer a survival advantage on certain mosquito populations.

Remembering the past can help living organisms make better decisions, but memory comes at a cost. Whether it is an animal searching for food or a single cell responding to its surroundings, storing and using information requires energy and resources. So, when is memory worth the effort?

On July 23, R/V Kronprins Haakon cast off from the coal quay in Longyearbyen. Around 30 researchers and 20 crew members will spend the next 50 days sailing toward the North Pole as part of the Polhavet 2050 research program.

Seoul National University (SNU) College of Engineering announced that a research team led by Professor Jeong Woo Han of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering has developed a new nanostructured catalyst with up to 14.4 times the greenhouse gas decomposition performance of conventional commercial catalysts.

Researchers from Skoltech, together with colleagues from the N.D. Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry and Westlake University, have experimentally demonstrated how the operating regime of a polariton laser changes with a gradual increase in cavity thickness.

Scientists have discovered two new mechanisms for how a well-established antibiotic works, paving the way for the potential development of new antibiotic treatments.

A new quantum sensing technique could enable measurements of single protein structures and other important molecules, with potential applications in drug discovery and structural biology. A research team from the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo developed a new method that uses a single molecule as a quantum sensor. Quantum sensors use unique properties of quantum mechanics to make ultra-precise measurements that traditional sensors cannot achieve.

Children who attend preschool before starting school are significantly more likely to arrive ready to learn, according to a major Curtin University study of more than 123,000 Western Australian children.

It seems as if the world is afire this summer. But even as wildfires in Europe and North America grow more extreme, key worldwide burning statistics are at a record low largely because Africa and Asia are controlling fire more.

The spacecraft rushing to the rescue of an aging and sinking NASA telescope has run into its own problem.

From "heat wave simulators" to ecological boot camps, scientists and conservationists are trying ways to revive and reinforce the famous coral reefs off Japan's Okinawa, decimated by climate-driven bleaching two summers ago.

Could taking plant biomass and burying it in the deep, anoxic parts of the ocean be a workable large-scale strategy for carbon sequestration? The concept has intrigued scientists for years, and now a recent international workshop led by UC Santa Barbara researchers has taken the first steps toward developing it.

A school district in a rural corner of upstate New York is hitting pause on plans to deploy an AI-powered, humanoid robot in the classroom after state education officials, teachers and local residents raised concerns, including the maker's ties to a company that produces hyper realistic sex bots.

A newly discovered dinosaur from Zimbabwe is offering fresh clues to how the animals diversified, suggesting they spread across distinct ecosystems in southern Africa, scientists said Wednesday.

A shape that captured worldwide attention for solving a decades-old mathematical puzzle has returned to the spotlight. While the shape's properties allowed it to solve previous puzzles, little is known about its other associated properties, creating opportunities for further discovery. These unexplored properties may also help solve new physics mysteries, such as how to twist light into striking chiral patterns.

From planning transportation networks to organizing massive datasets, many of society's most important challenges boil down to an optimization problem: finding the best solution among an enormous number of possibilities. As these problems increase in size and scope, however, the computational resources required to solve them can increase dramatically.

For approximately a century, researchers studying the Assyrian Empire's history have relied on the Assyrian King List (AKL) as the definitive record of Assyrian monarchs and their chronology, especially for later periods of Assyrian history. But a recent article published in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies, titled "Three New Kings of Assyria," posits that the AKL may not be as authoritative or objective as previously considered and presents, for the first time, the identities of three kings who

The United States on Tuesday said it plans to exempt its private space sector from numerous environmental regulations to accelerate the pace of space launches and ramp up competition with China.

A naturally abundant plant material best known for giving trees and crops their strength may one day help repair broken bones, according to a new study led by postdoctoral researcher Dr. Srinath Palakurthy and Professor Rivka Elbaum of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Scientists have uncovered an ancient population previously unknown to science in Ladakh, a high-altitude region in northern India. Their studies revealed individuals with a nearly perfect 50–50 mix of South Asian-related and Tibetan-related ancestry who lived approximately 1,500 years ago.

Scientists have reacted with alarm to news that the British government will cut funding to the world-famous radio telescope at the Jodrell Bank Observatory, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in northwest England that has been helping explore the cosmos for almost 70 years.

New research from Costa Rica's Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG) suggests that tropical insects may be vulnerable to rising temperatures. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined the heat and cold tolerance of more than 100 species of rove beetles living between the lowland dry forest and the cloud forest of Volcán Cacao.

Around a quarter of the U.S. food supply is grown in California's Central Valley. Most of its crops, like rice, fruit trees and nut trees, are water-intensive and require extensive groundwater pumping during droughts. Over time, heavy water extraction has contributed to changes in the aquifer systems under the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys. Although some of these changes can be reversed, a new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicates that large part