https://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. 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 ACS Applied Nano Materials. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-fuel-nanomaterial-green-hydrogen.html Nanomaterials Mon, 26 Oct 2026 19:00:03 EDT news712234922 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. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-clouds-lava-planet-astronomers.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 26 Oct 2026 13:20:01 EDT news712234995 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's atmosphere known as the corona, electrons can reach temperatures of millions of degrees, for reasons astronomers have yet to fully explain. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-laser-blasted-plasma-instabilities-sun.html Astronomy Mon, 26 Oct 2026 13:00:10 EDT news712234865 Whether a community is prioritized for public support can depend on how its needs are measured, according to new research from the University of New Hampshire. The study found significant differences in how government screening tools identify communities, particularly in rural areas where those differences could affect access to funding. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-screening-tools-disadvantage-rural-communities.html Economics & Business Sun, 25 Oct 2026 14:00:02 EDT news711814459 A team at HZB has, for the first time, reported polar vortices in (BaTiO₃/SrTiO₃)₁₀ superlattices on silicon. These results expand the range of materials and substrates on which polar topological textures can occur and open up new options for incorporating complex ferroelectric states into silicon-based technologies. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-patterns-polar-vortices-free-superlattices.html Condensed Matter Sun, 25 Oct 2026 13:00:01 EDT news711645241 Relatively simple changes to the way traditional brick kilns operate in Bangladesh can reduce pollution, save fuel and improve the quality of bricks they produce. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-cleaner-brick-kilns-pollution-gains.html Environment Sat, 24 Oct 2026 08:00:07 EDT news711976603 Researchers at AIST have directly observed magnetic flux quanta generated in a superconductor by photon absorption and demonstrated a new principle of photon detection that identifies the number of photons based on the number of these flux quanta. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-magnetic-flux-quanta-photon.html Optics & Photonics Fri, 23 Oct 2026 17:20:02 EDT news711982021 Establishing a long-term presence on the moon will require solving challenges that are easy to overlook on Earth. Lunar temperatures, for instance, can vary from hundreds of degrees below zero to boiling, making effective insulation essential for lunar habitats. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-everyday-mylar-insulator-lunar-habitats.html Space Exploration Fri, 23 Oct 2026 15:20:01 EDT news711979621 A new study led by University of Hawai'i (UH) at Mānoa researchers reveals how extreme ocean warming disrupts whale metabolism, nutrition and reproductive success and what the developing 2026–2027 El Niño could mean next. As climate change drives increasingly intense marine heat waves, scientists are uncovering how these extreme warming events disrupt the biology of humpback whales. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-marine-suppress-nutrient-reproductive-flexibility.html Plants & Animals Fri, 23 Oct 2026 13:20:19 EDT news711972450 Glass can keep a drink safely contained, protect a smartphone screen, or serve as a foundation for electronic components. But when it comes to controlling heat, this familiar material still holds some scientific mysteries. Now, researchers have identified a key factor governing how efficiently heat travels through silicate glass, offering a new guideline for designing glass materials for next-generation electronic devices. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-glass-good-key.html General Physics Fri, 23 Oct 2026 10:20:25 EDT news711967502 El Niño is part of a natural climate pattern that occurs roughly every two to seven years, bringing warmer-than-normal water to parts of the equatorial Pacific. The most recent very strong El Niño events, in 1997–98 and 2015–16, upended weather patterns. Impacts spanned the planet, from fires in Indonesia and the Amazon to crop failures due to drought in southern Africa to heavy rain and coastal flooding in Southern California. The current El Niño rivals these past heavyweights. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-el-nio-1.html Earth Sciences Fri, 23 Oct 2026 09:40:02 EDT news711963762 A joint research team from KAIST and the APEC Climate Center has found that the East Asian summer front has migrated north over the past half century, with the shift exceeding 200 km (124 miles) in late summer. This raises the risk that the Korean Peninsula will experience heavy rain and heat stress at the same time. The findings suggest that summer disaster planning should address flood prevention and heat-illness management together, through late September. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-east-asia-summer-belt-shifted.html Earth Sciences Fri, 23 Oct 2026 09:00:06 EDT news711963421 In the deepest region of the Earth's mantle, just above the core, much of the material consists of crystals of magnesium oxide. In larger rocky exoplanets called super-Earths, the higher pressures in the lower mantle may drive magnesium oxide to transform into a new high-pressure crystal structure or a metallic, electrically conductive liquid that generates a magnetic field. And in gas giants, magnesium oxide could exist in the cores themselves. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-mineral-planets-reveals-lesson.html Planetary Sciences Fri, 23 Oct 2026 03:42:44 EDT news711945720 New research started with a special material that behaves unusually when it's extremely cold—135 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (minus 93 degrees Celsius), close to the most frigid temperature ever recorded in Antarctica—and showed that the unusual behavior could be extended to well above room temperature—up to about 135 F (57 degrees Celsius), close to the highest heat ever measured in Death Valley, California. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-amino-acid-stabilizes-material-quantum.html Nanophysics Thu, 22 Oct 2026 17:40:13 EDT news711902942 In a review article recently published in the journal Earth-Science Reviews, researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW), in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Leicester (United Kingdom), report on how human activity has altered Earth's sediments over the decades. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-microplastics-sediment-decades-human-worldwide.html Earth Sciences Thu, 22 Oct 2026 16:20:19 EDT news711901381 From 2010 to 2024, the Amazon rainforest—the largest tropical rainforest on the planet—released an average of 1.17 billion metric tons more carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere than it absorbed each year. Wildfires were the main source, emitting approximately 1.47 billion metric tons of CO₂ per year—far exceeding the forest's absorption capacity of 300 million metric tons per year. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-wildfires-amazon-emit-billion-metric.html Earth Sciences Thu, 22 Oct 2026 13:00:20 EDT news711890465 An international team of scientists from the University of Sheffield and the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, led by a postdoctoral research fellow from the University of Newcastle, Australia, has discovered that solar jets called spicules, which are 6–8 Mm long, take the form of warped, denser plasma sheets like pleated drapery. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-curtain-plasma-solar-jets-apparent.html Astronomy Thu, 22 Oct 2026 10:20:06 EDT news711877531 A new study suggests that some of the heaviest rocky planets ever reported may not be as heavy as they look. These so-called 'mega-Earths,' rocky planets weighing more than about 10 Earths, could be an illusion created by activity on their host stars. The paper was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Oct. 8. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-mega-earths-real-stellar-oversized.html Planetary Sciences Thu, 22 Oct 2026 09:50:01 EDT news711879490 Semiconductors with wider bandgaps could pave the way for smaller, more efficient electronics that can handle far higher voltages, but the wider this gap becomes, the harder it is to control how well a material conducts electricity. Now, a team led by Darrell Schlom at Cornell University has shown that adding silicon to thin films of aluminum gallium oxide can keep this control intact at bandgaps wider than any semiconductor before it. Their research has been published in Nature. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-sapphire-grown-semiconductor-bandgap.html Condensed Matter Thu, 22 Oct 2026 07:00:04 EDT news711713518 Populations of many pollinators, including bumblebees, have been crashing over the last few decades, thanks to the widespread use of chemical pesticides, loss of habitat and the acceleration of climate change. But it can be hard to know just how bad the problem is, or whether conservation strategies are helping, without relying on lethal traps—which can kill tens of thousands of bees in order to get an accurate count of their populations. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-ai-bee-lethal.html Plants & Animals Wed, 21 Oct 2026 19:40:05 EDT news711817081 Why has the yeast Candida auris become a dangerous pathogen worldwide in just a few years? This question is on the minds of many researchers. Carla Schuh and Chaitanya Gokhale from the Biocentre at the University of Würzburg have now summarized the current state of knowledge in a review article in the journal mSphere. To that end, they analyzed around 180 studies by other researchers. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-candida-auris-harbinger-dangerous-fungal.html Evolution Wed, 21 Oct 2026 19:00:01 EDT news711814201 Clostridium botulinum bacteria produce a potent neurotoxin called botulinum toxin, which causes the serious illness botulism. The toxin attacks the nervous system, leaving the body unable to control its muscles and making every breath a struggle. Without immediate treatment, botulism can be fatal. Humans, however, have managed to domesticate this dangerous bacterium to do their bidding. Over more than 90 years, biologists have been able to turn a wild microbe into an efficient factory for medical, military and cosmetic products like Botox. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-humans-domesticated-bacterium-botox-treatments.html Evolution Wed, 21 Oct 2026 15:50:01 EDT news711814360 Despite being known for more mundane uses such as sticking notes to refrigerators or keeping bags shut, magnetization is one of the most fundamental and useful properties of a material. Indeed, it forms the physical basis for storing most of our digital information, encoding the bits used in hard drives, computer memories and credit cards. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-ultrafast-ferromagnetism.html Condensed Matter Wed, 21 Oct 2026 13:40:04 EDT news711801302 Earthquakes and the seismic waves they generate provide some of the best clues to Earth's interior. To extend that success to other worlds, scientists placed seismometers on the Apollo missions to the moon and on the Viking Mars landers, which reached Mars in 1976. Though the Apollo detectors proved a resounding success, Viking's results on Mars were less clear: Viking 1's seismometer failed to deploy properly, and Viking 2 recorded only two ambiguous events. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-reexamined-viking-reveals-marsquake-region.html Planetary Sciences Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:40:06 EDT news711799802 Climate change can look very different at the scale of a forest, field or hillside. A new review shows how changes in vegetation and atmospheric conditions can cause local microclimates to warm at very different rates from the regional climate—and why this matters for understanding how biodiversity will respond to climate change. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-life-earth-climate.html Earth Sciences Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:20:23 EDT news711798782 Marine heat waves are usually seen as destructive events that can disrupt entire ocean ecosystems and trigger massive environmental damage. In 2018 and 2019, an extreme heat wave hit the Bering Sea, causing spring sea ice levels to plummet. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-bering-sea-linked-boom-hybrid.html Plants & Animals Wed, 21 Oct 2026 10:30:02 EDT news711795170 Biochar can store carbon in the soil and reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—yet we still know too little about how long the biochar will persist. Now, researchers from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences have found a new way to measure this, using wood from the 1960s that was affected by nuclear weapons testing. The paper is published in the journal Radiocarbon. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-carbon-wood-stability-biochar-soil.html Earth Sciences Tue, 20 Oct 2026 13:20:30 EDT news711713461 Tiny atoms and molecules are constantly bombarding each other all around us. While we regularly measure the large-scale effects of these interactions, measuring the effect of each individual collision is far more difficult. But now, researchers have managed to measure how tiny gas particles affect a single silica particle in the lab. In their new study, published in Physical Review Letters, the team describes how they detected the momentum transfers of individual collisions of gas particles with a nanoparticle levitated in laser light. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-individual-atomic-collisions-lab-potentially.html General Physics Tue, 20 Oct 2026 13:10:01 EDT news711719258 The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS brought material from another planetary system within reach of our telescopes, but reading its chemistry poses a problem. Energetic particles encountered during its journey through space may have changed its outer layers, so how much of what astronomers detect still reflects the comet's birthplace? https://phys.org/news/2026-10-sun-meters-interstellar-comet-3iatlas.html Astronomy Tue, 20 Oct 2026 08:10:01 EDT news711696503 The gas orbiting Sagittarius A (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, is rich in metals, researchers at McGill University's Trottier Space Institute have found. The metal enrichment probably resulted from stars that exploded and released material into the black hole's surroundings over time, they said. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-webb-reveals-metal-rich-gas.html Astronomy Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:00:15 EDT news711642481