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. A new tool makes it possible to screen millions of tiny protein fragments and select those that can be recognized by the immune system. The CIC biomaGUNE Center for Cooperative Research in Biomaterials has developed epiGPTope, a system that uses machine learning to generate and classify epitopes, in collaboration with the company Multiverse Computing. https://phys.org/news/2026-04-ai-epitope-library-vaccines-immunotherapy.html Biotechnology Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:00:08 EDT news694786861 Researchers have harnessed nonlocal artificial materials to create optical systems that emulate parallel spaces, wormholes, and multiple realities. A single material acts as two distinct optical media or devices simultaneously, allowing light to experience different properties based on entry boundaries. Demonstrations include invisible optical tunnels and coexisting optical devices, opening new avenues for compact, multifunctional optical devices by introducing nonlocality as a new degree of freedom for light manipulation. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-nonlocality-enabled-photonic-analogies-wormholes.html General Physics Tue, 21 Oct 2025 09:41:00 EDT news680258455 This week, researchers pinned down the age of a complete Homo-genus skull found in Greece in 1960 to at least 286,000 years old. Medical researchers reported that the majority of chronic pain patients discontinue cannabis use within one year. And engineers prototyped solar trees, a new solar technology designed with natural tree morphology that can be incorporated into natural branches in the upper canopies of trees while allowing light to penetrate to underlying vegetation. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-saturday-citations-general-gas-giants.html Other Sat, 23 Aug 2025 08:00:03 EDT news675081846 We're often told it is "unscientific" or "meaningless" to ask what happened before the Big Bang. But a new paper by FQxI cosmologist Eugene Lim, of King's College London, UK, and astrophysicists Katy Clough, of Queen Mary University of London, UK, and Josu Aurrekoetxea, at Oxford University, UK, published in Living Reviews in Relativity, proposes a way forward: using complex computer simulations to numerically (rather than exactly) solve Einstein's equations for gravity in extreme situations. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-big-method.html Astronomy Thu, 21 Aug 2025 08:48:11 EDT news674984887 The theory of quantum mechanics has transformed daily life since being proposed a century ago, yet how it works remains a mystery—and physicists are deeply divided about what is actually going on, a survey in the journal Nature said Wednesday. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-physicists-quantum-world-years.html Quantum Physics Wed, 30 Jul 2025 12:59:06 EDT news673099141 A University of Colorado Denver engineer is on the cusp of giving scientists a new tool that can help them turn sci-fi into reality. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-quantum-tool-gamma-ray-lasers.html Quantum Physics Wed, 23 Jul 2025 09:10:05 EDT news672480271 Students learning quantum mechanics are taught the Schrodinger equation and how to solve it to obtain a wave function. But a crucial step is skipped because it has puzzled scientists since the earliest days—how does the real, classical world emerge from, often, a large number of solutions for the wave functions? https://phys.org/news/2024-12-numerical-simulations-classical-world-emerge.html Quantum Physics Fri, 27 Dec 2024 07:40:02 EST news654497502 The chances of intelligent life emerging in our universe—and in any hypothetical ones beyond it—can be estimated by a new theoretical model which has echoes of the famous Drake Equation. https://phys.org/news/2024-11-formula-life-chances-intelligent-universe.html Astronomy Tue, 12 Nov 2024 19:00:01 EST news650625236 We live in a golden age for learning about the universe. Our most powerful telescopes have revealed that the cosmos is surprisingly simple on the largest visible scales. Likewise, our most powerful "microscope," the Large Hadron Collider, has found no deviations from known physics on the tiniest scales. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-early-cosmos-balloon-size-mirror.html Astronomy Thu, 24 Oct 2024 13:14:01 EDT news648994436 Enrico Fermi's lunchtime question at wartime Los Alamos, "Where is everybody?" has been both a gift and a problem to scientists ever since. Known as "Fermi's Paradox," it simply asks, why, since life on Earth is ubiquitous and developed very early in Earth's history, and the galaxy is very old and not overly large, aren't there intelligent, advanced extraterrestrials everywhere? In particular, why can't we detect any, and why haven't any (obvious) aliens visited us? https://phys.org/news/2024-08-alien-life.html Astrobiology Mon, 26 Aug 2024 10:10:02 EDT news643885427 An international research team led by Dr. Gabriel S. Ferreira from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment at the University of Tübingen has described a new species of giant turtle from the late Pleistocene. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-newly-fossil-giant-turtle-stephen.html Paleontology & Fossils Wed, 13 Mar 2024 10:04:03 EDT news629543041 When Thomas Hertog was first summoned to Stephen Hawking's office in the late 1990s, there was an instant connection between the young Belgian researcher and the legendary British theoretical physicist. https://phys.org/news/2023-05-stephen-hawking-collaborator-physicist-theory.html General Physics Sun, 28 May 2023 05:01:21 EDT news604468871 New research suggests an unseen "mirror world" of particles that interacts with our world only via gravity that might be the key to solving a major puzzle in cosmology today—the Hubble constant problem. https://phys.org/news/2022-05-ghostly-mirror-world-cosmic-controversy.html General Physics Thu, 19 May 2022 11:18:20 EDT news572177897 Whether you need a new villain or an old Spider-Man, your sci-fi movie will sound more scientifically respectable if you use the word "multiverse." The Marvel multiverse puts different versions of our universe "out there," somewhere. In these films, with the right blend of technology, magic, and imagination, travel between these universes is possible. https://phys.org/news/2022-05-multiverse.html General Physics Fri, 06 May 2022 11:05:05 EDT news571053900 The discovery of the Higgs boson was a landmark in the history of physics. It explained something fundamental: how elementary particles that have mass get their masses. But it also marked something no less fundamental: the beginning of an era of measuring in detail the particle's properties and finding out what they might reveal about the nature of the universe. https://phys.org/news/2022-01-crunching-multiverse-physics-puzzles.html General Physics Thu, 13 Jan 2022 12:48:34 EST news561300506 Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Ohio state University recently carried out a study examining the possible effects of a first-order phase transition in a confining dark sector with heavy dark quarks. Using computer simulations, they showed that in several scenarios, such a transition could lead to a sizable reduction in the abundance of dark matter. The results of their analyses were published in Physical Review Letters. https://phys.org/news/2021-12-explores-phase-transitions-confining-dark.html General Physics Mon, 06 Dec 2021 10:00:01 EST news558006612 Malicious COVID-19 online content—including racist content, disinformation and misinformation—thrives and spreads online by bypassing the moderation efforts of individual social media platforms, according to new research published in the journal Scientific Reports. By mapping online hate clusters across six major social media platforms, researchers at the George Washington University show how malicious content exploits pathways between platforms, highlighting the need for social media companies to rethink and adjust their content moderation policies. https://phys.org/news/2021-06-malicious-content-exploits-pathways-platforms.html Social Sciences Tue, 15 Jun 2021 05:14:12 EDT news542952845 Discovering there's intelligent life beyond our planet could be the most transformative event in human history— but what if scientists decided to collectively ignore evidence suggesting it already happened? https://phys.org/news/2021-02-harvard-astronomer-alien-vessel-paid.html Astronomy Sat, 06 Feb 2021 13:19:58 EST news531839988 The Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) is home to many interdisciplinary projects which benefit from the synergy of a wide range of expertise available at the institute. One such project is the study of black holes that could have formed in the early universe, before stars and galaxies were born. https://phys.org/news/2020-12-primordial-black-holes-dark-multiverse.html Astronomy Mon, 28 Dec 2020 13:14:39 EST news528383667 In November of 2019—likely, even earlier—a tiny entity measuring just a few hundred billionths of a meter in diameter began to tear apart human society on a global scale. Within a few months, the relentless voyager known as SARS-CoV-2 had made its way to every populated corner of the earth, leaving scientists and health authorities with too many questions and few answers. https://phys.org/news/2020-04-viral-multiverse.html Cell & Microbiology Tue, 28 Apr 2020 03:27:47 EDT news507263257 A Multiverse—where our Universe is only one of many—might not be as inhospitable to life as previously thought, according to new research. https://phys.org/news/2018-05-multiverse-hospitable-life.html Astronomy Mon, 14 May 2018 03:22:56 EDT news445486960 With a science paper published after his death, Stephen Hawking has revived debate on a deeply divisive question for cosmologists: Is our Universe just one of many in an infinite, ever-expanding "multiverse"? https://phys.org/news/2018-05-death-hawking-multiverse-theory-size.html General Physics Sun, 06 May 2018 09:08:40 EDT news444816511 Professor Stephen Hawking's final theory on the origin of the universe, which he worked on in collaboration with Professor Thomas Hertog from KU Leuven, has been published today in the Journal of High Energy Physics. https://phys.org/news/2018-05-multiversestephen-hawking-theory-big.html General Physics Wed, 02 May 2018 09:23:45 EDT news444471815 Rumour has it that Albert Einstein spent his last few hours on Earth scribbling something on a piece of paper in a last attempt to formulate a theory of everything. Some 60 years later, another legendary figure in theoretical physics, Stephen Hawking, may have passed away with similar thoughts. We know Hawking thought something called "M-theory" is our best bet for a complete theory of the universe. But what is it? https://phys.org/news/2018-03-stephen-hawking-pinned-m-theory-fully.html General Physics Fri, 16 Mar 2018 10:00:02 EDT news440412776 When scientists recorded a rippling in space-time, followed within two seconds by an associated burst of light observed by dozens of telescopes around the globe, they had witnessed, for the first time, the explosive collision and merger of two neutron stars. https://phys.org/news/2017-12-star-mergers-gravity-dark-energy.html General Physics Mon, 18 Dec 2017 12:47:05 EST news432823602 A project that explores whether there is a musical equivalent to the curvature of spacetime will be presented on Thursday 6 July by Gavin Starks at the National Astronomy Meeting at the University of Hull. https://phys.org/news/2017-07-adventures-acoustic-cosmology.html Astronomy Thu, 06 Jul 2017 07:27:14 EDT news418544824 Scientists have long tried to explain the origin of a mysterious, large and anomalously cold region of the sky. In 2015, they came close to figuring it out as a study showed it to be a "supervoid" in which the density of galaxies is much lower than it is in the rest of the universe. However, other studies haven't managed to replicate the result. https://phys.org/news/2017-05-cold-sky-collision-parallel-universe.html Astronomy Wed, 31 May 2017 08:58:49 EDT news415439919 A supervoid is unlikely to explain a 'Cold Spot' in the cosmic microwave background, according to the results of a new survey, leaving room for exotic explanations like a collision between universes. The researchers, led by postgraduate student Ruari Mackenzie and Professor Tom Shanks in Durham University's Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, publish their results in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. https://phys.org/news/2017-04-survey-hints-exotic-cold.html Astronomy Tue, 25 Apr 2017 14:19:27 EDT news412348759 (Phys.org)—The possibility that other universes exist beyond our own universe is tantalizing, but seems nearly impossible to test. Now a group of physicists has suggested that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest particle collider in the world, may be able to uncover the existence of parallel universes, should they exist. https://phys.org/news/2015-03-mini-black-holes-lhc-parallel.html General Physics Wed, 18 Mar 2015 11:20:02 EDT news345894165 (Phys.org) —Summer may be on us (at least in the northern hemisphere) but scientists are still busy conducting research, particularly at the Large Hadron Collider as physicists detect process even rarer than the long-sought Higgs particle—after two years of study they've found evidence of a process that can be used to test the mechanism involved where the Higgs imparts mass to other particles. Also, another team has found that entanglement between particle and wave-like states of light resembles Schrodinger's cat experiment. They found a way to entangle a particle wave and a photon creating a new type of qubit that might be useful for quantum computing and which might also be the closest analogy of Schrödinger's Gedankenexperiment realized so far. Another group working on a test of equivalence principle searches for effects of spin-gravity coupling—they used a quantum sensor to investigate gravitational interaction to test the equivalence principle by comparing the gravitational interaction for a bosonic particle to that of a fermionic particle. https://phys.org/news/2014-07-week-qubit-hubble-galaxy-extreme.html Other Mon, 21 Jul 2014 09:00:02 EDT news325148614