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. University of Maryland researchers discovered a new approach to treating venomous snakebites—using the same toxin-blocking proteins that snakes evolved to protect themselves. The team found that specific combinations of blood proteins from western diamondback rattlesnakes provided unprecedented neutralizing power against the venom of multiple dangerous snake species. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-combined-rattlesnake-proteins-potent-current.html Biotechnology Thu, 30 Jul 2026 16:40:05 EDT news704641381 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. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-cuco-catalyst-nitrate-pollution-green.html Analytical Chemistry Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:00:03 EDT news704467682 A research team led by UCLA and the University of Rochester has demonstrated a promising evolution of an imaging system designed to capture details within "complex media," which scatter light, from depicting structures inside body tissue to seeing obstacles through heavy fog. The system uses physics-based machine learning to improve an existing imaging technique. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-physics-based-ai-boost-biomedical.html Optics & Photonics Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:00:08 EDT news703945682 The immune system, the body's defense network against infections and injuries, can sometimes become too active. In these cases, it can produce too many immune mediators, fragments of genetic material or proteins that regulate immune responses. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-nanoparticles-immune-molecules-blood.html Bio & Medicine Sat, 18 Jul 2026 13:40:01 EDT news703402994 Some researchers are leaning into biology for inspiration in computing. In particular, neuromorphic computing offers a brain-inspired approach to hardware that replaces traditional binary processing with systems that function more like neurons and synapses. Now, a new study, published in Nature Communications, describes an innovative design for a fluidic memristor that uses its own self-heating mechanism to induce a history-dependent memory effect. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-brain-nanopore-device-current-memory.html Nanophysics Thu, 16 Jul 2026 13:40:03 EDT news703417766 Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have discovered that tiny photosynthetic bacteria band together into protective "herds" when attacked by predators—a survival strategy that could also influence how carbon is stored in the world's waters. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-bacteria-herds-survive-predators-fresh.html Cell & Microbiology Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:20:04 EDT news703340944 The expense of launching cargo into space will plummet over the next few years, with the cost of reaching orbit forecast to more than halve between now and the end of the decade, and fall by around 93% by 2040, according to new Cambridge-led research. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-space-cargo-fall.html Space Exploration Tue, 14 Jul 2026 07:35:02 EDT news703233247 A team led by bioengineers at the University of California San Diego has developed a genome-scale reference map that details how individual genes control the functions and identities of human stem cells. This open-access resource could help researchers build virtual cell models for complex diseases, as well as design patient-specific treatments for these diseases. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-million-stem-cells-reveal-genome.html Biotechnology Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:30:01 EDT news703155590 Moderate volcanic eruptions and extreme wildfires since 2005 have led to an increase in the amount of water vapor in the stratosphere, a layer of Earth's atmosphere above the weather-filled troposphere. That's potentially bad news because water vapor here acts like a greenhouse gas that traps heat and changes ozone chemistry. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-volcanoes-wildfires-adding-vapor-stratosphere.html Earth Sciences Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:30:05 EDT news702816070 Researchers are closer to unraveling a longstanding solar mystery surrounding the extreme thinness of the sun's tachocline layer of strong shearing motion—a region believed to be critical for creating the violent eruptions of high-energy particles and radiation from the sun known as "space weather." https://phys.org/news/2026-07-unraveling-solar-mystery-extreme-thinness.html Astronomy Wed, 08 Jul 2026 14:40:01 EDT news702724695 Relationships are all about compromise. From deciding on where to eat dinner with a friend to negotiating chore lists at home, we often experience situations that require some flexibility. But what happens when we must work with others—especially people we don't know—to make a risky decision? That's what Caltech's Dean Mobbs, professor of cognitive neuroscience, and members of his lab set out to explore in a recent study. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-compromise-risky-decisions-biased-blame.html Social Sciences Thu, 02 Jul 2026 17:30:02 EDT news702230102 More accurate navigation systems and improved wireless communications may not come from traditional electronics, but rather from atoms. Researchers at Penn State and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new way to build tinier, smarter glass sensors filled with highly precise and stable atoms. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-glass-cells-atoms-path-smarter.html Nanophysics Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:40:04 EDT news701699108 Over recent decades, harmful algal blooms have become increasingly common. These blooms often consist of bacteria called "cyanobacteria" in freshwater ecosystems. They can produce debilitating toxins, suffocate marine life by depleting oxygen in the water, and make water unsafe for drinking. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-iron-driven-chain-reaction-trigger.html Ecology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:20:01 EDT news701696952 Cells can spontaneously change shape even without external signals, but the underlying mechanisms behind this form of self-organization have remained unclear. Now, researchers from Japan have discovered self-propelled treadmilling actin filaments (SpTAs), mobile protein assemblies that function as self-propelled particles. The team's work shows that even though SpTAs move randomly, they push the cell membrane outward to grow protrusions, thereby defining the overall shape of the cell. The work appears in EMBO Reports. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-propelled-actin-filaments-cells-spontaneously.html Cell & Microbiology Thu, 25 Jun 2026 05:00:03 EDT news701532481 Living cells constantly exchange ions (i.e., charged particles) via the thin barrier that surrounds their interior, known as the outer membrane. Neuroscientists and medical researchers have long been trying to devise effective methods to measure this exchange of ions, which is known to be associated with communication between neurons and various other crucial physiological processes. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-artificial-dna-tiles-drugs-neurons.html Bio & Medicine Wed, 24 Jun 2026 12:00:01 EDT news701516330 Researchers have developed a self-driving chemistry lab that can autonomously search through hundreds of catalyst recipes and reaction conditions to identify faster, more selective and more programmable ways to make important industrial chemicals. The work could accelerate catalyst discovery for industries ranging from pharmaceuticals and plastics to fuels and specialty chemicals. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-chemistry-lab-catalysts-products-demand.html Analytical Chemistry Tue, 23 Jun 2026 18:50:01 EDT news701450462 This April, when the spring breeze carried the formal acceptance notice of our paper by the Journal of the American Chemical Society to my desk, my thoughts instantly drifted back to the late Phil Geissler. A legendary physical chemist and the original spark for this research, Geissler had once observed a baffling phenomenon: When the hairy, flexible ligands passivating a nanoparticle's surface spontaneously order themselves into crystalline patterns, a massive, seemingly magical attractive force suddenly erupts between the particles. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-liquid-ripples-rewrite-year-biological.html Nanophysics Tue, 23 Jun 2026 12:00:08 EDT news701427498 When Jasmin Imran Alsous peered down her microscope lens, she expected to see chaos—a mishmash of tangled cells. She was viewing the inside of a male fruit fly's sperm storage organ, using a powerful microscope at the CCBScope Observatory, the experimental biology lab at the Center for Computational Biology (CCB) at the Simons Foundation's Flatiron Institute in New York City. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-thousands-nature-longest-sperm-tiny.html Evolution Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:20:15 EDT news701353213 High above our heads, a silent battle is unfolding within Earth's magnetic shield. For decades, scientists have tracked "killer electrons"—ultrafast particles capable of piercing satellite armor and endangering astronauts as they zip through the Van Allen radiation belts. While we knew these dangerous particles eventually leak out of the belts and into the atmosphere, the primary mechanism "cleaning" the highest-energy electrons has remained a persistent mystery of space weather. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-hidden-electric-space-quietly-earth.html Astronomy Thu, 18 Jun 2026 11:20:07 EDT news700999652 By teaching an AI to use optical tweezers, researchers from the University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology have sped up the analysis of life's smallest components. The AI platform captures particles, takes measurements and loads new samples, all without human intervention. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-ai-driven-optical-tweezers-hundreds.html Bio & Medicine Thu, 18 Jun 2026 05:00:05 EDT news700900562 The Ramsar Convention is the world's longest-standing international treaty for wetland and waterbird protection. Signed in Ramsar, Iran, in 1971, the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance Especially as Waterfowl Habitat has to date been signed by 172 countries, which have agreed to engage in "working together for wetland conservation and wise use" in more than 2,500 protected areas covering over 2.5 million square kilometers (965,000 square miles) around the world. However, the Ramsar Convention's measures are not legally binding, leaving open the possibility that many Ramsar sites may be akin to "paper parks"—protected in theory, but not in reality. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-slaughter-ramsar-convention-african-waterbirds.html Plants & Animals Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:40:06 EDT news700822148 Life on Earth has evolved under an uninterrupted rhythm of day and night. While light provides the energy that powers countless molecular processes, periods of darkness often allow biological systems to reorganize, recover and transform that energy into functional outcomes. Inspired by this natural balance, an international team led by Javier Montenegro at the Center for Research in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Materials (CiQUS) of the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela has demonstrated that the same principle can govern the behavior of simple synthetic molecular systems. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-darkness-nanotubes-responsive-molecular.html Bio & Medicine Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:10:01 EDT news700843622 A research team from Tohoku University and Kyocera Corp. has developed a new magneto-optical material—a nanocomposite magnetic garnet film—that can be deposited directly onto silicon substrates while delivering a magneto-optical figure of merit four times higher than conventional polycrystalline films. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-silicon-compatible-nanocomposite-garnet-enables.html Nanophysics Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:00:01 EDT news700829521 Parents who come down hard on their children for telling lies or misbehaving may believe they are teaching the child right from wrong. But new research by NUS suggests that overly strict or punitive parenting could be part of what drives the behavior in the first place. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-reveals-parenting-styles-children-honesty.html Social Sciences Sun, 14 Jun 2026 12:00:03 EDT news700232381 One September day, it started to snow inside MIT's Pierce Laboratory. Researchers depressurized a tank of liquid carbon dioxide (CO2), instantly freezing it and releasing solid flakes. These were blended into cement paste and pressed into disks roughly the size of a dime, each sealed with a thin layer of vegetable oil to keep water in and air out. The team trained lasers on each one, observing for the first time the transient chemical reaction that might explain why CO2-injected cement paste gains strength faster. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-reveals-hidden-cement-chemistry-stronger.html Materials Science Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:20:05 EDT news700413588 Researchers from Skoltech—a VEB.RF group institution—and their colleagues from the U.S. and China have explained how the antibiotic resistance gene established itself in the genome of the bacterium Klebsiella pneumoniae. The findings could help control this widespread microbe, which can cause pneumonia, meningitis and other, often hospital-acquired, infections in patients with weakened immunity. The findings were reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-anti-crispr-proteins-hospital-infections.html Cell & Microbiology Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:00:03 EDT news700314481 While scientists have studied how bacteria move toward food using a chemical radar known as chemotaxis, they have only watched single species swim in isolated environments over distances of only a few centimeters. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-bacteria-hitchhike-large-distances.html Ecology Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:00:05 EDT news700313941 Recent research showed that an artificially constructed self-replicating RNA system modeling primitive life at the origin of life evolved to become more prone to extinction under certain experimental conditions. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-early-life-rna-extinction-prone.html Molecular & Computational biology Sun, 07 Jun 2026 15:40:03 EDT news700065437 A new study in Nature Communications finds a critical climate tipping point in Tibetan permafrost ecosystems. Warming of 2–4 degrees Celsius triggers a self-reinforcing cycle of carbon release that could significantly accelerate climate change, according to the work. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-ancient-carbon-tibetan-permafrost-triggering.html Earth Sciences Wed, 03 Jun 2026 15:20:04 EDT news699718093 A Dartmouth College study is the first to map the interplay of personal choice and social networks that has led to the United States being one of the world's most heavily armed countries, with 120 firearms for every 100 people. The researchers describe in Science Advances how individual incentives to buy firearms can lead to a phenomenon they call "overarming." In an overarmed society, the collective cost of firearm ownership outweighs the individual benefits of possessing a gun. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-overarming-america-game-theory-explores.html Mathematics Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:00:10 EDT news699704161