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. New York, New Orleans and Miami are among the eight cities along the US Gulf and Atlantic coasts facing the highest flood risk, according to a new study published in Science Advances. Scientists developed a new AI-driven framework and combined it with historical flood-damage data to not only identify high-risk coastal areas but also pinpoint the underlying factors driving that risk. https://phys.org/news/2026-04-coastal-cities-america-front-line.html Earth Sciences Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:26:05 EDT news696162309 The development of humans and other animals unfolds gradually over time, with cells taking on specific roles and functions via a process called cell fate determination. The fate of individual cells, or in other words, what type of cells they will become, is influenced both by predictable biological signals and random physiological fluctuations. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-cell-mathematics-machine.html Cell & Microbiology Mon, 26 Jan 2026 10:40:01 EST news688394192 Researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA) are helping reshape how scientists study the sun. The UH-led team has developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can map the sun's magnetic field in three dimensions with unprecedented accuracy, supporting research tied to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope built and managed by the NSF National Solar Observatory (NSO) on Haleakalā. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-sun-magnetic-secrets-ai-powered.html Astronomy Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:18:23 EST news684692281 It is a simple equation, especially for a mathematician. Loved ones, plus food, equals good times. https://phys.org/news/2025-11-cuisines-broken-simple-culinary-fingerprints.html General Physics Thu, 20 Nov 2025 09:27:04 EST news682853221 A new open-access tool created by University of Toronto Engineering researchers provides a systematic way to organize and synthesize knowledge about metal–organic frameworks (MOFs)—a class of materials with applications in drug delivery, catalysis, carbon capture and more. https://phys.org/news/2025-11-access-tool-world-metalorganic-frameworks.html Analytical Chemistry Mon, 17 Nov 2025 15:30:03 EST news682615542 Researchers from the University of South Florida have used artificial intelligence and citizen science to identify what may be the first specimen of Anopheles stephensi—an invasive and deadly malaria-carrying mosquito—ever detected in Madagascar. The study, led by USF scientists Ryan Carney and Sriram Chellappan, demonstrates how AI-powered image recognition and public participation can transform global disease surveillance. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-ai-citizen-science-reveal-potential.html Ecology Tue, 28 Oct 2025 09:00:06 EDT news680772961 For years, we believed the Himalayas were a climatic sanctuary—untouched, pristine, and resilient to the turbulence of modernization. But what happens when mountain cities begin to mimic the dynamics of megacities in the plains? https://phys.org/news/2025-10-term-driven-evidence-reveals-escalating.html Earth Sciences Mon, 20 Oct 2025 17:10:01 EDT news680173394 What if plants could speak when they were thirsty? Agriculture, in essence, is a dialog among crops, soil and climate. Yet drought, the most insidious stressor, remains largely silent until its damage is visible. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-ai-simple-images-early-drought.html Biotechnology Fri, 29 Aug 2025 09:53:40 EDT news675680013 Large language models (LLMs), advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models trained to analyze and generate texts in different human languages, have become increasingly widespread over the past few years. Since the release of the conversational platform ChatGPT, which relies on different versions of an LLM called GPT, these models have become widely used by individuals worldwide, while also making their way into some professional and research settings. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-llms-psychological-outcomes-childhood-essays.html Social Sciences Thu, 07 Aug 2025 07:00:01 EDT news673694784 Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology has successfully developed a real-time, low-cost algal bloom monitoring system utilizing inexpensive optical sensors and a novel labeling logic. The system achieves higher accuracy than state-of-the-art AI models such as Gradient Boosting and Random Forest. The findings are published in the journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessment. https://phys.org/news/2025-05-sensor-algal-bloom-real.html Environment Thu, 29 May 2025 12:09:15 EDT news667739351 Landslides pose a significant threat to people and the environment worldwide. Researchers from the Leibniz Center for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), together with international partners, have developed a new framework that significantly improves landslide prediction using machine learning methods. https://phys.org/news/2025-03-ai-framework-accuracy-landslide-prone.html Earth Sciences Mon, 31 Mar 2025 14:11:03 EDT news662649061 Eelgrass, a type of flowering seagrass found in temperate zones around the world, provides habitat for many species, protects coastlines, improves water quality, sequesters carbon and supports fishing economies. The foundation of a highly productive marine food web, eelgrass's health is paramount but mysterious. https://phys.org/news/2025-02-ai-powered-analysis-uncovers-marine.html Plants & Animals Wed, 05 Feb 2025 12:18:05 EST news657980281 In order to use remote locations to record and assess the behavior of wildlife and environmental conditions, the GAIA Initiative developed an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that reliably and automatically classifies behaviors of white-backed vultures using animal tag data. https://phys.org/news/2024-11-vultures-ai-death-detectors-high.html Ecology Tue, 19 Nov 2024 15:58:16 EST news651254291 Researchers from Skoltech, the University of Warsaw, and the University of Iceland have demonstrated that by optical means it is possible to excite and stir an exciton-polariton condensate, which emits a linearly polarized light with a polarization axis following the stirring direction. https://phys.org/news/2024-11-scientists-optical-nuclear-magnetic-resonance.html Condensed Matter Tue, 05 Nov 2024 07:02:05 EST news650012521 By rapidly analyzing large amounts of data and making accurate predictions, artificial intelligence (AI) tools could help to answer many long-standing research questions. For instance, they could help to identify new materials to fabricate electronics or the patterns in brain activity associated with specific human behaviors. https://phys.org/news/2024-06-merging-ai-human-efforts-tackle.html Mathematics Mon, 24 Jun 2024 08:50:02 EDT news638437425 Researchers at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT-Italian Institute of Technology) in collaboration with the University of Freiburg have developed a biohybrid robot, which consists of a flour-based capsule created using 3D microfabrication techniques, and two natural appendages from oat fruit capable of moving in response to air humidity. https://phys.org/news/2024-05-biohybrid-robot-flour-oats-biodegradable.html Ecology Mon, 13 May 2024 12:53:28 EDT news634823606 Researchers at the University of Toronto have used an artificial intelligence framework to redesign a crucial protein involved in the delivery of gene therapy. https://phys.org/news/2024-01-ai-proteins-gene-therapy.html Biotechnology Mon, 29 Jan 2024 16:03:33 EST news625766607 A new study has highlighted how and when changes to the environment result in animal-borne disease thresholds being breeched, allowing for a better understanding and increased capacity to predict the risk of transmissions. https://phys.org/news/2023-03-landscapes-disease-scapes.html Environment Mon, 13 Mar 2023 12:31:03 EDT news597929461 About 40 percent of interior Alaska is underlain by ice-rich permafrost—permanently frozen grounds made up of soil, gravel and sand—bound together by ice. Certain conditions, such as climate warming, have intensified tundra wildfires which have profound implications for permafrost thaw. https://phys.org/news/2023-02-technique-large-scale-impacts-fire-induced-permafrost.html Earth Sciences Tue, 14 Feb 2023 10:29:16 EST news595592950 Scientists at the University of Toronto have successfully tested the use of machine learning models to guide the design of long-acting injectable drug formulations. The potential for machine learning algorithms to accelerate drug formulation could reduce the time and cost associated with drug development, making promising new medicines available faster. https://phys.org/news/2023-01-scientists-machine-fast-track-drug.html Analytical Chemistry Tue, 10 Jan 2023 05:00:01 EST news592505159 As nations meet in Uruguay to negotiate a new Global Plastics Treaty, marine and forensic scientists publish new results this week that reveal the discovery of synthetic plastic fibers in air, seawater, sediment and sea ice sampled in the Antarctic Weddell Sea. The field research was undertaken during an expedition to discover Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship, the Endurance. The results are published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. https://phys.org/news/2022-11-synthetic-fibers-antarctic-air-seawater.html Earth Sciences Wed, 23 Nov 2022 16:14:03 EST news588442441 For the first time, scientists at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) in Brazil have shown that infection by SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, changes the functioning of host cell RNA. They arrived at this conclusion by analyzing 13 datasets obtained during four studies of viral, human and animal cell RNA. https://phys.org/news/2022-11-sars-cov-rna-infected-cells-reveals.html Cell & Microbiology Wed, 09 Nov 2022 14:03:29 EST news587225005 Polymer brush films consists of monomer chains grown in close proximity on a substrate. The monomers, which look like "bristles" at the nanoscale, form a highly functional and versatile coating, such that it can selectively adsorb or repel a variety of chemicals or biological molecules. For instance, polymer brush films have been used as a scaffold to grow biological cells and as protective anti-biofouling coatings that repel unwanted biological organisms. https://phys.org/news/2022-08-machine-enables-optimal-anti-biofouling-polymer.html Polymers Wed, 03 Aug 2022 14:16:15 EDT news578754972 In recent years, several computer scientists and physicists have been exploring the potential of quantum-enhanced machine learning algorithms. As their name suggests, quantum machine learning approaches combine quantum algorithms with machine learning techniques. https://phys.org/news/2021-08-quantum-machine-classification-task.html General Physics Wed, 25 Aug 2021 13:25:22 EDT news549116705 Physical principles can be incorporated in a machine learning architecture as a fundamental setup to develop artificial intelligence for inorganic materials. In a new report now on Science Advances, Huta R. Banjade, and a research team in physics, computer and information science and nanoscience in the U.S. and Belgium proposed structure motifs in inorganic crystals to serve as a central input to a machine learning framework. The team demonstrated how the presence of structure motifs and their connections in a large set of crystalline compounds could be converted into unique vector representations via an unsupervised learning algorithm. They accomplished this by creating a motif-centric leaning framework by combining motif information with atom-based graph neural networks to form an atom-motif dual graph network (AMDNet). The setup accurately predicted the electronic structure of metal oxides such as bandgaps. The work illustrates a method to design graph neural network learning architectures to investigate complex materials beyond atom physical properties. https://phys.org/news/2021-05-motif-centric-framework-inorganic-crystalline.html Materials Science Mon, 10 May 2021 09:40:01 EDT news539852478 You might not like mosquitoes, but they like you, says Utah State University biologist Norah Saarman. And where you lead, they will follow. https://phys.org/news/2021-02-scientists-machine-learning-approach-track-disease-carrying.html Ecology Mon, 22 Feb 2021 15:00:03 EST news533222075 Scientists have recently explored the unique properties of nonlinear waves to facilitate a wide range of applications including impact mitigation, asymmetric transmission, switching and focusing. In a new study now published on Science Advances, Bolei Deng and a team of research scientists at Harvard, CNRS and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in the U.S. and France harnessed the propagation of nonlinear waves to make flexible structures crawl. They combined bioinspired experimental and theoretical methods to show how such pulse-driven locomotion could reach a maximum efficiency when the initiated pulses were solitons (solitary wave). The simple machine developed in the work could move across a wide range of surfaces and steer onward. The study expanded the variety of possible applications with nonlinear waves to offer a new platform for flexible machines. https://phys.org/news/2020-05-pulse-driven-robot-motion-solitary.html General Physics Fri, 08 May 2020 10:05:08 EDT news508151086 The destructive force of a tornado occurs due to the extremely high rotational speeds in its center, which is called a vortex. Surprisingly, similar effects are predicted for light that travels along an atomically smooth gold surface, which can exhibit angular momentum and vortices. Researchers at the Universities of Stuttgart and Duisburg-Essen and the University of Melbourne (Australia) have now succeeded for the first time in filming these vortex patterns, which are called skyrmions, on the nanometer scale. The journal Science reports this groundbreaking work in its issue of April 24, 2020. https://phys.org/news/2020-04-dynamics-plasmonic-skyrmions-ultra-smooth-gold.html Optics & Photonics Fri, 24 Apr 2020 07:20:09 EDT news506931605 The counterintuitive question on how to wrap a curved spherical surface using conventionally stiff and non-stretchable or brittle materials, forms the basis of this study. To answer the question, Yu-Ki Lee and a research team in the departments of materials engineering and computer science in the Republic of Korea and the U.S. extended a geometrical design method of computational origami to wrap spherical constructs in a new report now published in Science Advances. The approach provided a robust and reliable method to engineer conformal devices for arbitrary curved surfaces using a computationally designed nonpolyhedral developable net. The computer-aided design transformed two-dimensional (2-D) materials such as silicon (Si) wafers and steel sheets into conformal structures that could fully wrap 3-D structures without fracture or deformation. The computational wrapping method allowed them to develop a design platform to transform conventionally non-stretchable 2-D devices into conformal 3-D curved surfaces. https://phys.org/news/2020-04-origami-universal-method-d-surfaces.html Materials Science Wed, 15 Apr 2020 10:20:02 EDT news506163557 In a new report on Science Advances, Hui Kwon Kim and interdisciplinary researchers at the departments of Pharmacology, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Medical Sciences, Nanomedicine and Bioinformatics in the Republic of Korea, evaluated the activities of SpCas9; a bacterial RNA-guided Cas9 endonuclease variant (a bacterial enzyme that cuts DNA for genome editing) from Streptococcus pyogenes. They used a high-throughput approach with 12,832 target sequences based on a human cell library to build a deep learning model and predict the activity of SpCas9. https://phys.org/news/2019-11-deep-learning-based-deepspcas9-spcas9.html Biotechnology Fri, 22 Nov 2019 09:30:01 EST news493544298