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. While the Discovery Channel's annual Shark Week event has given the public greater familiarity with sharks, much about them—from their mysterious love lives to how their eating habits bring them into conflict with recreational anglers—remains a mystery to scientists. Now, two new studies led by researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst peer into these important aspects of shark biology to help guide real-world conservation strategies. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-prey-nurse-shark-northeast-angler.html Plants & Animals Mon, 21 Sep 2026 19:00:01 EDT news709220523 When NASA's Perseverance rover reached the inner edge of Mars' Jezero Crater in September 2023, mission scientists were surprised by what they found. The geologic area, called the "Margin Unit," stretches along the shoreline of an ancient Martian lake, so they expected sedimentary rocks, which would have formed as layers of sand piled on top of each other over millennia. Composed of clay and silt, sedimentary rocks on Earth are good at preserving past microbial life. The scientists were especially intrigued by strong signals of carbonate minerals detected by Mars orbiters. On Earth, carbonates frequently form in shallow ocean and lake environments capable of supporting life. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-early-mars-reveal-episodes.html Astrobiology Mon, 21 Sep 2026 16:30:01 EDT news709226281 Around 631,000 years ago—a geological blink of an eye—catastrophe unfolded in what is now northwestern Wyoming, U.S. During what is thought to have been a series of immense volcanic eruptions, life within hundreds of kilometers of the blasts was shattered. Ash was dispersed across much of North America, and the effects were felt worldwide. This was a super-eruption of the massive volcanic system located in what is now Yellowstone National Park. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-humanity-blowbyblow-account-yellowstone-supervolcano.html Earth Sciences Mon, 21 Sep 2026 10:40:06 EDT news709205583 Mitochondria—tiny structures that convert nutrients into energy—are often depicted as discrete kidney bean-shaped objects. But in reality, they form a dynamic, interconnected network throughout the entire cell, rapidly splitting and fusing as they're transported to where energy is needed most. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-virtual-cells-built-4d-ai.html Cell & Microbiology Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:00:05 EDT news708876106 Across Appalachia and the Rust Belt region, including throughout the city of Pittsburgh, former industrial sites are being transformed into new neighborhoods, research centers and technology hubs. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-steel-site-pittsburgh-bacteria-evolved.html Cell & Microbiology Sat, 19 Sep 2026 19:30:01 EDT news708868519 Stretching more than 200,000 square kilometers (77,000 square miles) across southern Australia, the vast, flat plains of the Nullarbor mark one of the world's largest regions of limestone. It formed when an ancient shallow sea retreated some 14 million years ago. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-australia-vast-nullarbor-plain-deep.html Earth Sciences Sat, 19 Sep 2026 14:00:01 EDT news708868377 A new study combines paleoanthropology and diving physiology to address a fundamental question in human evolution: Why did humans evolve their exceptional aerobic endurance? Did our ancestors begin endurance running to exhaust terrestrial prey, or did breath-hold diving for aquatic resources also play a key role? https://phys.org/news/2026-09-endurance-running-or-diving-which.html Evolution Thu, 17 Sep 2026 11:00:04 EDT news708854355 Vanderbilt University's Golnaz Arastoopour Irgens, assistant professor of human-centered learning technologies at Peabody College of Education and Human Development, partnered with Sarah K. Burriss (Ph.D. '23, Peabody's Department of Teaching and Learning), assistant professor of the practice at the College of Connected Computing, to rethink how kids should learn about artificial intelligence. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-ai-kids.html Education Thu, 17 Sep 2026 10:40:29 EDT news708847977 Immersive boot camps for women could be a way to overcome the stark gender imbalance in political leadership, according to new research that examined how to increase the political ambitions of talented women. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-political-boot-women-redress-gender.html Social Sciences Thu, 17 Sep 2026 07:40:08 EDT news708844262 Cephalopods are a group of soft-bodied marine mollusks that include cuttlefish, octopuses, squid and nautiluses. Many of these mollusks have muscular suckers on their arms that allow them to seize prey or grip other surfaces in their surroundings. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-cuttlefish-suckers-reveal-rough-prey.html Plants & Animals Thu, 17 Sep 2026 07:40:04 EDT news708600523 For decades, one of the major complaints about nuclear power in the United States has been the argument that, after all this time, we still have not come up with a dependable strategy for sequestering high-level radioactive waste, including spent fuel from plant operation. This issue is of such importance that Haruko Wainwright has put it at the center of her research agenda as an Atlantic Richfield Career Development Professor in Energy Studies at MIT and an associate professor in the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-nuclear-perspective.html Environment Wed, 16 Sep 2026 09:40:04 EDT news708761702 Astronomers have confirmed that one of the fastest-changing stars ever observed has entered a new stage of its evolution, offering a rare opportunity to watch a star's life unfold on human timescales. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-born-star-rare-chance-stellar.html Astronomy Wed, 16 Sep 2026 05:00:09 EDT news708680821 In the hills of northwestern Morocco, overlooking the river that gives the site its name, research at Oued Beht is bringing to light a previously unknown chapter of the region's past. The discovery of a substantial built structure suggests that, during the second millennium BC, communities in northwestern Africa were actively shaping their environment. They were also engaging in broader networks of interaction across the Mediterranean world. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-history-rewritten-archaeological-site-morocco.html Archaeology Tue, 15 Sep 2026 18:00:01 EDT news708702974 This starry view of the nearby star-forming region IC 348 is one of the largest images released to date from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Using Webb, astronomers searched IC 348 for brown dwarfs, which are less massive than the smallest stars. The researchers discovered brown dwarfs just twice the mass of Jupiter, bringing the study of these curious objects into a new mass range and revealing new insights about the star-formation process. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-webb-reveals-dynamic-panorama-star.html Astronomy Tue, 15 Sep 2026 17:20:01 EDT news708697684 When JWST's first science results started rolling in, it was a triumph for scientific vision and persistence. For years, the fate of the powerful space telescope was uncertain. It went way over budget, and for 25 years, troubling conversations accompanied its ongoing development. Several times, it seemed like it would be canceled, and in 2011, Congress came close to ending the program. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-dense-galaxies-early-universe.html Astronomy Mon, 14 Sep 2026 21:40:01 EDT news708611502 Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have developed an artificial intelligence framework that helps researchers use atomic force microscopes to identify important nanoscale features while autonomously targeting the most informative areas of a sample for closer study. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-ai-microscopes-nanoscale-features-sample.html Bio & Medicine Sun, 13 Sep 2026 16:00:01 EDT news708262090 For the first time, important features of the Antarctic coastal zone have been mapped at high resolution around the continent by training an artificial intelligence tool to accurately recognize grounded icebergs in satellite radar images. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-antarctic-wide-grounded-icebergs-reveals.html Earth Sciences Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:40:02 EDT news708340082 A string of major disasters in 2026 have had devastating consequences. Earthquakes in Venezuela and Colombia and floods and mudslides in Nepal have killed tens of thousands of people and injured many more. Countless people remain missing, and hundreds of thousands of homes are damaged, with some entire neighborhoods destroyed. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-diaspora-groups-disasters-nepal-colombia.html Social Sciences Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:00:03 EDT news708340802 Body weight monitoring is one of the most important tools for poultry farmers. It provides valuable information about growth, uniformity, feed conversion efficiency—how well birds turn feed into meat—and the occurrence of diseases in a flock. But obtaining frequent and accurate body weight measurements is a significant challenge in commercial poultry production, according to researchers at Penn State who may have developed a solution. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-turkey-ai-body-weight-weeks.html Biotechnology Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:20:08 EDT news708339304 To be or not to be a gentle parent? That is the question. There is so much controversy these days about gentle parenting. What is it, and what is it not? https://phys.org/news/2026-09-gentle-parenting.html Social Sciences Thu, 10 Sep 2026 19:20:01 EDT news708262290 Parents often learn the hard way that to make it anywhere on time, they should calculate how much time they think they need to get ready—and double it. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-kids-brains-built-distraction-good.html Education Thu, 10 Sep 2026 15:40:12 EDT news708267002 Peatlands store large amounts of carbon. However, when they are drained, they can become substantial sources of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO₂). https://phys.org/news/2026-09-rewetting-peatlands-curb-driven-emissions.html Earth Sciences Thu, 10 Sep 2026 13:20:05 EDT news708254702 First Nations ranger groups working in protected areas such as national or marine parks have identified illegal commercial fishing as a major concern for the Northern Territory's green turtle populations, a study led by Charles Darwin University (CDU) and James Cook University (JCU) has found. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-nations-ranger-knowledge-reveals-threats.html Ecology Thu, 10 Sep 2026 07:40:04 EDT news708238741 Researchers have developed an AI-based system that automatically and objectively detects the moment when fish experience loss of equilibrium (LOE) due to temperature stress. The system combines DeepLabCut, a deep-learning AI that captures animal posture from video, with ResNet34, a deep-learning AI-based image classification technology. Their system is expected to help predict the effects of climate change on fish. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-ai-fish-thermal-limit.html Plants & Animals Thu, 10 Sep 2026 05:00:06 EDT news708104701 WA's trapdoor spiders are endangered. Jackson Rendall is here to help—because he thinks they're "just really cool." https://phys.org/news/2026-09-trapdoor-spiders-leg-science.html Plants & Animals Wed, 09 Sep 2026 21:20:03 EDT news708187202 Hidden deep in the bush, ranging over huge territories at speeds humans can't match and through terrain not even the most rugged vehicle can handle, hyenas and lions are hard to study. Now, new research using GPS collars to map the movements of individual animals has revealed crucial information about the relationship between these competing carnivore species. We've long assumed that hyenas simply shadow lions for scraps, but these findings show that when they encounter each other, it's the lions, especially males, that approach hyenas, and the hyenas that give way. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-gps-collars-reveal-secrets-power.html Plants & Animals Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:01 EDT news708004081 Researchers at The University of Manchester have developed a new physics-based artificial intelligence approach that, for the first time, enables accurate global-scale predictions of how dissolved organic carbon moves between seawater and marine sediments, a crucial but previously unquantifiable component of the planet's carbon cycle. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-physics-based-ai-global-carbon.html Earth Sciences Tue, 08 Sep 2026 16:40:03 EDT news708097002 Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have captured one of the most detailed three-dimensional views yet of a massive binary star system while it is still being born. By tracking the motions of two young, massive stars over nearly eight years, the team found that the pair follows a highly stretched-out orbit and is surrounded by strongly tilted gas disks, both relative to each other and to the stars' orbit. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-alma-massive-binary-real.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 11:20:02 EDT news708077941 In 2012, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) was commissioned to measure the effect of dark energy, the mysterious force driving the expansion of the cosmos. Since then, the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys have obtained optical images of tens of millions of galaxies and quasars, including through NOIRLab's Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO). In recent news, the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team made its 11th data release (DR 11), constituting the largest-ever 2D map of the universe. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-desi-legacy-imaging-survey-largest.html Astronomy Mon, 07 Sep 2026 12:00:06 EDT news707991722 After a bad night's sleep, you squabble with your kids at breakfast. Then a neighbor blocks you in. When you finally get to work an hour late, your boss makes one more impossible demand. No wonder you're angry with the world. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-angry-dont-steam.html Social Sciences Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:20:01 EDT news707981762