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. Docking with the ISS may seem simple. However, actually doing so shows how difficult orbital mechanics can be. It's like traveling down a highway at 28,000 km/hr (17,000 mph) and parallel parking in an open garage on a multibillion-dollar laboratory traveling at the same speed. If you try to accelerate forward, you actually drift up, and there's no air friction to naturally slow you down. Oh, and if you hit the lab, everyone aboard both your craft and the station dies, and the resulting debris field could wipe out dozens of satellites and even harm people on the ground. No pressure, obviously. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-spacecraft-space-station.html Space Exploration Sat, 26 Sep 2026 14:00:01 EDT news709462341 Tiny insects called aphids inject hundreds of mysterious proteins into plants, hijacking the plants' own genomes to build galls: structures made of plant tissue but constructed to the insects' specifications to house and feed their offspring. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-blueprint-aphid-proteins-ai.html Plants & Animals Thu, 24 Sep 2026 16:10:01 EDT news709481221 When sudden rainstorms roll across Texas, flooding can erupt in a matter of minutes. From coastal bends facing storm surges to low-water crossings in San Antonio, flood risks often spike block by block long before regional alerts sound. That means some people could have ankle-deep water in their yards by the time a flash flood warning sounds on their phones. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-powered-smart-local.html Environment Wed, 23 Sep 2026 10:20:05 EDT news709371242 Have you ever stopped and listened to the background sounds in a room you are in? The hum of the ventilation? The buzz of electricity? While most of the time we are barely aware of these sounds, Arthur Jinyue Guo, a researcher at the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Rhythm, Time and Motion, has revealed that they nevertheless affect our behavior. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-background-affect-human-behavior.html Other Fri, 18 Sep 2026 13:00:01 EDT news708953761 Researchers at Cardiff University have presented two studies at the 2026 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026) that address fundamental challenges in modern AI: understanding the complex geometry and relationships within data and recognizing patterns that occur across very different scales. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-ai-approaches-complex-biological.html Molecular & Computational biology Tue, 01 Sep 2026 14:00:07 EDT news707473279 Cornell engineers have developed a "digital twin" framework that creates a real-time virtual representation of urban carbon dioxide conditions, providing a tool that could help city planners monitor emissions, identify hotspots and evaluate potential interventions before implementing them in the real world. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-digital-twin-manhattan-air-quality.html Environment Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:40:07 EDT news706464302 Long before dark sunspots appear on the sun's surface, a new active region—where powerful solar eruptions can originate—begins showing subtle signs of its formation. Now, researchers say a new artificial intelligence model can detect those early signals and forecast the emergence of solar active regions nearly nine hours in advance on average. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-ai-hidden-solar-eruptions-hours.html Planetary Sciences Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:00:01 EDT news705840421 More than 100,000 people are awaiting an organ transplant in the United States, with a new candidate added to the list every 10 minutes. Even if the transplant is carried out successfully, recipients must take immunosuppressive medications, elevating their risk of broader infections, and adhere to a strict lifestyle for the rest of their lives—all while facing the possibility that their body could reject the donated organ at any time. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-hybrid-bioprinter-capillary-networks-narrower.html Biotechnology Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:40:06 EDT news705752101 When it comes to identifying harmful bacteria, it helps to look at the company their genes keep. Researchers with the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, the research arm of the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, used a machine-learning approach to study not just which genes a bacterium has, but also where those genes sit next to each other. That "genetic neighborhood" helped researchers distinguish disease-causing strains of Enterococcus cecorum, a poultry pathogen, from nonpathogenic strains. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-genetic-neighborhoods-distinguish-poultry-bacteria.html Cell & Microbiology Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:40:02 EDT news705683881 Electrons zipping through transistors, powering the screens on our smartphones. Light zooming from distant stars to Earth, moving faster than anything else in the universe. Protons enabling MRI machines to analyze people's injuries. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-quantum-palm-evolution-superconducting-qubits.html Superconductivity Wed, 29 Jul 2026 23:20:04 EDT news704540077 While headlines warn that AI could unleash future biological threats, the technology also offers our best defense: a way to anticipate viral evolution and stress-test treatments. Rather than waiting for SARS-CoV-2 to mutate and outrun our immune system, my colleagues and I at École Normale Supérieure and Institut Pasteur built EscapeMap. Published in Cell Systems, our framework generates highly mutated, functional viral proteins to evaluate therapeutics against future evolutionary trajectories long before those mutations surface in the real world. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-ai-sars-cov-variants-prevalent.html Biotechnology Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:00:02 EDT news704454474 Quasars, distant cores of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes, are among the most luminous objects in the universe. While not uncommon, their brightness can make it difficult to accurately measure the galaxies they reside in. This means scientists must use gravitational lensing to assist in analyzing these bright objects, a method that relies on studying how an object's strong gravity bends light around its host galaxy. Yet despite their own powerful gravity, quasars that can act as lenses are rare. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-quasar-lenses-emerge-ai-scan.html Astronomy Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:20:07 EDT news704377501 Neural networks have transformed how machines find patterns in data, from recognizing faces in photos to predicting the shapes of proteins. So far, all of this progress has been made on ordinary classical computers, but with quantum computers now edging into practical use, there is a real possibility that neural networks could tap into distinctly quantum effects and operate in ways that classical machines never could. So far, however, neural networks have proven far more difficult to run on quantum hardware. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-quantum-neural-networks-hardware.html Quantum Physics Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:50:01 EDT news704365485 What if the Higgs boson found in 2012 is not alone but is the only sibling we have encountered so far? Scientists at CERN discovered the particle that year, and it was a major discovery because it explained how other particles acquire mass. For a long time, scientists thought this was the final piece of the puzzle. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-machine-narrows-additional-particles-higgs.html General Physics Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:50:01 EDT news704040661 Subseasonal forecasting, or the ability to predict weather trends two weeks to two months in advance, is a capability highly sought after in various economic sectors, including energy, water management and agriculture. Reliable forecasts on this scale have thus far been largely out of reach, but researchers at the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR) are leveraging AI to see whether it can help them grasp this elusive capability. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-subseasonal-ai.html Environment Thu, 23 Jul 2026 11:20:04 EDT news704015342 Penn Engineers have developed PeptiVerse, an AI-powered platform that predicts key chemical and biological properties of peptides, strings of amino acids whose medical potential has been demonstrated by the success of GLP-1 drugs, widely used weight-loss treatments. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-source-ai-key-peptide-traits.html Biochemistry Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:30:01 EDT news703867621 For anyone worried about AI's effects on jobs, here's good news: New research by Stanford economist Lukas Althoff concludes that artificial intelligence is likely to reshape jobs rather than eliminate entire occupations and will ultimately increase wages for all workers—with the biggest gains benefiting lower-skilled workers. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-skilled-workers-ai-world.html Economics & Business Tue, 14 Jul 2026 07:40:03 EDT news703228441 As a heat dome drives dangerous temperatures across much of the United States and renews concerns about extreme heat, USC researchers have developed a new, freely available AI tool that could help cities better understand one of their best defenses against rising temperatures: trees. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-ai-tool-cities-urban-tree.html Environment Thu, 09 Jul 2026 07:40:05 EDT news702799682 Researchers at the University of Tokyo and the Innovation Center of NanoMedicine (iCONM) have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) approach that identifies the morphology of nanoparticles in liquid using data from standard nanoparticle tracking analysis (NTA), a widely used technique for particle sizing. The method achieved classification accuracies exceeding 80% for non-spherical nanoparticles without requiring modification of existing instruments. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-deep-reveals-nanoparticle-routine-tracking.html Nanomaterials Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:20:06 EDT news702657911 Researchers from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) have taken an important step toward developing intelligent molecular materials. The team headed by Dr. Bernd M. Schmidt (Institute of Organic Chemistry and Macromolecular Chemistry) and Professor Dr. Jan Meisner (Institute of Physical Chemistry) has shown that complex molecular nanostructures can be selectively activated, disassembled in a controlled way and even reassembled using ultrasound. The results, published in Nature Communications, could, for example, aid the development of more targeted cancer medication in the future. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-molecular-nanostructures-ultrasound.html Bio & Medicine Mon, 06 Jul 2026 15:20:09 EDT news702562709 Cleveland Clinic researchers are unlocking quantum computing's full potential through the creation of a new computing paradigm inspired by the human brain. Fabio Cumbo, Ph.D., research associate in the lab of Daniel Blankenberg, Ph.D., associate staff, Computational Life Sciences, is developing the model, called quantum hyperdimensional computing (QHDC). https://phys.org/news/2026-06-quantum-hyperdimensional-faster-methods.html Quantum Physics Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:00:03 EDT news700834148 A method to interpret artificial intelligence (AI) models used in materials discovery by analyzing their learned features has been developed by researchers from Japan. The method extracts key features from an AI model trained on atomic structural data and optical absorption spectra, and then groups materials with similar structural and spectral characteristics. This approach can be extended to reveal how atomic arrangements influence other material properties, paving the way for more efficient materials design. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-ai-materials-discovery-uncovering.html Analytical Chemistry Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:30:01 EDT news700482481 Artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally reshaping the contours of life as we know it. In agriculture, the world market for AI is expected to reach almost US$47 billion by 2034. AI enables higher farm yields with fewer inputs, an outcome that matters deeply in an era of climate uncertainty and resource scarcity. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-ai-agriculture-canada-farmers-regional.html Biotechnology Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:40:02 EDT news700232930 From the air, you see it only through the constant jolt, tilt, and shudder of the low-flying Cessna aircraft. The landscape of the Llanos de Moxos, northern Bolivia, appears as a disconnected patchwork of open grassland savannahs, forest islands, and lakes. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-great-mysteries-archaeology-ancient-amazonian.html Social Sciences Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:00:04 EDT news700144861 Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have shown that bacteria can learn from past experiences, store memories across generations and adapt their behavior to changing environments, all without a brain or nervous system. The research could shape how scientists think about bacterial infections and antibiotic treatment. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-bacteria-memories-brain.html Cell & Microbiology Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:40:04 EDT news700129742 UNSW Sydney engineers have riffed on the famous Schrödinger's cat analogy to demonstrate a more efficient way to eliminate errors in quantum computing. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-dont-cat-smarter-quantum.html Quantum Physics Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:40:07 EDT news699709561 For more than half a century, materials scientists have struggled with how to simulate the complexity of polymer materials. An individual chain can comprise tens of thousands of atoms, a melt or composite contains billions, and the properties engineers actually care about, such as how an adhesive grips a surface, how a self-assembling block copolymer locks into a nanostructure, or how a biopolymer film stretches without tearing, emerge only over length and time scales that forcible atomistic simulation cannot reach. https://phys.org/news/2026-05-thermodynamic-laws-ai-polymer.html Polymers Tue, 26 May 2026 19:20:07 EDT news699029450 Protein language models are artificial intelligence tools which help engineer proteins with useful properties, including completely new structures never seen before in nature. https://phys.org/news/2026-05-roadmap-safer-protein-ai.html Biotechnology Mon, 11 May 2026 13:20:06 EDT news697716121 Modern biology is awash in data. Scientists can sequence DNA, track gene activity cell-by-cell, map proteins in space, and image tissues at microscopic resolution. However, it is a struggle to put all that information together to form a cohesive view. https://phys.org/news/2026-05-super-aims-biology-ai.html Biotechnology Tue, 05 May 2026 13:40:06 EDT news697198681 Researchers at the University of Oregon have developed an artificial intelligence tool that can read genetic code the way large language models like ChatGPT read text. Scanning the genome for biological mutation patterns, the computer model traces pairs of genes back in time to their last common ancestor. https://phys.org/news/2026-05-dna-ai-reconstructs-ancestry-minutes.html Biotechnology Mon, 04 May 2026 16:20:06 EDT news697124401