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. NASA is bringing artificial intelligence to the study of the moon, helping researchers transform how they analyze its surface. In an ongoing collaboration with IBM Research and several academic institutions, NASA has launched the NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model, one of the first open-source AI models built specifically for lunar science. The model, trained primarily on data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), is hosted publicly on Hugging Face for anyone to use, with the complete codebase available on GitHub for testing and experimentation. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-ai-years-lunar-ice-craters.html Planetary Sciences Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:40:09 EDT news708340141 High school student Khushi Khurana creates and leads coding and artificial intelligence (AI) summer camps for K–12 students in her community outside Philadelphia. Priya Kumar, PNC Technologies Career Development Professor in Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), studies how young people navigate the digital world. Their shared interests led to a research collaboration exploring a youth-led STEM learning model that puts children's voices at the center of the learning experience. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-peer-engage-children.html Education Thu, 10 Sep 2026 11:00:09 EDT news708243662 Imagine a manager sends a thoughtful message to one of her hard-working employees after a particularly exhausting week in the office. The message communicates personal warmth, but when the recipient discovers it was generated by AI, it somehow feels less genuine. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-ai-watermarks-workplace.html Social Sciences Thu, 10 Sep 2026 09:20:06 EDT news708242221 University of Missouri researchers are paving the way as artificial intelligence transforms biomedical research. A team from the College of Engineering and collaborators recently published one of the most comprehensive reviews to date of an emerging AI approach for biology known as flow matching. The work, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, provides scientists around the world with a roadmap for applying the technology to accelerate drug discovery, precision medicine and other biomedical advances. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-ai-powered-biomedical-discoveries.html Biotechnology Wed, 09 Sep 2026 16:40:05 EDT news708177607 Material properties such as sound insulation, resistance to extreme heat and thermal expansion originate from how the zillions of microscopic building blocks (nuclei and electrons) interact at equilibrium and respond to perturbations. Atoms are typically about one ten-billionth of a meter across, so there can be a lot of parts to keep track of—a task that is complicated at the quantum-mechanical level, where particles are neither here nor there until observed. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-physics-aware-benchmark-reveals-similar.html Condensed Matter Wed, 09 Sep 2026 11:20:07 EDT news708165703 Today's best weather computers would still have struggled to accurately predict the weather for the D-Day landings, University of Reading research shows. The new research, published in the journal Weather ahead of the release of the D-Day film "Pressure," used AI models to produce 50 different forecasts of the storm that famously pushed back the Allies' invasion of Normandy in June 1944. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-ai-d-day-weather-falters.html Environment Wed, 09 Sep 2026 04:24:58 EDT news708146669 Researchers have developed a method for extrapolating sea surface temperatures from sparse data that is significantly more accurate than other commonly used computational methods and slightly more accurate than the best-performing AI model, while taking a fraction of the time to train. The work has implications for both short-term weather forecasting and longer-term climate predictions. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-sparse-method-sea-surface-temperatures.html Earth Sciences Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:20:04 EDT news708102301 Plants are home to a diverse array of microorganisms that support their growth and help them adapt to environmental stress—of which there has been an abundance lately. High temperatures and drought caused by human-induced climate change have led to reduced crop yields and the use of biofertilizers such as rhizosphere microorganisms, which help plants absorb nutrients and increase their resistance to disease and stress. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-optimizing-tomato-growth-microbes.html Cell & Microbiology Tue, 08 Sep 2026 17:40:01 EDT news708087932 As an embryo develops from a small cluster of stem cells, those once "blank slate" cells begin to take on more specialized roles like brain, liver or muscle cells and organize themselves into three-dimensional structures such as tissues and organs. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-ai-decodes-cell-fingerprints-diverse.html Cell & Microbiology Tue, 08 Sep 2026 05:00:03 EDT news707993406 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 When it comes to bees, most of us can identify the ubiquitous honey bee (Apis mellifera) and that's about it. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-vital-native-bee-highway-backyard.html Ecology Mon, 07 Sep 2026 11:20:05 EDT news707991182 The key to finding more critical minerals may lie in understanding how fluids and chemicals move through rock. As these fluids travel underground, they can dissolve, transport and concentrate valuable minerals in specific places. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-physics-ai-critical-minerals.html Earth Sciences Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:00:05 EDT news707738461 Two tiny ant fossils recovered in southern Saskatchewan are helping scientists better understand the evolutionary history of modern ants. Ant fossils dating from 72–56 million years ago are rare. What happened to insects such as ants during this period that saw a mass extinction wipe out all non-bird dinosaurs? How did that event reshape their world? https://phys.org/news/2026-09-tiny-fossils-reveal-big-insights.html Evolution Thu, 03 Sep 2026 19:20:01 EDT news707668441 Scientists from Leeds' School of Food Science and Nutrition have developed an advanced AI process that can rapidly identify plant proteins capable of acting as emulsifiers from tens of millions of initial candidates. To date, it has identified nearly 800. The discovery will cut years of costly trial-and-error research and bring the next generation of plant-based foods and cosmetics closer. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-peas-potatoes-ai-proteins-food.html Biochemistry Thu, 03 Sep 2026 19:00:04 EDT news707663648 There are myriad ways of "being a star," and scientists spend years trying to uncover and understand them. One unusual type is the so-called hot subdwarf—small stars that burn mysteriously hot for their size. Scientists from the Faculty of Physics and the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics at Vilnius University (VU) are working to explain this strange phenomenon and recently made important breakthroughs. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-hot-subdwarfs-focus-ai-scans.html Astronomy Thu, 03 Sep 2026 16:40:05 EDT news707660641 Research means asking questions of the universe. For centuries, clever minds have advanced science by devising ingenious experiments designed so their results reveal something about the laws of nature as clearly and unambiguously as possible. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-ai-physics-outperform-human-setups.html General Physics Thu, 03 Sep 2026 12:20:06 EDT news707649841 Inside some fusion energy systems, particles hotter than the core of the sun can become unruly in a few thousandths of a second, far faster than any human operator can react. A new software framework developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University hands those split-second decisions to artificial intelligence (AI), while keeping the machine safe and humans firmly in charge of the goals. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-pacman-ai-framework-fusion-safely.html Plasma Physics Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:00:08 EDT news707581261 Inside a lab at the University of Texas at Dallas, researchers have re-created a small-scale ocean environment where they can make waves build, break and crash into one another. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-tunnel-deeper-ocean.html Earth Sciences Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:40:07 EDT news707556602 For many years, the European Union has pursued a policy aimed at the replacement, reduction and refinement of animal testing (the 3Rs principle). To put the ethical principle of the 3Rs into practice, the European Commission has published a roadmap for the gradual phaseout of animal testing in the safety assessment of chemicals. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-roadmap-animal-free-chemical.html Biochemistry Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:40:02 EDT news707488201 Researchers today announced AdaptiveFlow, an AI-informed platform that can virtually screen billions of drug-like molecules with a 1,000-fold reduction in computational costs over existing methods. Developed and validated by scientists from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, University of Pavia, Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, AdaptiveFlow allows prohibitively expensive ultra-large virtual drug screens to be conducted routinely. The open-source platform was published today in Nature Biotechnology. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-ai-adaptiveflow-redefines-large-scale.html Biotechnology Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:00:07 EDT news707486977 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 On hearing the first cuckoo of spring, the poet's heart might sing, and while one swallow does not make a summer, the annual migrations of bird species across continents have fascinated us for centuries. Today, however, technology is giving ornithologists the means to follow these incredible journeys in ways that would have been unimaginable to earlier generations of naturalists. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-ai-track-bird-migration.html Plants & Animals Mon, 31 Aug 2026 14:00:06 EDT news707397541 Earlier this summer, the four of us spent three days in a room with a dozen others whose jobs sound nothing like ours, or like each other's: a cosmologist, an emergency management scholar, a genetic counselor, a hydrologist, a neuropsychologist, a health risk communication scholar, a cognitive neuroscientist, a theater director, an investigative journalist and a meteorologist. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-communicating-uncertainty-hard.html Education Mon, 31 Aug 2026 13:40:07 EDT news707392862 Whakaari/White Island's sudden eruption in December 2019, which killed 22 people and severely injured 25 others, was New Zealand's deadliest volcanic disaster in recent history. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-earlier-volcano-false-alarms.html Earth Sciences Mon, 31 Aug 2026 13:20:10 EDT news707394542 Welcome back to our series on Interstellar Travel, where we look at the many proposals made for sending missions to the stars since the dawn of the Space Age. In our first installment, we examined how Cold War-era developments in nuclear weapons and rockets paralleled advances in space exploration, resulting in proposals for nuclear rockets. We then examined how the creation of thermonuclear weapons led to applications in fusion propulsion. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-interstellar-warp-wormholes-halo.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:40:04 EDT news707391962 Zachary Kopel '26 has developed a forecasting tool now in use by the U.S. Space Force to help predict dangerous convective wind events, including microbursts that can threaten rockets during launch operations. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-tool-space-dangerous-events.html Environment Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:20:08 EDT news707389382 A protein's function is determined by its structure, and structure—the way a protein folds—is determined by its sequence of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-ai-potentially-stable-protein-sequences.html Biotechnology Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:10:02 EDT news707070182 Finding one Higgs boson was hard enough, but physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are hunting for something even more elusive: pairs of Higgs bosons. At the recent International Conference on High Energy Physics 2026, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations presented new constraints on the double-Higgs production rate, providing insight into how the Higgs boson interacts with itself. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-atlas-cms-narrow-twin-higgs.html General Physics Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:00:04 EDT news707051300 A new study examining tropical cyclone forecasts in the Atlantic Ocean suggests that artificial intelligence could provide valuable additional guidance for predicting when and where tropical disturbances may develop into tropical storms. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-ai-complement-traditional-weather-guidance.html Environment Thu, 27 Aug 2026 09:40:01 EDT news707035262 Machine learning doesn't replace human intelligence, but it can outlast human endurance, which makes it a helpful tool for chemistry and materials discovery. Scientists know machine learning models can make predictions based on the vast reams of data they are trained on, but can they take it a step further and massively scale up testing those predictions? https://phys.org/news/2026-08-machine-methods-labs-closer-materials.html Analytical Chemistry Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:50:01 EDT news706981081