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. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have uncovered experimental evidence that particles of matter emerging from energetic subatomic smashups retain a key feature of virtual particles that exist only fleetingly in the quantum vacuum. The finding offers a new way to explore how the vacuum—once thought of as empty space—provides important ingredients needed to transform virtual "nothingness" into the matter that makes up our world. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-glimpsing-quantum-vacuum-particle-insight.html General Physics Wed, 04 Feb 2026 16:20:01 EST news689442697 In beehives on the CERN site, a buzzing team of bees collaborates to build hexagon after hexagon of honeycomb—a shape that allows the most honey for a given amount of beeswax to be stored. Working nearby, a team of similarly committed scientists has recently pieced together some more high-tech hexagons to form the first prototype "cassette" for the new CMS endcap calorimeters. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-prototype-cassettes-key-cms-high.html General Physics Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:50:01 EST news688923791 Scientists analyzing data from heavy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—the world's most powerful particle collider, located at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research—have new evidence that a pattern of "flow" observed in particles streaming from these collisions reflects those particles' collective behavior. The measurements reveal how the distribution of particles is driven by pressure gradients generated by the extreme conditions in these collisions, which mimic what the universe was like just after the Big Bang. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-atlas-nature-quark-soup-radial.html General Physics Thu, 22 Jan 2026 15:36:23 EST news688318561 Celebrate the New Year with the "Champagne Cluster," a galaxy cluster seen in this new image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical telescopes. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-nasa-chandra-year-champagne-cluster.html Astronomy Tue, 30 Dec 2025 13:25:54 EST news686323491 All experiments broke records in the final full operating year of the third run of the LHC. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-lhc-particle-collisions.html General Physics Wed, 10 Dec 2025 12:50:06 EST news684593045 A boiling sea of quarks and gluons, including virtual ones—this is how we can imagine the main phase of high-energy proton collisions. It would seem that particles here have significantly more opportunities to evolve than when less numerous and much "better-behaved" secondary particles spread out from the collision point. However, data from the LHC accelerator prove that reality works differently, in a manner that is better described by an improved model of proton collisions. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-lhc-validity-hadron-production-foundations.html General Physics Thu, 04 Dec 2025 12:12:31 EST news684072722 Although its existence had been theorized for decades, the Higgs boson was finally observed to exist in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Since then, it has continued to be heavily studied at the LHC. Now, a new study from the researchers at CERN combines the last two runs of ATLAS—one of the two general-purpose detectors at the LHC—to lay out evidence that the Higgs boson can decay into a muon–antimuon pair. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-cern-atlas-evidence-decay-higgs.html General Physics Thu, 04 Dec 2025 11:10:01 EST news684068791 In physical systems, transport takes many forms, such as electric current through a wire, heat through metal, or even water through a pipe. Each of these flows can be described by how easily the underlying quantity—charge, energy, or mass—moves through a material. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-physicists-quantum-wire-mass-energy.html Quantum Physics Mon, 01 Dec 2025 13:32:25 EST news683818322 A map of badger roadkill hotspots in the UK has been generated by a team from Cardiff University to help prevent wildlife-vehicle collisions in the future. https://phys.org/news/2025-11-scientists-badger-roadkill-hotspots-uk.html Plants & Animals Mon, 24 Nov 2025 11:15:04 EST news683205301 More than 150,000 people took shelter in coastal provinces of the Philippines on Monday as powerful Typhoon Kalmaegi neared landfall in a region hit by some of the country's deadliest storms. https://phys.org/news/2025-11-thousands-evacuated-typhoon-philippines.html Environment Mon, 03 Nov 2025 04:26:14 EST news681366368 For the first time, scientists have the calculations and simulations to explain mysterious flashes from the galaxy OJ 287. Roughly twice every 12 years, from 3.5 billion light years away, the light equivalent of 1 trillion suns flashes in the night sky and then fades away over the next few months. It's a phenomenon that astronomers have been documenting since the late 1880s, originating in a galaxy known as OJ 287. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-simulations-reveal-black-hole-collisions.html Astronomy Wed, 29 Oct 2025 14:40:09 EDT news680967005 Could yeast and humans be any more different? Going by looks alone, probably not. But peering into our genomes reveals surprising similarities. That's because we share a common ancestor called LECA (last eukaryotic common ancestor). Before this single-celled organism died off around 2 billion years ago, it passed down Dicer, a key protein humans and certain yeasts still rely on today. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-ancient-protein-dicer-rnase-transcriptionreplication.html Cell & Microbiology Tue, 28 Oct 2025 11:00:04 EDT news680796902 For the first time, by studying quantum correlations between triplets of secondary particles created during high-energy collisions in the LHC accelerator, it has been possible to observe their coherent production. This achievement confirms the validity of the core-halo model, currently used to describe one of the most important physical processes: hadronization, during which individual quarks combine to form the main components of matter in the universe. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-triplets-born-proton-collisions.html General Physics Thu, 16 Oct 2025 14:50:04 EDT news679844512 Whether an asteroid is spinning neatly on its axis or tumbling chaotically, and how fast it is doing so, has been shown to be dependent on how frequently it has experienced collisions. The findings, presented at the recent EPSC-DPS2025 Joint Meeting in Helsinki, are based on data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission and provide a means of determining an asteroid's physical properties—information that is vital for successfully deflecting asteroids on a collision course with Earth. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-gaia-mystery-asteroids-probe-interiors.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 30 Sep 2025 13:30:07 EDT news678457179 A researcher, Heikki Mäntysaari from the University of Jyväskylä (Finland), has been part of an international research group that has made significant advances in modeling heavy ion collisions. New computer models provide additional information about the matter in the early universe and improve our understanding of the extremely hot and dense nuclear matter. The work is published in the journal Physical Review Letters. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-heavy-ion-collisions-reveal-early.html General Physics Mon, 29 Sep 2025 15:50:09 EDT news678379312 Members of the STAR collaboration, a group of physicists collecting and analyzing data from particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), have published a new high-precision analysis of data on the number of protons produced in gold-ion smashups over a range of energies. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-high-analysis-reveals-phase-turbulence.html General Physics Mon, 29 Sep 2025 14:19:06 EDT news678374341 The formation of Mercury remains an unsolved mystery. The planet closest to the sun has a disproportionately large metallic core—accounting for about 70% of its mass—and a relatively small rocky mantle. Until now, the most widely accepted explanation was that Mercury lost much of its crust and mantle after colliding catastrophically with a large celestial body. However, dynamic simulations show that this type of impact involving bodies of very different masses is extremely rare. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-collision-bodies-similar-mass-formation.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 22 Sep 2025 16:53:04 EDT news677778781 More than 10,000 evacuees sheltered in schools and evacuation centers in the Philippines on Monday as heavy rains and gale-force winds from Super Typhoon Ragasa lashed the country's far north. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-thousands-evacuated-philippines-super-typhoon.html Environment Mon, 22 Sep 2025 04:32:05 EDT news677734317 Florida Tech astrophysicist Howard Chen is offering new insights to help aid NASA's search for life beyond Earth. His latest theoretical work investigates the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system, one of the most widely studied exoplanetary systems in the galaxy. It has captured scientists' attention for its potential to host water, and thus possibly life, on its planets. Now, he's offering an explanation for why telescopes have yet to find definitive signs of either. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-simulations-exoplanet-formation-extraterrestrial-life.html Astrobiology Thu, 18 Sep 2025 09:00:01 EDT news677404444 A new study published today in the journal Biological Conservation finds that different communication approaches can influence whether people take action to prevent birds from colliding with windows, a leading cause of bird mortality that kills over 1 billion birds annually in the United States and Canada. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-messages-people-bird-window-collisions.html Plants & Animals Tue, 16 Sep 2025 10:00:01 EDT news677174701 Selecting the right spot to smash a spacecraft into the surface of a hazardous asteroid to deflect it must be done with great care, according to new research presented at the EPSC-DPS2025 Joint Meeting in Helsinki. Slamming into its surface indiscriminately runs the risk of knocking the asteroid through a "gravitational keyhole" that sends it back around to hit Earth at a later date. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-beware-gravitational-keyhole-safest-deflect.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 09 Sep 2025 09:59:03 EDT news676630741 In Tenerife, Spain, stands a unique duo: ESA's Izaña-1 and Izaña-2 laser-ranging stations. Together, they form an optical technology testbed of the European Space Agency that takes the monitoring of space debris and satellites to a new level while maturing new technologies for commercialization. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-izaa-laser-game-track-space.html Space Exploration Thu, 28 Aug 2025 11:00:05 EDT news675597040 Baryons, composite particles made up of three quarks bound together via the so-called strong force, make up the most visible matter and have thus been the focus of numerous physics studies. Studying the rare processes via which unstable baryons decay into other particles could potentially contribute to the discovery of new physics that is not explained by the Standard Model of particle physics. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-lhcb-collaboration-ultra-rare-baryon.html General Physics Tue, 19 Aug 2025 10:10:33 EDT news674817018 Earth orbit is becoming increasingly crowded. With more than 11,000 active satellites and many thousands more expected in the coming years, as well as more than 1.2 million pieces of space debris greater than 1 cm, the risk of in-orbit collisions has turned into a daily operational concern. ESA is investing in automation technologies that can help satellite operators respond more effectively to collision risks. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-cream-collisions-space-automation.html Space Exploration Tue, 12 Aug 2025 11:52:03 EDT news674218321 During the early days of our solar system, giant impacts were common occurrences. Earth likely experienced such an impact that created our moon, and Mars may have been struck by objects that created its asymmetrical surface features. But what about Venus? https://phys.org/news/2025-08-explores-venus-violent.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 11 Aug 2025 10:26:55 EDT news674126813 A recent study led by Dilda Berdikhan, a Ph.D. student from the Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory (XAO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has uncovered compelling evidence that a cloud–cloud collision has triggered active star formation in the molecular cloud G013.313+0.193 (hereafter G013.313) in the Milky Way. The findings are published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-cloudcloud-collision-star-formation-milky.html Astronomy Wed, 06 Aug 2025 09:01:03 EDT news673689661 The sPHENIX particle detector, the newest experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, has released its first physics results: precision measurements of the number and energy density of thousands of particles streaming from collisions of near-light-speed gold ions. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-physics-results-sphenix-particle-detector.html General Physics Fri, 18 Jul 2025 07:38:15 EDT news672043087 An unforeseen feature in proton-proton collisions previously observed by the CMS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has now been confirmed by its sister experiment ATLAS. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-elusive-romance-quark-pairs-large.html General Physics Tue, 08 Jul 2025 10:59:04 EDT news671191141 The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) gets a breath of fresh air as it collides beams of protons and oxygen ions for the very first time. Oxygen–oxygen and neon–neon collisions are also on the menu of the next few days. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-collisions-oxygen-large-hadron-collider.html General Physics Tue, 01 Jul 2025 13:43:04 EDT news670596180 If a huge asteroid smashes into the moon in 2032, the gigantic explosion would send debris streaming toward Earth that would threaten satellites and create a spectacular meteor shower, according to researchers. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-earth-satellites-asteroid-moon.html Astronomy Mon, 23 Jun 2025 15:50:01 EDT news669912360