Scientific Discoveries

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Life on the move in a changing Chesapeake Bay
Science News

Life on the move in a changing Chesapeake Bay

In 2025, a local crabber reached out to professor Romuald Lipcius with some news: He'd been catching stone crabs in the Chesapeake Bay. Native to Florida, the species had reached its northernmost documented occurrence to date. News got out, and William & Mary's VIMS & Batten School were flooded with additional sightings from the public. Some were legitimate; many were mistaken identities.

📅 2026-11-03 17:20:14    •    Phys.org
Plants' immune memory hints at new crop breeding approach
Science News

Plants' immune memory hints at new crop breeding approach

A study published in Nature Communications, led by professor Jurriaan Ton and Dr. Adam Hannan Parker at the University of Sheffield, has identified mechanisms by which plants maintain and reset stress memory from past infections. This immune memory enables plants to defend themselves more effectively against harmful bacteria and mildews, which are increasingly threatening our crop and food production.

📅 2026-11-03 17:20:01    •    Phys.org
A new way to navigate tough land and water use decisions
Science News

A new way to navigate tough land and water use decisions

An open-source software tool to help find a sweet spot between competing environmental and development demands has been launched by researchers at the University of Queensland.

📅 2026-11-03 17:10:01    •    Phys.org
Boat burial reveals leprosy strain in fifth-century Germany
Science News

Boat burial reveals leprosy strain in fifth-century Germany

Visigothic and Vandal forces marched into Italy and conquered Rome; the Huns spread fear and terror on their campaigns through Western Europe; the Franks expanded their domain southward—the fifth century was an era of profound, often violent upheavals in Europe, and at the same time one of great mobility. Researchers from the Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology (IKMB) at Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel and the Lower Saxony Institute for Historical Coastal Research (NIhK) have now identified a specific example of this mobility in the Fallward burial ground in what is now the district of Cuxhaven.

📅 2026-11-03 17:00:06    •    Phys.org
Red and green auroras may share electron-driven origins
Science News

Red and green auroras may share electron-driven origins

With their mysterious glow and swirling veils of color, auroras enchant even experienced researchers. When a particularly intense solar storm reached Earth on the night of May 10, 2024, and relevant websites predicted auroras even for southern Lower Saxony, several researchers from the Technical University of Braunschweig, the Fraunhofer Institute for Surface Engineering and Thin Films IST, the University of Göttingen, and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) took to the outdoors.

📅 2026-11-03 16:40:15    •    Phys.org
Park users reveal 5 factors shaping acceptance of wildlife management
Science News

Park users reveal 5 factors shaping acceptance of wildlife management

Should an area be fenced off, should animals be sterilized or relocated—or, as a last resort, selectively culled? As the long-running controversy over white-tailed deer in the Montreal suburb of Longueuil's Michel-Chartrand Park has shown, managing wildlife in peri-urban parks isn't just about the science. Emotions, trust and how decisions are communicated also play a role.

📅 2026-11-03 16:40:10    •    Phys.org
An asteroid's shape influences where a nuclear blast must be aimed to deflect it
Science News

An asteroid's shape influences where a nuclear blast must be aimed to deflect it

If a dangerous asteroid were headed toward Earth, one defense could be a nuclear detonation to blast one side with X-rays and nudge it off course. But new simulations suggest that for a lumpy, irregular asteroid, exactly where those X-rays hit could make a huge difference.

📅 2026-11-03 16:20:09    •    Phys.org
A type of Arctic Ocean bacteria may be using acetone to turn carbon into food
Science News

A type of Arctic Ocean bacteria may be using acetone to turn carbon into food

A newly identified Arctic Ocean bacterium may have an unusual way of making the building blocks it needs to grow. Using acetone, a common chemical in seawater, the bacteria incorporate carbon dioxide (CO₂) into their metabolisms, allowing them to survive in waters where nutrients and usable organic matter are scarce.

📅 2026-11-03 16:00:25    •    Phys.org
Research ties heat to mealybug feeding and pasture damage
Science News

Research ties heat to mealybug feeding and pasture damage

High temperatures change how mealybugs feed, and that could help explain why some pasture mealybug infestations do far more damage than others, according to early findings from Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientists.

📅 2026-11-03 16:00:13    •    Phys.org
Physicists step closer to the 'Zeptoverse' after 42-year particle search
Science News

Physicists step closer to the 'Zeptoverse' after 42-year particle search

Physicists have found evidence of a particle decay so rare that it is expected to occur only around once in every 10 billion "beauty" particles. The result, from the upgraded LHCb experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), follows a search spanning more than 40 years and brings physicists closer to exploring the "Zeptoverse"—an unexplored world that exists at distances of a billionth of a trillionth of a meter, or a "zeptometer," where new particles and forces of nature may be hiding.

📅 2026-11-03 15:40:30    •    Phys.org