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Why Melbourne makes you sneeze in spring
Science News

Why Melbourne makes you sneeze in spring

When most Australians say 'spring is in the air,' they're speaking metaphorically, as the days become longer and warmer.

📅 2026-09-17 02:20:01    •    Phys.org
Tracking visits to public points of interest can inform community health measures
Science News

Tracking visits to public points of interest can inform community health measures

It's not so much where people live, but where they frequently spend their time, that can provide useful information for predicting community health measures. A team led by geographers in the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences found that adding place visitation data—geographic data points collected from millions of anonymous cellphone users with GPS-enabled devices—to a population health model increased the model's predictive performance by an average of 7.5%.

📅 2026-09-17 01:20:02    •    Phys.org
Long-term oyster reef restoration shows clear success in murky waters
Science News

Long-term oyster reef restoration shows clear success in murky waters

Large-scale oyster reef restoration in the Chesapeake Bay is successfully creating three-dimensional habitats that support larger, more diverse fish communities, according to new research from scientists at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The study, published in Ecosphere, provides compelling evidence that restoration efforts are shifting underwater ecosystems from communities dominated by small, transient schooling fish to those supporting larger, resident species.

📅 2026-09-16 23:50:01    •    Phys.org
Device simulates natural conditions to grow biofilms and test their antibiotic susceptibility more accurately
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Device simulates natural conditions to grow biofilms and test their antibiotic susceptibility more accurately

Biofilms are complex microbial communities that adhere to a surface and encase themselves in a viscous matrix they produce. This structure protects bacteria from antibiotics and the immune system far more effectively than if they lived in a free-floating state, making biofilms one of the most common causes of hard-to-treat chronic infections—such as respiratory infections in people with cystic fibrosis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), chronic wounds, or infections associated with catheters and prosthetic devices. Added to this is the global rise in antibiotic resistance, which makes it increasingly urgent to have tools capable of predicting which treatment will work in each ...

📅 2026-09-16 23:40:05    •    Phys.org
Hot electrons reveal electronic collisions may raise resistance in twisted graphene
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Hot electrons reveal electronic collisions may raise resistance in twisted graphene

When a material heats up, its electrical resistance often rises. The harder question is what, exactly, is getting in the way. The electrons carrying the current may be scattered by vibrations of the material's atomic lattice, known as phonons. They may also collide with one another. Frustratingly, a conventional temperature test warms the electrons and the lattice together, so the effects arrive tangled in the same resistance measurement.

📅 2026-09-16 23:40:01    •    Phys.org
Building big with DNA gets a software upgrade
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Building big with DNA gets a software upgrade

Forty-four years ago, Nadrian Seeman published his groundbreaking ideas on using DNA as a structural material, expanding DNA's significance far beyond its role as a carrier of genetic information. Since then, the steadily growing field of DNA nanotechnology has seen numerous innovations. One was the DNA origami technique, which enables researchers to fold a single long strand of DNA into a desired 2D or 3D shape.

📅 2026-09-16 23:30:01    •    Phys.org
ChatGPT at university: Study maps why students stick with AI for learning
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ChatGPT at university: Study maps why students stick with AI for learning

What factors influence students' decisions about whether they will continue to use ChatGPT for learning in the future? This was the question addressed by a new study from ELTE's Faculty of Informatics, which used an interpretable machine learning framework to identify the factors that most strongly influence the use of generative artificial intelligence in higher education.

📅 2026-09-16 23:20:04    •    Phys.org
Thinking outside the binding site: Drug molecule makes a square peg fit a round hole
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Thinking outside the binding site: Drug molecule makes a square peg fit a round hole

A square peg doesn't fit a round hole. But what if the peg could change the shape of the hole? A newly developed drug molecule can do something surprisingly similar when binding to its target protein, according to a University at Buffalo-led study published Tuesday (Sept. 15) in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

📅 2026-09-16 23:20:01    •    Phys.org
Henry VIII's dissolution enforcer stashed Catholic manuscript—its lost pages have just been rediscovered
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Henry VIII's dissolution enforcer stashed Catholic manuscript—its lost pages have just been rediscovered

Sir John Gage, a key figure in Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, saved a dangerous Catholic book from likely destruction, a new study suggests. The identification of six lost pages of a medieval bestseller—illicitly prized by Catholics in the Reformation—as belonging to Gage, exposes the split loyalties of one of Tudor England's great survivors.

📅 2026-09-16 23:10:01    •    Phys.org