phys.org

Distant, ancient galaxies are giving scientists more hints that a mysterious force called dark energy may not be what they thought.

On March 2, 2022, delegates to the UN environment assembly adopted an ambitious resolution to develop the text of a new treaty by the end of 2024 to end plastic pollution. With 24 days of formal negotiation between almost 200 countries completed, spread over meetings in Peru, France, Kenya and Canada, the fifth and final negotiation meeting is about to take place in Busan, South Korea. This is crunch time. Agreement must be found or the opportunity to take global action to tackle plastic pollution might be lost.

Chemists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed a sustainable method to electrosynthesize 1,3-butadiene, a feedstock used for synthetic rubber production, from acetylene.

Imagine you are a blue whale swimming up the California coast, as you do every spring. You are searching for krill in the Santa Barbara Channel, a zone that teems with fish, kelp forests, seagrass beds and other undersea life, but also vibrates with noise from ship traffic. Suddenly, the noise gets louder.

Peer review is a central feature of academic work. It's the process through which research ends up published in an academic journal: independent experts scrutinize the work of another researcher in order to recommend if it should be accepted by a publisher and if and how it should be improved.

The term "social distancing" spread out across the public vocabulary in recent years as people around the world changed habits to combat the COVID pandemic. New research led by UT Professor Alex Bentley, however, reveals the practice of organized elbow room could date back approximately 6,000 years.

A team of marine biologists from Norway, the U.S. and Denmark has conducted the first hearing test of a live baleen whale. For their study published in the journal Science, the group corralled a pair of wild minke whales and recorded their brain waves.

A recent study in Physical Review Letters explores quantum effects on black hole thermodynamics and geometry, focusing on extending two classical inequalities into the quantum regime.

Since we last spoke, researchers at the University of Birmingham have defined the precise shape of a single photon (spoiler: roundish). Economists worry that Trump's grandiose deportation plans could lead to a recession. And astronomers report that the Milky Way may not be truly representative of other galaxies in the universe. We also reported on supercharged human metabolism, projections of sea level rise over the next 75 years and a remarkable photo of a dying star in another galaxy:

Fierce bargaining at UN climate talks in Azerbaijan dragged into Saturday after a $250 billion a year offer from rich nations was flatly refused by developing countries hardest hit by Earth's rapid warming.