News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
By Michael Le Page, Clare Wilson, Jessica Hamzelou, Sam Wong, Graham Lawton, Adam Vaughan, Conrad Quilty-Harper, Jason Arunn Murugesu, Layal Liverpool, Carissa Wong and Alex Wilkins A child receives the covid-19 vaccine KONRAD K/SIPA/Shutterstock Latest coronavirus news as of 12pm on 17 February Children aged between five and 11 in England will be able to … Read more
A simple test for water pollution involving engineered strands of DNA can report levels of contamination, and this biological system can carry out logical operations like those done by computers Technology 17 February 2022 By Matthew Sparkes The DNA computer – although not set up for a formal analysis Julius Lucks/Northwestern University A biological computer … Read more
Although people take longer to make decisions from age 20 onwards, this may not be due to a decline in the speed of information processing, a large study has found Mind 17 February 2022 By Carissa Wong People playing chess WHL/Getty Images Our ability to process information during decision-making doesn’t drop off until age 60, … Read more
Experiments show that two species of mosquitoes change their behaviour after exposure to five common pesticides, which could make the chemicals less effective Life 17 February 2022 By Chen Ly A female Aedes aegypti mosquito BSIP SA/Alamy Mosquitoes can learn to avoid pesticides after just one exposure to them, which means current pesticides may not … Read more
Patients can wait a long time for potentially life-saving lung transplants, since the need to find close matches complicates the process. One of the characteristics that need to be matched is patient and donor blood type. Now new research shows that the blood type of some donated lungs could be altered before transplant, which … Read more
A statistical tool borrowed from ecology suggests that there were originally 40,600 copies of stories about King Arthur and other western European heroes – but only 3648 survive Life 17 February 2022 By Chris Stokel-Walker A scene from the Romance of Lancelot of the Lake The Print Collector/Alamy Nine in 10 medieval manuscripts telling tales … Read more
Researchers have discovered an exceptionally rare, newly hatched “ghost shark” near New Zealand’s South Island, according to the country’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). Translucent, gelatinous and crowned with a pair of giant black eyes on its pointed head, the alien-like baby likely belongs to one of the more than 50 … Read more
Coca-Cola is returning to space, in a new and different way. The iconic soft drink, which was one of the first carbonated beverages to be taste-tested by astronauts in orbit, is now attempting to bring the taste of space down to Earth as a first-of-its-kind, limited edition. “Coca-Cola Starlight,” as revealed on Thursday (Feb. 17), … Read more
NASA wants your help to safely land future lunar spacecraft in the dark, including permanently shadowed craters that may be icy. The agency’s new Nighttime Precision Landing Challenge No. 1 plans to award as many as three prizes of up to $650,000 each. The challenge asks applicants to create sensors able to detect hazards from … Read more
NASA’s Curiosity rover just aced a bit of atmospheric science on Mars. The Curiosity rover, now nearing its 10th year of exploring the Red Planet, took imagery of clouds drifting over its exploration site on Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons) with an aim to measuring their speed. But it wasn’t an easy task, NASA’s Jet Propulsion … Read more