News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Look up tonight (March 15) to see the Hyades star cluster light up the Taurus constellation in the night sky. The Hyades star cluster is the closest star cluster to Earth, located only 150 light-years away. Viewers can spot the star cluster by looking for the tall, Y-shaped constellation Taurus, the bull, which is situated … Read more
A newly released image from a Mars satellite offers a glimpse into the complex past of the now dry and dusty world. From high above the surface of Mars, the orbiting High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) homes in on the Danielson Crater, just north of the Mars equator. This region is intensely interesting to space … Read more
All pandemics end eventually. But how, exactly, will we know when the COVID-19 pandemic is really “over”? It turns out the answer to that question may lie more in sociology than epidemiology. As the world passes the second anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration of the COVID pandemic, things seem to be at a … Read more
At this time of year Maryna Kravchenko, a population ecologist at Kharkiv National University (KNU), normally heads into the forests of eastern Ukraine to track frogs and toads emerging from hibernation. Instead, after 1 week sheltering from bombs in a basement, she fled with her young children to Germany, where colleagues at Ludwig Maximilian University … Read more
This weekend, an astronomer spotted a small asteroid just hours before the space rock crashed into Earth’s atmosphere and met its fiery demise. On Friday (March 11), astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky was observing the sky at the Piszkésteto Mountain Station, which is part of the Konkoly Observatory near Budapest in Hungary. During his observations, he spotted … Read more
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drags on, an information war is raging alongside the physical fighting. Russia’s recent attempts to spread disinformation have not yet found great success in the West. Within the country, however, President Vladimir Putin’s regime is controlling the narrative through censorship, state control of media and other forms of digital repression. … Read more
When ThankGod Echezona Ebenezer left southeast Nigeria to start a biochemistry Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 2013, he soon realized little information on the genomes of plants and animals from Africa were in existing global sequencing databases. To help protect the continent’s biodiversity and aid its agriculture, he and colleagues founded the African … Read more
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Solar cycle 25 is kicking off in style. Our sun has a cycle of activity and as it becomes more active, there will be more sightings of the northern (and southern) lights. That is what is happening this … Read more
After COVID appeared, a huge number of virologists, biochemists, cell biologists and immunologists shifted their work to the coronavirus, and because of that, the world got what it was desperately hoping for: a vaccine, in record time. Everything worked out better than we could have dreamed—several parallel vaccines, all with high efficacy. We are seeing … Read more
New satellite images of Ukraine have revealed shocking scenes of death and destruction in the southern port city of Mariupol. The images, taken by the U.S. private satellite company Maxar on Saturday (March 12) morning, reveal a hellish landscape of smoldering apartment blocks; parks pockmarked by shell fire; and grocery stores blasted into rubble by … Read more