News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
President Joe Biden’s top science adviser, geneticist Eric Lander, has been reprimanded for bullying and demeaning women on his staff, according to a scathing piece this morning in Politico. A 2-month White House investigation found “credible evidence” that Lander bullied one of his attorneys and disrespected and demeaned members of his 140-person staff in the … Read more
Here are some of the wildest perennial space myths that just won’t go die. Credit: NASA/Getty On the internet, you need to be a skeptical reader these days. Claims of aliens and UFOs, Mars being abnormally big, or the moon turning green are the kinds of things you should check out carefully. Here are some … Read more
Robbie Goodall/Getty Images “We learn geology the morning after the earthquake,” the 19th-century essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote. The quote has a pithy resonance as we grapple with the fallout of our inaction on so many fronts, from pandemic prevention to climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss. Applied to geology itself, it is a … Read more
Scientists have spotted two space rocks that may be Earth’s freshest asteroid neighbors. The strange pair of near-Earth asteroids is separated by about 600,000 miles (1 million kilometers), and researchers calculated that they likely broke off the same asteroid just a few centuries ago. “It’s very exciting to find such a young asteroid pair that … Read more
By Clare Wilson GAP Photos/Anna Omiotek-Tott IN MY garden, bulbs such as snowdrops are coming up. Every year, I wonder if spring is arriving earlier due to climate change. One study from 2006 found that many signs of spring, such as plant species unfurling their leaves, had been hastened by 7.5 days across Europe in … Read more
On January 15 the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted in the South Pacific kingdom of Tonga, generating ashfall and a tsunami that affected 84 percent of the country’s population. A few days later, amid heat and humidity, scores of people all over Tonga came out to clean up debris and ash, even sweeping airport runways … Read more
Dogs’ urine and faeces bring large amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus into suburban nature reserves, which could be harmful to plant biodiversity Life 7 February 2022 By Chen Ly A dog in a wildflower patch at St Abbs Head Nature Reserve, UK Rebecca Cole / Alamy Stock Photo Taking your dog for a walk in … Read more
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 People register to undergo PCR testing in Wong Tai Sin, Hong Kong, China, 5 February, 2022 Marc Fernandes/NurPhoto/Shutterstock Latest coronavirus news as of 12pm on 7 February Even with … Read more
An impaired sense of smell affects from about 30 to 75 percent of people infected with the novel coronavirus, according to a recent estimate, suggesting that millions of people worldwide have suffered this condition at some point in the past two years. Called anosmia, the olfactory system dysfunction is typically temporary, but it can take months … Read more
Whether via West Coast wildfires that shrouded New York City’s skyline in smoke or historic floods in Germany, in 2021, signs of the climate crisis were everywhere. A group of the world’s leading ecologists summarized humanity’s predicament when they recently argued that our main goal now as a species is to “avoid a ghastly future.” … Read more