News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
NASA says it plans to plunge the vestiges of the International Space Station (ISS) into a remote part of the Pacific Ocean known as Point Nemo in early 2031, after passing the baton to commercial space stations. In an updated transition report just delivered to Congress, the space agency detailed the endgame for the space station, which … Read more
A few years ago, Spanish prison authorities were rather baffled after a prisoner who had been declared dead by three separate doctors woke up in the morgue – just hours before his own autopsy was set to commence. The prisoner, then-29-year-old Gonzalo Montoya Jiménez, was found unresponsive in his cell during a morning roll … Read more
A newfound variant of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, has been uncovered in the Netherlands and appears to cause faster disease progression compared with other versions of the virus. The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infects and destroys immune cells called CD4 cells in the body, causing the number of these cells to plummet. … Read more
China’s Tianwen 1 Mars orbiter is once again delivering stunning imagery, with a new video released to celebrate the lunar New Year. The 38-second clip shows shadows and sunlight moving across the body of Tianwen 1, with the sunlight causing insulation to move slightly due to thermal expansion. Mars then appears below the spacecraft, with … Read more
The James Webb Space Telescope continues to take big strides toward becoming an operational observatory. Mission team members have begun the three-month process of aligning the $10 billion Webb, which launched on Dec. 25, NASA officials announced today (Feb. 3). In the past day or so, for the first time, photons from distant stars traveled … Read more
The sun may appear to be the largest star in the sky but that’s just because it’s the closest. On a stellar scale, it’s really quite average — about half of the known stars are larger; half are smaller. The largest known star in the universe is UY Scuti, a hypergiant with a radius around … Read more
We are now at the midpoint of winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and on a clear and cold night the sky is especially transparent, and the faintest stars abound in great profusion. Careful skywatchers can pick out dim borderline stars and nebulas that cannot be seen at other seasons when the air is less clear. … Read more
NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins is preparing to make history as the first Black woman to embark on an extended mission in space. This April, Watkins will launch to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that will lift off as part of the company’s Crew-4 mission. Watkins, who is a part of … Read more
Earth’s moon is large for the planet’s size, and many astronomers have long believed that this fact has helped make Earth a habitable world. And a new study has now found that our planet was just the right size to form such a large, life-enabling moon. The study, by researchers from the University of Rochester … Read more
Oceans are heating up at breakneck speed, and the warming waters are threatening marine animals all over the world. That’s the alarming takeaway from a pair of new studies on marine warming published this week in the journal PLOS Climate. The first study looks back in time to find out how the oceans have changed since the Industrial … Read more