News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
In the winter of 1997 Carver Mead lectured on an unusual topic for a computer scientist: the nervous systems of animals, such as the humble fly. Mead, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, described his earlier idea for an electronic problem-solving system inspired by nerve cells, a technique he had dubbed “neuromorphic” computing. … Read more
Astronomers are constantly learning new star facts as space exploration and technology evolves. To make sense of these new findings, it’s important to know the basics. Stars are giant, luminous spheres of plasma. There are billions of them — including our own sun — in the Milky Way galaxy. And there are billions of galaxies … Read more
A Japanese company targeting the moon pushed back its second moon mission by a year to 2024. The Tokyo-based company ispace is planning a series of robotic moon missions with the first, called M1, expected to visit Earth‘s celestial companion at the end of this year. In an update Monday (Jan. 25), however, ispace said … Read more
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is leftover radiation from the Big Bang or the time when the universe began. As the theory goes, when the universe was born it underwent rapid inflation, expansion and cooling. (The universe is still expanding today, and the expansion rate appears different depending on where you look). The CMB represents … Read more
Small-scale gold mining has been going on in the Amazon for decades, with huge expansion of this activity since the early 2000s. It is often done via river dredging, in which miners excavate sediments in search of small pieces of gold. To separate the gold, miners mix liquid mercury into the sediment, which forms a … Read more
Astronomers have discovered a mysterious, flickering object in our galaxy, the Milky Way, that belches enormous amounts of energy toward Earth three times an hour. This strangely powerful object — located about 4,000 light-years from the sun — is unlike any cosmic structure ever observed, researchers wrote in a statement. The object in question — named GLEAM-X J162759.5-523504.3 (but … Read more
Humans have tracked time in one way or another in every civilization we have records of, writes physicist Chad Orzel. In his new book A Brief History of Timekeeping (BenBella Books, 2022), Orzel chronicles Neolithic efforts to predict solstices and other astronomical events, the latest atomic clocks that keep time to ever more precise decimals … Read more
Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen is associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. He contributed this article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. There is a new speck of light in the sky right now, best observable from Earth around midnight. This blurry speck — dim as it may be, small as it may be — represents … Read more
As Comet Leonard bid farewell to Earth and flew past Venus, a sun-studying spacecraft flew through the comet’s long tail, giving humans a new perspective on the icy wanderer. Discovered last January and also known as Comet C/2021 A1, Comet Leonard was perhaps the most spectacular visitor for skywatchers in 2021. The object put on … Read more
GEOSCIENCE Orbiting radar mapper goes dark The head of the European Space Agency said last week the agency may accelerate the launch of its next Earth-observing radar satellite, after a power supply anomaly caused one of its two orbiting radar satellites, Sentinel-1B, to go dark for more than 1 month. Since its launch in 2016, … Read more