News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. “Polina came to our bedroom awakened by the sound of explosions. I didn’t know and still don’t know what to tell her. Her eyes today are full of fear and terror; eyes of all of us.” Alina, a … Read more
Pack hunting spiders exist in places other than your nightmares. While most spiders enjoy solitary lives, 20 of the roughly 50,000 known spider species live in colonies. One species, Anelosimus eximius, lives in extremely large colonies of up to 1,000 individual spiders that work together to build webs spanning several meters. When prey falls into their web, … Read more
HOUSTON—EPA unveiled its plans yesterday for regulating the power sector, with greenhouse gas rules in a supporting role to limits on conventional pollution. Describing his agency’s regulatory blueprint at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference here, EPA Administrator Michael Regan argued that regulations that would be rolled out in the coming year for mercury, ozone, … Read more
THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS—After a year exploring the floor of Mars’s Jezero crater, where it gathered seven—soon to be eight—chalk-size rock samples for return to Earth, NASA’s Perseverance rover is set to speed toward its longstanding target at the crater’s edge: the remnants of a delta, deposited by water billions of years ago, that may contain … Read more
A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 375, Issue 6585. The reconnaissance trip in western Venezuela was going smoothly—until a gunman took aim at their windshield. It was March 2019, and two infectious disease specialists, Alberto Paniz Mondolfi and Carlos Hernandez, were driving back to their headquarters from villages in Venezuela’s disease-ridden Portuguesa … Read more
An epic outburst from a baby star still in the process of forming has been captured in a spectacular Hubble image. Roughly 1,250 light-years away, in the Orion molecular cloud star-forming region, jets from a protostar are punching through the cloud at supersonic speeds, heating the gas and causing it to glow brightly. The result … Read more
THERAPEUTICS Big COVID-19 trial notches another effective drug The world’s largest study of COVID-19 treatments has yielded another drug that can reduce mortality. On 3 March, researchers with the United Kingdom’s Recovery trial announced that baricitinib, an oral drug that dampens an overactive immune system and is commonly used by people with rheumatoid arthritis, reduced … Read more
Venus will meet up with Mars in the very early morning sky on Saturday (March 12) — here’s how you can catch the planetary duo. The two planets will appear close to each other in the south-eastern sky as they reach conjunction, meaning they will share the same right ascension or celestial longitude. The pair … Read more
Researchers have discovered a simple and surprising control over the depth of a volcano’s magma chamber: how much water it contains. The finding is significant because water fuels the most devastating eruptions—from Vesuvius in 79 C.E. to Mount Pinatubo in 1991. The work could also help improve models that predict eruptions, which for years have … Read more
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has sent a second shipment of Starlink terminals to Ukraine, generating grateful thank-yous from senior Ukrainian government officials, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. SpaceX delivered its first batch of Starlink terminals to Ukraine after Russia’s invasion of that country on Feb. 24 caused widespread communications outages across the country. That lack of connectivity … Read more