News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more Humans 5 January 2022 Josie Ford Nailed it Gazing into the alternative reality featured on the other pages of this magazine, we have mixed feelings. That’s a generally valid statement, but it applies especially to the metaverse that The Company … Read more
For a ship that sank 80 years ago, the SS Virginia has traveled a fair distance: the oil tanker has moved more than 10 kilometers since it was torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1942. The shipwreck, located off the coast of Louisiana, is riding lobes of mud moving over the seafloor. These mudflows occur … Read more
By Chen Ly The new species – Uvariopsis dicaprio Lorna MacKinnon A tropical, evergreen tree from Cameroon, the first plant species to be named as new to science in 2022, has officially been labelled Uvariopsis dicaprio today in honour of the actor Leonardo DiCaprio. It adds to the list of the strange and spectacular plants … Read more
When the James Webb Space Telescope’s mission first began on Dec. 25, it was already time for people on Earth to say goodbye to the observatory. A new video from the European Space Agency shows the $10 billion Webb telescope deploying from the Ariane 5 rocket that carried it into space, all in glorious 4K … Read more
Astronaut photograph ISS066-E-86969 taken aboard the ISS on Dec. 6, 2021. (Image credit: NASA’s Earth Observatory) An astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) has captured a stunning photo of a crescent moon above Earth as the last light of the setting sun shines through the different layers of the atmosphere. The photo was taken … Read more
We may need to check our assumptions about how the Milky Way looks to an outsider. While the typical artist’s image of our galaxy suggests a barred spiral with long, graceful arms, the challenge is we made these interpretations from data collected from within the galaxy, which provides a poor view of its outer reaches. … Read more
The Planck time is an incredibly small interval of time that emerges naturally from a few basic quantities in theoretical physics. When it was discovered by Max Planck at the end of the 19th century, it seemed to be no more than a scientific curiosity. But today it plays a tantalizing role in our understanding … Read more
If a hangover is an experience you’re familiar with, then you might have your own go-to hangover cure to try and get yourself back from that painful, zombie-fied state. However, we have bad news: new research suggests that most of these cures don’t have any solid science behind them. Through a review of 21 … Read more
Just seven months after it announced a milestone record for plasma fusion, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has absolutely smashed it. Their ‘artificial Sun’ tokomak reactor is has maintained a roiling loop of plasma superheated to 120 million degrees Celsius (216 million degrees Fahrenheit) for a gobsmacking 1,056 seconds, the Institute of Plasma Physics reports. … Read more
Roughly 13.8 billion years ago, our Universe was born in a massive explosion that gave rise to the first subatomic particles and the laws of physics as we know them. About 370,000 years later, hydrogen had formed, the building block of stars, which fuse hydrogen and helium in their interiors to create all the heavier … Read more