News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
A “doughnut UFO” in the skies over Switzerland. Strange green lights vanishing into the clouds above Canada. A saucer-shaped blob plunging suddenly into the ocean. The year 2021 gave truth-seekers and alien hunters no shortage of mysteries to ponder. But it also gave them answers — from a hotly anticipated Pentagon report on military UFO … Read more
The place that humans know most intimately in all the universe is a rocky planet called Earth. It makes sense, then, that humans are existentially driven to imagine what other such celestial bodies may be like. The scientific curiosity about what planets exist beyond the sun’s neighborhood is supported by several missions, like NASA’s Transiting … Read more
Warning: Spoilers ahead for “Star Trek: Discovery” Season 4, Episode 7 Probably the most significant “Star Trek” news that broke in the time between last week’s episode and now was that Paramount unexpectedly announced on Twitter that “Star Trek: Discovery” will be taking a mid-season break, with tonight’s installment being the mid-season finale. The fourth … Read more
In 1996 scientists announced the astonishing news that they’d discovered what they believed might be signs of ancient life inside a meteorite from Mars. In 2014 astrophysicists declared that they’d found direct evidence at last for the “inflationary universe” theory, first proposed in the 1980s. What these assertions had in common was that they were based on research by … Read more
Tardigrades — those microscopic, plump-bodied critters lovingly known as “moss piglets” — have been put through the ringer for science. The amazingly durable creatures have been shot out of guns, bathed in boiling-hot water, exposed to intense ultraviolet radiation and even (accidentally) crash-landed on the moon, all to test the limits of their impressive “tun” … Read more
One minute you’re enjoying a nice buzz, the next your brain stops recording events that are taking place. The result can mean having vague or no memory of a time period ranging anywhere from a few minutes up to several hours. Scary—isn’t it? Unfortunately, alcohol-induced blackouts aren’t a rarity, either. A 2015 survey of English … Read more
Imaginary numbers are necessary to accurately describe reality, two new studies have suggested. Imaginary numbers are what you get when you take the square root of a negative number, and they have long been used in the most important equations of quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that describes the world of the very small. … Read more
Fiction Review by Robin MacArthur How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu William Morrow, 2022 ($27.99) Sometimes a novel comes along that feels so prescient—so startlingly aligned with the happenings of the real world—it seems plausible that the author was attuned not just to scientific foreshadowing but to some divinatory reading of … Read more
A new study sponsored by NASA investigates the feasibility of sending people with disabilities safely into space and returning them back to Earth. The appraisal, called the Parastronaut Feasibility Foundational Research Study, makes a number of recommendations, including revising medical standards for astronaut selection and using parabolic aircraft flights to demonstrate parastronaut proof of … Read more
An exciting year lies ahead with many space missions slated to launch in 2022. While 2021 was an eventful year with the first space tourist-focused missions, NASA’s new Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter landing on Mars, the long-awaited launch of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and numerous other science missions, there’s even more to look … Read more