News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
The Russian space agency Roscosmos is stopping all Soyuz rocket launches from Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana due to European Union sanctions on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “In response to EU sanctions against our enterprises, Roscosmos is suspending cooperation with European partners in organizing space launches from the Kourou cosmodrome and withdrawing its personnel, including … Read more
Microsoft had big plans when it purchased Minecraft, the immensely popular open-world ‘sandbox’ game, back in 2014 for US$2.5 billion. Among them was to invest heavily in an educational revolution – the gamification of learning. It’s not hard to imagine how the logic-based mechanics of Minecraft’s construction system could help teach knowledge and practical skills in fields … Read more
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Thankfully, most people who get COVID–19 don’t become seriously ill—especially those who are vaccinated. But a small fraction do get hospitalized, and a smaller fraction do die. If you are vaccinated and catch the coronavirus, what are your … Read more
Scientists got a strange sense of déjà vu when they took a close look at a mysterious series of bright flashes in a galaxy just 12 million light-years away. The flashes, known as a repeating fast radio burst (FRB), appear surprisingly similar to flashes found in the Crab Nebula. The Crab Nebula is a famous … Read more
Ceres might be spewing cryovolcanoes in yet another spot on the dwarf planet’s surface. Close-up pictures from NASA’s Dawn mission that orbited Ceres between 2015 and 2018 revealed salt deposits in a crater known as Urvara, spotted for the first time in a new study. The salt deposits may be associated with icy volcanoes, the … Read more
Bright Venus, red Mars and the crescent moon are all lining up for a sky show early in the morning Sunday (Feb. 27). If you’re up and available after 4 a.m. local time, be sure to head outside and look to the southeast. By the time the sun rises in New York City at 6:14 … Read more
Millions of new objects have just been cataloged in a vast new sky map that will lead to more investigations about our universe’s environment, the discovery team says. A map of roughly one-quarter of the northern sky was generated using a pan-European set of telescopes called the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR). It detected objects that … Read more
Not all planetary systems are alike. Out there in the big, wide galaxy, a number of different configurations have been spotted, some vastly different from our home system. These include extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, that orbit not one, but two stars, like the fictional Star Wars world of Tatooine. Now, for the first time, astronomers … Read more
The capacity to engage with and comprehend music spans nearly every human society. While other creatures also display musical behaviors (think bird song, humpback whale calls, or bonobo vocalizations), our musical cognition appears to be evolutionary distinct within the animal kingdom. A new study has given us more insight into the brain’s relationship with music, finding that … Read more
Riley Stearns’s dark comedy about a death match between clones has an appealing premise, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark Humans 23 February 2022 By Davide Abbatescianni Preparing for a death match against your double brings mental and physical challenges Courtesy of Sundance Institute Dual Riley Stearns Coming in 2022 FROM its very first scene, … Read more