News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Packed among the scientific research and crew supplies delivered by a cargo craft to the International Space Station early Monday morning (Feb. 21), was a small purple box “housing the seeds of a future, interplanetary culture.” Or so reads the inscription printed on the side of the canister. Dubbed the “Moon Gallery”, the collection of … Read more
Three galaxies collide in this stunning new Hubble Space Telescope image showing the galaxy cluster IC 2431 about 681 million light-years from Earth. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Keel, Dark Energy Survey, Department of Energy, Fermilab, Dark Energy Survey Camera, (DECam), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, NoirLab/National Science Foundation/AURA, Sloan Digital Sky Survey; Acknowledgment: J. … Read more
NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is back to science operations as of Thursday (Feb. 17), following a glitch more than a month ago. The nearly 18-year-old telescope suffered a failure with one of its reaction wheels on Jan. 18, forcing a temporary pivot to safe mode. Swift uses a total of six reaction wheels to … Read more
Chemicals cost more than just money: Today, petrochemical production spews out nearly 2% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Now, researchers have taken an important step to vastly reduce that footprint, by using bacteria and waste gases from steel plants, rather than petroleum, as the starting ingredient for dozens of commodity chemicals. So far, the … Read more
An artist’s impression of the hot Jupiter exoplanet WASP-121 b. In a new study, researchers explored the exoplanet’s nightside. (Image credit: Patricia Klein and MPIA) Imagine a world where the clouds are made of metal and liquid rubies and sapphires rain down from the sky. A new study shows that, on the hot Jupiter exoplanet … Read more
A giant exoplanet 855 light-years away is so extreme, it has clouds of vaporized metals and rains liquid rubies and sapphires. That’s the conclusion astronomers have reached after probing its atmosphere – the most detailed such analysis to date, revealing for the first time the conditions and dynamics of the exoplanet’s permanent night side. … Read more
One of the James Webb Space Telescope‘s first studies will seek to tell us more about 19 nearby galaxies and how they fit into our neighborhood’s history. The infrared images taken from deep space will allow Webb’s data to add galactic information about star formation, strong winds blowing off these stars to disturb gas and … Read more
“This is a case about Harvard’s decade-long failure to protect students from sexual abuse and career-ending retaliation.” That is the first sentence of a federal lawsuit filed on February 8 by three graduate students against Harvard University, accusing the university’s officials of enabling abusive behavior by John Comaroff, a professor in the anthropology department. The … Read more
Physicists have taken a step towards nailing down the mass of the neutrino, perhaps the most mysterious of all elementary particles. The team at the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment in Germany reports that neutrinos have a maximum mass of 0.8 electron volts. Researchers have long had indirect evidence that the particles should be lighter … Read more
Gathered your loved ones around the table to play some of the best space board games. Some of our picks are out-of-this-world, quite literally! Whether you’re in the mood for a planetary exploration adventure, a galaxy-hopping conquest, extra-terrestrial encounters, or tactical starship combat, we’ve got you covered with the best space board games in the … Read more