News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
NASA wants your help to safely land future lunar spacecraft in the dark, including permanently shadowed craters that may be icy. The agency’s new Nighttime Precision Landing Challenge No. 1 plans to award as many as three prizes of up to $650,000 each. The challenge asks applicants to create sensors able to detect hazards from … Read more
NASA’s Curiosity rover just aced a bit of atmospheric science on Mars. The Curiosity rover, now nearing its 10th year of exploring the Red Planet, took imagery of clouds drifting over its exploration site on Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons) with an aim to measuring their speed. But it wasn’t an easy task, NASA’s Jet Propulsion … Read more
A Cygnus cargo ship launching toward the International Space Station (ISS) this weekend will carry an experiment designed to improve fire safety on moon and Mars missions. Called SoFIE (Solid Fuel Ignition and Extinction), the experiment is the latest in a series of in-orbit investigations that look at how fire behaves in microgravity. SoFIE is … Read more
In a scene reminiscent of the recent “Dune” movie, the predecessor of a mission bound for Saturn‘s strangest moon soars over the California desert. A new YouTube video shows a drone flying above Imperial Dunes in California in September 2021 to perform testing for the Dragonfly mission, which is a life-hunting drone expected to launch … Read more
By telling the story of COVID-19 in real time, data visualization has taken on new importance in our daily lives. Early in the pandemic, we watched circles multiply and swell on a map as the virus spread around the globe. We saw lines on time-series charts turn nearly vertical during surges in cases. These numbers … Read more
Urban noise pollution is getting worse. Wildfires are growing more severe. And climate change is disrupting the timing of natural events and the life cycles of plants and animals all over the world. These are the major threats highlighted in a new United Nations report on emerging environmental concerns. The report, released today, is the … Read more
Astronomers have discovered the largest radio galaxy ever, stretching at least 16 million light-years through space, new research shows. The galaxy — named Alcyoneus after the son of Ouranos, the Greek primordial god of the sky — was discovered about 3 billion light-years from Earth by a “stroke of luck,” according to a statement from … Read more
Different methods of drug delivery give us more tools to fight disease Credit: James Olstein Advertisement Covid is credited with propelling clinical innovation. But for a disease that seems to start in people’s noses, none of the available drugs or vaccines are delivered intranasally. Killing the virus before it travels into our lower airways could … Read more
We often refer to our expanding universe with one simple word: space. But where does space begin and, more importantly, what is it? Space is an almost perfect vacuum, nearly void of matter and with extremely low pressure. In space, sound doesn’t carry because there aren’t molecules close enough together to transmit sound between them. … Read more
Most of us have at least one moment in our lives when we wish we’d made a different choice. It’s easy to recognize what went wrong in hindsight, but key factors that could have made all the difference at the time are often easily missed as we experience them. Understanding those pivot points becomes … Read more