News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
The northern lights, or the aurora borealis, are beautiful dancing waves of light that have captivated people for millennia. But for all its beauty, this spectacular light show is a rather violent event. Energized particles from the sun slam into Earth’s upper atmosphere at speeds of up to 45 million mph (72 million kph), but … Read more
By Chris Simms Angustopila psammion is the smallest known land snail Contributions to Zoology 2022 A newly discovered snail species is the smallest yet found on land. Angustopila psammion, discovered in cave sediment in northern Vietnam, has a shell just 0.48 millimetres high and a shell volume of only 0.036 cubic millimetres. This makes the … Read more
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Every disaster movie seems to open with a scientist being ignored. “Don’t Look Up” is no exception—in fact, people ignoring or flat out denying scientific evidence is the point. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play astronomers who make a literally … Read more
The second largest bitcoin mining nation in the world has cut off internet access, slashing the amount of computing power dedicated to the cryptocurrency Technology 7 January 2022 By Matthew Sparkes Riot police gather to block demonstrators during a protest in Almaty, Kazakhstan Vladimir Tretyakov/AP/Shutterstock Nationwide internet outages in Kazakhstan amid civil unrest have knocked … Read more
By Margaret Cuonzo A WOMAN once approached me with a curious problem concerning her husband. Like most people who choose to get married, she had promised to love her spouse to the exclusion of all others. But there was a problem: according to her, the man she married simply wasn’t the same person any more. … Read more
By Michael Le Page, Clare Wilson, Jessica Hamzelou, Sam Wong, Graham Lawton, Adam Vaughan, Conrad Quilty-Harper, Jason Arunn Murugesu and Layal Liverpool A disused granite quarry repurposed to cremate the dead due to covid-19 in Bengaluru, India Abhishek Chinnappa/Getty Images Latest coronavirus news as of 12pm on 7 January The potentially massive scale of unrecorded … Read more
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has reached a major milestone: one billion seconds in the final frontier. The famous observatory launched on April 24, 1990, aboard the space shuttle Discovery. Hubble was deployed into orbit the following day, beginning its mission to explore the vast universe, including distant galaxies, supernovas, nebulas and exoplanets. On Jan. 1, … Read more
Read Why We Love is one of the fundamental questions of human nature. Anna Machin trawls the social and life sciences for answers to why we fall in and out of love with partners, celebrities, family members and pets. The Natural History Museum/Alamy Watch Ancient Human Occupations of Britain will be revealed by Chris Stringer … Read more
By Elle Hunt BBC Studios/Paul Williams TV The Green Planet BBC One January HOUSEPLANTS are the new pets. According to the US National Gardening Association, sales rose by nearly 50 per cent in the three years up to 2019. Then, through the pandemic, they rose even further as we sought to bring nature indoors. Yet … Read more
When researcher Xinghu Qin ventured through rangeland near Inner Mongolia’s Hunshandake Desert, he spotted some puzzling behavior between two little beetles mating shamelessly in the open: one was constantly licking the other’s tail. “What on earth were they doing?” wondered Qin, then a graduate student at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. They were Mongolian … Read more