News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
If a pregnant woman catches COVID, it’s very rare for the virus to be passed through the placenta to the fetus. But it’s long been known that a mother’s antibodies can cross the placental barrier to the baby and can also be transferred via breast milk after the baby is born. This is why it’s … Read more
Ever since it was approved in 2000 as an abortion pill, mifepristone has been regulated as if it were a dangerous substance. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration required doctors to be specially certified to prescribe it. Patients had to sign an agreement confirming that they had been counseled on its risks. Most onerously, the … Read more
How does an animal as big as a semitruck move around? That’s a question scientists have long asked about sauropods, the largest known dinosaurs, which may have weighed as much as 70 tons. Did they walk like a giraffe, picking up their two left and right legs in a dignified march? Or like an elephant, … Read more
Star Trek: Picard season 2 will be beaming up for streaming on March 3 and Paramount Plus is probably going to be your best bet if you want to watch. The anticipated return of the popular series centered on the legendary Star Fleet captain is almost here and you can watch the trailer above. Season … Read more
President Biden used his first State of the Union address to reset his administration after a year of inflation and crises at home and abroad that has left him with nearly record-low approval ratings. But Biden did little to restart his stalled climate agenda. He spoke only briefly about climate change—talking about it roughly as … Read more
Some 40,000 years ago, a small group of foragers parked themselves on a riverbank in what is now northeastern China. Some split pebbles and bones to make small tools while others made a fire. And at least one experienced craftsperson concentrated on the primary task: grinding red, purple, and gray chunks of ochre into a … Read more
In 2020, a team of astronomers with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) discovered the closest black hole to Earth in the HR 6819 system, just 1,000 light-years away, only to have other scientists dispute the findings. As it turns out, those critics seem to have been correct. In new research, an international team of scientists … Read more
In just 17 years, messenger RNA therapies have gone from proof of concept to global salvation. The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines for COVID-19 have been given to hundreds of millions of people, saving countless lives. In 2005 Katalin Karikó and I created a way to make mRNA molecules that would not cause dangerous inflammation when … Read more
With so many interesting solar system facts, we’ve narrowed them down to 25 of our favorites. Our solar system consists of the sun and everything that orbits that sun, like the eight (once nine) planets we all know from elementary school. But the main planets, as diverse and fascinating as they are, are just the … Read more
If you’re looking to watch The Terminator movies in order, you’re going to need our guide, or a PhD in temporal mechanics. The Terminator franchise is a sci-fi epic – six movies (some excellent, some questionable), each one a building block to form the intrepid web of cyborg assassins and future wars. But what is … Read more