News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Commercial spaceflight companies such as Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are now offering exclusive opportunities for celebrities and civilians to travel to space. Traditionally, astronauts have been subject to rigorous training and medical scrutiny before going to space, and the risk of death from natural causes was considered remote. But in this new era of space tourism, … Read more
Patagonian ice fields are among some of the fastest-melting glaciers on the planet. As these glaciers disappear, the earth that once lay beneath them is rebounding upwards at rates much faster than expected. Now, scientists have worked out a gap in tectonic plates that began forming some 18 million years ago underneath now-shrinking ice … Read more
On Jan. 1, 1914, the world’s first scheduled passenger airline service took off from St. Petersburg, FL and landed at its destination in Tampa, FL, about 17 miles (27 kilometers) away. The St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line was a short-lived endeavor — only four months — but it paved the way for today’s daily transcontinental flights. … Read more
Humans have accomplished a great deal in our relatively short history – and have left our mark on Earth in the process. In this eBook, we examine the story of us: how we got here, the world… — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com
By Bethan Ackerley Mark Scout, played by Adam Scott, works for a shadowy corporation Atsushi Nishijima/Apple TV+ Severance Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle Apple TV+ THE first thing you should know about Mark Scout is that he is an employee of Lumon Industries, the nebulous corporation at the heart of new sci-fi thriller series Severance from … Read more
A strange X-ray glow seen in the sky three and a half years after an epic collision between two neutron stars is a first for science. According to astronomers studying the region of space, it could be the afterglow of the kilonova explosion that was generated by the merger, likely produced by a shock wave … Read more
There’s a no-nonsense technique for navigating between stars and constellations and all it requires is putting your hand in the air, says Abigail Beall Space 23 February 2022 By Abigail Beall Arnaud Lesueur/Alamy THIS week, instead of looking for a particular target, we will try a technique for measuring distances in the sky. Once you … Read more
Both quantum computing and machine learning have been touted as the next big computer revolution for a fair while now. However, experts have pointed out that these techniques aren’t generalized tools – they will only be the great leap forward in computer power for very specialized algorithms, and even more rarely will they be able … Read more
CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/Shutterstock TOO many people are ill and can’t be properly treated. They have “functional disorders” like myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), aka chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), that are life-altering and often disabling, but with unclear causes. Doctors struggle to find anything out of the ordinary in blood tests and other investigations. All they can do is … Read more
We thought black holes rotated in the same plane as their orbit. One that is tilted by at least 40 degrees suggests our understanding of their behaviour needs an update Space 24 February 2022 By Alex Wilkins Artist impression of the X-ray binary system containing a black hole (small black dot at the centre of … Read more