News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
A supernova is what happens when a star has reached the end of its life and explodes in a brilliant burst of light. Supernovae can briefly outshine entire galaxies and radiate more energy than our sun will in its entire lifetime. They’re also the primary source of heavy elements in the universe. According to NASA, … Read more
The Curiosity rover took a picture of something pretty enticing this week on the surface of Mars. While the object in question looks like a tiny little flower or maybe even some type of organic feature, the rover team confirmed this object is a mineral formation, with delicate structures that formed by minerals precipitating from water. … Read more
The Russian space agency Roscosmos is stopping all Soyuz rocket launches from Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana due to European Union sanctions on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “In response to EU sanctions against our enterprises, Roscosmos is suspending cooperation with European partners in organizing space launches from the Kourou cosmodrome and withdrawing its personnel, including … Read more
Microsoft had big plans when it purchased Minecraft, the immensely popular open-world ‘sandbox’ game, back in 2014 for US$2.5 billion. Among them was to invest heavily in an educational revolution – the gamification of learning. It’s not hard to imagine how the logic-based mechanics of Minecraft’s construction system could help teach knowledge and practical skills in fields … Read more
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Thankfully, most people who get COVID–19 don’t become seriously ill—especially those who are vaccinated. But a small fraction do get hospitalized, and a smaller fraction do die. If you are vaccinated and catch the coronavirus, what are your … Read more
Scientists got a strange sense of déjà vu when they took a close look at a mysterious series of bright flashes in a galaxy just 12 million light-years away. The flashes, known as a repeating fast radio burst (FRB), appear surprisingly similar to flashes found in the Crab Nebula. The Crab Nebula is a famous … Read more
Ceres might be spewing cryovolcanoes in yet another spot on the dwarf planet’s surface. Close-up pictures from NASA’s Dawn mission that orbited Ceres between 2015 and 2018 revealed salt deposits in a crater known as Urvara, spotted for the first time in a new study. The salt deposits may be associated with icy volcanoes, the … Read more
Bright Venus, red Mars and the crescent moon are all lining up for a sky show early in the morning Sunday (Feb. 27). If you’re up and available after 4 a.m. local time, be sure to head outside and look to the southeast. By the time the sun rises in New York City at 6:14 … Read more
Millions of new objects have just been cataloged in a vast new sky map that will lead to more investigations about our universe’s environment, the discovery team says. A map of roughly one-quarter of the northern sky was generated using a pan-European set of telescopes called the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR). It detected objects that … Read more
Not all planetary systems are alike. Out there in the big, wide galaxy, a number of different configurations have been spotted, some vastly different from our home system. These include extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, that orbit not one, but two stars, like the fictional Star Wars world of Tatooine. Now, for the first time, astronomers … Read more