News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Whenever you get around to doing dishes, how easily water slides down a dirty plate depends on how uneven and crusty the plate’s surface is. At the nanoscale, however, where surface features can be hundreds of thousands of times smaller than the average width of a human hair, water can experience friction even on surfaces … Read more
How do you design a sail that can get a spacecraft to another solar system? NASA’s Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes, which launched in the 1970s, remain the only two human-made objects ever to leave our solar system. While the pair have defied expectations and are still operational, researchers continue to devise new missions … Read more
A low-lying continent that existed some 40 million years ago and was home to exotic fauna may have “paved the way” for Asian mammals to colonize southern Europe, new research suggests. Wedged between Europe, Africa and Asia, this forgotten continent – which researchers have dubbed “Balkanatolia” – became a gateway between Asia and Europe … Read more
An object 681 million light-years away might look like one glorious, exquisite mess, but there’s a lot more going on that a first glance indicates. The object showcased in a new Hubble image – called IC 2431 – is not one galaxy, but three, coming together in a massive galactic merger that will one day … Read more
When we attached tiny, backpack-like tracking devices to five Australian magpies for a pilot study, we didn’t expect to discover an entirely new social behavior rarely seen in birds. Our goal was to learn more about the movement and social dynamics of these highly intelligent birds, and to test these new, durable and reusable … Read more
Petrov’s Flu is an ode to Russian sci-fi and absurdist art Sergey Ponomarev/Sovereign Films Petrov’s Flu Kirill Serebrennikov In UK cinemas now PETROV (Semyon Serzin) is riding a trolleybus home across the snowbound city of Yekaterinburg when a fellow passenger mutters that the rich deserve to be shot. Seconds later, the bus stops, Petrov is pulled onto the … Read more
By Sam Wong StockFood WHEN cooking food, we need heat to diffuse from the outside to its centre. If we want food to be evenly cooked throughout, this can be a problem: by the time heat reaches the centre, the outside may be overcooked. But in some cases, we can use the slow diffusion of … Read more
Carbon capture and utilisation technologies, which aim to pull carbon dioxide from the air and use it for emissions-lowering processes, emit more carbon than they remove Environment 18 February 2022 By Alex Wilkins A carbon capture facility at the Hawiyah Natural Gas Liquids Recovery Plant in Saudi Arabia Maya Siddiqui/Bloomberg via Getty Images Most carbon … Read more
By Michael Le Page, Clare Wilson, Jessica Hamzelou, Sam Wong, Graham Lawton, Adam Vaughan, Conrad Quilty-Harper, Jason Arunn Murugesu, Layal Liverpool, Carissa Wong and Alex Wilkins Two people embrace on arrival at Sydney’s International Airport on 21 February 2022 in Sydney, Australia. Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images Latest coronavirus news as of 12pm on 21 February … Read more
Social media profiles with deepfake photos and AI-generated text fooled most participants in a study, even when there were obvious errors Technology 21 February 2022 By Chris Stokel-Walker A man browsing LinkedIn Chris Batson / Alamy Social media profiles that contain telltale signs of fakery still convince large numbers of users to accept friendship requests … Read more