News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
For years, scientists have believed frigid craters at the Moon’s poles hold water ice, which would be both a scientific boon and a potential resource for human missions. Now, researchers have discovered a reason why the ice has persisted on an otherwise bone-dry world: Some polar craters may be protected by ancient magnetic fields. “It’s … Read more
Centuries before first contact with Europeans, new research suggests a strain of tuberculosis was already circulating from the South American coasts to the mountains. Deadly European diseases, like tuberculosis (TB), whooping cough, and smallpox, were spread around the world with colonization, but recent evidence indicates this wasn’t the first time TB arrived in South America. … Read more
China’s first Mars rover reveals how weather and ancient water changed the surface of the largest impact basin on Mars. China’s Zhurong rover landed in the Utopia Planitia, a 2,000-miles-wide (3,300 kilometers) basin in the Northern Hemisphere of Mars, in May 2021. Since then, the rover has been studying local geology, chemical composition of rocks, … Read more
In 2018, an international team of scientists announced a startling discovery: Buried beneath the thick ice of the Hiawatha Glacier in northwest Greenland is an impact crater 31 kilometers wide—not as big as the crater from the dinosaur-killing impact 66 million years ago, but perhaps still big enough to mess with the climate. Scientists were … Read more
An AI tool developed by DeepMind can help historians restore ancient Greek texts with 72 per cent accuracy, and date inscriptions to within 30 years of their true age Humans 9 March 2022 By Carissa Wong The Celsus Library in the ancient city of Ephesus, Turkey Mazur Travel/Shutterstock An artificial intelligence algorithm developed as part … Read more
An exceptional fossil unearthed in Montana has given us the earliest known ancestor of vampire squids and octopuses. The cephalopod, belonging to the vampyropod or octopodiform superorder, pushes back the age of the group by about 82 million years. This challenges our understanding that octopuses evolved from a Triassic ancestor. Fascinatingly, it has not eight, … Read more
Archaeologists may have just uncovered evidence for the oldest known practice of mummification. Human remains interred 8,000 years ago in the Sado Valley in Portugal, during the Mesolithic, appear to have been deliberately treated for mummification prior to burial. This is the first evidence for Mesolithic mummification in Europe. It’s also possibly the oldest … Read more
Scientists discovered remnants of an Old Stone Age culture, less than 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of Beijing, where ancient hominins used a reddish pigment called ochre and crafted tiny, blade-like tools from stone. The archaeological site, called Xiamabei, offers a rare glimpse into the life of Homo sapiens and now-extinct human relatives who inhabited the region some … Read more
These are dark times, and I take solace where I can get it. Lately I’ve gotten it from The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by anthropologist David Graeber, who died shortly after finishing the book, and archaeologist David Wengrow. Dawn is both a dense, 692-page scholarly inquiry into the origins of civilization … Read more
On a spring day 66 million years ago, as flowers bloomed and baby birds hatched in what is now North Dakota, a ball of fire streaked across the sky and wiped out nearly three-quarters of life on Earth. So says a new high-resolution study of fossilized fish bones, which pinpoints the season of the Cretaceous-Paleogene … Read more