News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Once, there were giants. Mountain ranges that rivaled the Himalayas in height used to stretch thousands upon thousands of kilometers across the seams of merging supercontinents, billions of years in the past. Like the teeth of decrepit old gods, they’ve long been worn down to their roots by time and decay. But in those … Read more
San Diego-based IDW Publishing has been at the front lines of “Transformers” tie-in, one-shot, and spinoff comic books starring those sentient robots in disguise since they first acquired the licensing rights from Hasbro back in 2005. Since then, IDW has been the champion of more than 400 “Transformers”-centric issues representing the longest-running era of “Transformers” … Read more
The venerable elders of a forest are hugely important to the diversity, fitness, and survival of the woodland as a whole, new research shows – and they bring with them a hardiness and experience in dealing with change, as well as a lifetime of ecological interactions preserved in their immediate surrounds.. Scientists used models … Read more
An ancient temple dating from the early centuries of Buddhism has been unearthed in the Swat Valley in northern Pakistan – part of the ancient Gandhara region that was conquered by Alexander the Great and gave rise to a mixing of Buddhist belief and Greek art. Archaeologists think that the temple dates from about the middle … Read more
Evidence for an intense asteroid impact on Mars has been found in a Martian meteorite, which could alter the timeline for when the red planet might have been habitable. In a famous meteorite named NWA 7034, or ‘Black Beauty’, scientists discovered a shocked crystal of the mineral zircon, showing a feature only seen on Earth … Read more
The skeletal remains of a man buried 1,400 years ago near a headless horse have been discovered at an ancient cemetery in the town of Knittlingen in southern Germany. He likely was the horse’s owner/rider when he was alive. The man was buried at a time when the Merovingian dynasty (476–750 CE) flourished in … Read more
For the ancient Maya people who lived across central America for thousands of years, the cacao plant that chocolate comes from was considered to be a gift from the gods – so much so that beans from these trees were used as a unit of currency. Now, researchers have been able to identify new … Read more
About 800 years ago, a giant oak tree in England’s Sherwood Forest helped shelter Robin Hood from the corrupt sheriff of Nottingham. Though the tale is likely a myth, the tree is not: It still stands as one of the world’s oldest oaks. Such ancient trees—some dating back more than 3000 years—are key to the … Read more
An extremely powerful solar storm pummeled our planet 9,200 years ago, leaving permanent scars on the ice buried deep below Greenland and Antarctica. A new study of those ancient ice samples has found that this previously unknown storm is one of the strongest outbursts of solar weather ever detected and would have crippled modern communications systems … Read more
Microorganisms have adapted to one of the harshest environments on Earth, a sulphurous and acidic lake that is considered an analogue to ancient lakes on Mars Space 28 January 2022 By Chen Ly A volcanic crater in Costa Rica with an extremely harsh lake known as Laguna Caliente Justin Wang Bacteria have adapted to survive … Read more