News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
When ThankGod Echezona Ebenezer left southeast Nigeria to start a biochemistry Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 2013, he soon realized little information on the genomes of plants and animals from Africa were in existing global sequencing databases. To help protect the continent’s biodiversity and aid its agriculture, he and colleagues founded the African … Read more
NASA will get just over $24 billion this year, if Congress is able to pass a newly devised omnibus spending bill. The funding package, which allocates a total of $1.5 trillion throughout the government, would give NASA about $760 million less for fiscal year 2022 than U.S. President Joe Biden requested last year. (The fiscal … Read more
Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose by 6 percent in 2021 to a record 36.3 billion metric tons, their highest ever level, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday. “The increase in global CO2 emissions of over 2 billion metric tons was the largest in history in absolute terms, more than offsetting the previous year’s … Read more
A meteor that exploded in the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013 could have also been somehow involved in the giant impact that formed the Moon. This tantalizing finding comes thanks to a new way of dating collisions between rocks in space, based on microscopic analysis of minerals within meteorites. Although further investigation is warranted, … Read more
A larger volume of waste and ‘more realistic’ scope of costs has resulted in a bigger price tag for building and operating a long-term storage facility for radioactive waste Environment 24 February 2022 By Adam Vaughan The Sizewell nuclear site in Suffolk, UK David J. Green/Alamy The cost of a proposed underground storage facility to … Read more
A group of physicists has announced one of the highest performance atomic clocks ever made. The instrument is said to measure time so precisely that it will only lose one second every 300 billion years, allowing for more exact measurements of gravitational waves, dark matter and other physics phenomena. A study based on the UW-Madison-led … Read more
The megadrought that has parched the southwestern United States and parts of Mexico over the last two decades is the worst to hit the region in at least 1,200 years, researchers said Monday. Human-caused global heating accounts for more than 40 percent of the dry spell’s intensity, they reported in the journal Nature Climate … Read more
The Biden administration will roll out a $5 billion program today to help states build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations by decade’s end. The newly dubbed National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program was established by President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure law, which Congress passed last November. The administration announced the program … Read more
Sometimes astronomers and astrophysicists are working at such gigantic, mind-bending scales – in terms of both distance and time – that you can’t help but be awestruck at the new discoveries they keep coming out with. Case in point: a temperature check of the Universe in its youngest phase, just 880 million years after … 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