News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Screens brighten with the flow of words. Perhaps they are emails, hastily scrawled on smart devices, or emoji-laden messages exchanged between friends or families. On this same river of the digital, millions flock to binge their favorite television programming, to stream pornography, or enter the sprawling worlds of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, or simply … Read more
A signal interpreted as the first light illuminating the Universe may not be from the far reaches of the Universe after all, a new study has found. In fact, it may not even be from space. Far from being a problem, however, this new finding may just set the Universe to rights. The signal, … Read more
Hidden turbulent motion that takes place inside the atmosphere of the Sun can be accurately predicted by a newly developed neural network. Fed only temperature and vertical motion data collected from the surface of the solar photosphere, the AI model could correctly identify turbulent horizontal motion below the surface. This could help us to better … Read more
The capacity to engage with and comprehend music spans nearly every human society. While other creatures also display musical behaviors (think bird song, humpback whale calls, or bonobo vocalizations), our musical cognition appears to be evolutionary distinct within the animal kingdom. A new study has given us more insight into the brain’s relationship with music, finding that … Read more
A dance of death is taking place at the heart of a galaxy in the distant Universe. Some 10 billion light-years away, two supermassive black holes are locked in an orbit so tight that they will collide with each other and form one much larger black hole in the relatively short time of just 10,000 … Read more
In June 2000, two rival groups of researchers shook hands in the shared success of a milestone in biology – the delivery of a rough draft of the human genome. What started with an incomplete map of our chromosomes has since bloomed into a vast trove of individualized sequences from all corners of the globe, … 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
GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN—On a brutally cold day here earlier this week, Kirill Shchapov stood 200 meters off the shore of Lake Michigan, using a green auger to drill into a glistening ice sheet that stretched to the horizon. A fountain of water erupted when he yanked the auger from the hole. But soon Shchapov, a … Read more
An asteroid discovered in the 19th century has just been identified as the most crowded we’ve ever found. It’s called 130 Elektra, or just Elektra for short, and astronomers have just discovered that it has not one, nor two, but three smaller satellite companions, or moons. That not only makes it the most numerous asteroid … Read more
By telling the story of COVID-19 in real time, data visualization has taken on new importance in our daily lives. Early in the pandemic, we watched circles multiply and swell on a map as the virus spread around the globe. We saw lines on time-series charts turn nearly vertical during surges in cases. These numbers … Read more