News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
We all know that drinking too much is bad for us. But what about just a few glasses a week? Red wine has antioxidants, we’ve been told, so a few glasses are apparently ‘good for you‘. Other studies have suggested that low-to-moderate drinkers are less likely to have a heart attack than those who avoid drinking altogether. Wine … Read more
A new image of the heart of the Milky Way is revealing mysterious structures we’ve never seen before. Taken using the ultra-sensitive MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, the images show nearly 1,000 strands of magnetic filaments, measuring up to 150 light-years in length, in surprisingly neat and regular arrangements. That’s 10 times the … Read more
It took just one virus to cripple the world’s economy and kill millions of people; yet virologists estimate that trillions of still-unknown viruses exist, many of which might be lethal or have the potential to spark the next pandemic. Now, they have a new—and very long—list of possible suspects to interrogate. By sifting through unprecedented … Read more
The great-granddaughters of men who smoked cigarettes when they were pre-pubescent boys are more likely to carry excess fat on their bodies as young women several decades later, a rather startling study has found. The discovery – which scientists claim is one of the “first human demonstrations of transgenerational effects of an environmental exposure … Read more
A mysterious particle thought to have existed briefly just after the Big Bang has now been detected for the first time in the ‘primordial soup’. Specifically, in a medium called the quark-gluon plasma, generated in the Large Hadron Collider by colliding lead ions. There, amid the trillions of particles produced by these collisions, physicists managed … Read more
As emergency rooms worldwide are flooded with a wave of new COVID-19 patients, a large study in the United Kingdom has laid out the deadly consequences of delayed critical care. Nearly 27 million individuals attended a major emergency room in England from 2016 to 2018, waiting on average just under five hours for a … Read more
After many decades of growth, China’s population could begin to shrink this year, suggest data released yesterday by China’s National Bureau of Statistics. The numbers show that in 2021, China’s birth rate fell for the fifth year in a row, to a record low of 7.52 per 1000 people. Based on that number, demographers estimate … Read more
A fresh approach to generating images based on text descriptions with AI, called a diffusion model, effectively un-destroys new images into existence Technology 18 January 2022 By Matthew Sparkes Images created from text descriptions by GLIDE, a new AI OpenAI Early last year, artificial intelligence company OpenAI unveiled software with the surprising ability to create … Read more
When the full Moon rises, strange things can happen here on Earth. Oysters snap close. Corals spawn. Zooplankton dive deeper. Seabirds stick to the shore. And lions hunt less. Several of these behaviors are tied to moonlight; others, to tides. But some have no clear explanation at all. More than 50 years’ worth of shark … Read more
A small pile of pebbles is clogging up the Perseverance Mars rover’s operations. The rover, which is collecting rock samples for eventual return to Earth, began to struggle on Dec. 29, after extracting a core from a rock the mission team nicknamed “Issole.” According to a NASA blog, the problem occurred in the device that transfers … Read more