News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Dust drastically lowers the output of solar panels, but applying an electric field to the panels can make dust particles repel each other and disperse Technology 11 March 2022 By Chen Ly Illustration of dust removal from a solar panel using static electricity Sreedath Panat and Kripa Varanasi Static electricity could remove dust from desert … Read more
The system uses day-night temperature differences to extract water from the air while slightly increasing electricity generation by cooling solar panels Environment 1 March 2022 By Michael Le Page A prototype of the water-harvesting device Renyuan Li A three-month trial in Saudi Arabia has shown that a solar panel add-on system can harvest water without … Read more
Every April for the past decade, systems biologist Rodrigo Gutiérrez has driven 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) to reach one of the driest places on Earth: Chile’s Atacama Desert, parts of which receive less than three millimeters of rain annually. His team collected plants and soil from nearly two dozen sites each year, froze the samples … Read more
Archaeologists deep in the Jordanian desert have discovered a 9,000-year-old ritualistic complex near what is thought to be the earliest known large human-built structure worldwide. The Stone Age shrine site, excavated last year, was used by gazelle hunters and features carved stone figures, an altar and a miniature model of a large-scale hunting trap. … Read more
Photosynthesis quite literally changed our world. Plants ‘eating’ sunlight and ‘breathing out’ oxygen transformed Earth’s entire atmosphere into the one we now breathe, and fuel our ecosystems with energy. Now researchers have caught a cunning species of bacteria with stolen photosynthesizing technology. And their molecular, light-eating device is unlike any we’ve ever seen. “The … Read more
In a scene reminiscent of the recent “Dune” movie, the predecessor of a mission bound for Saturn‘s strangest moon soars over the California desert. A new YouTube video shows a drone flying above Imperial Dunes in California in September 2021 to perform testing for the Dragonfly mission, which is a life-hunting drone expected to launch … Read more
The road to life in the Arabian desert might once have been paved with the dead. In what is now Saudi Arabia, archaeologists have revealed an impressive network of lost highways, marked by human tombs, that link one oasis to another. Many thousands of years ago, these roads would have led Bedouin people and … Read more
The time is up for hellfire.
When researcher Xinghu Qin ventured through rangeland near Inner Mongolia’s Hunshandake Desert, he spotted some puzzling behavior between two little beetles mating shamelessly in the open: one was constantly licking the other’s tail. “What on earth were they doing?” wondered Qin, then a graduate student at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. They were Mongolian … Read more