News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
A team of researchers hunting for the wreck of a lost WWII destroyer ship in the Philippine Sea returned to land with another, perhaps even more exciting discovery: video evidence of the deepest-swimming squid ever recorded. Cruising just above the floor of the Philippine Trench at a staggering 20,300 feet (6,200 meters) below the … 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
Scientists in China say they have found the oldest flower bud in the fossil record, finally aligning the fossil evidence with the genetic data suggesting flowering plants, or angiosperms, evolved tens of millions of years earlier than we initially thought. The team hopes their discovery will help “ease the pain” around a nagging, centuries-old mystery that … Read more
Astronomers have spotted three new exoplanets orbiting dangerously close to their parent stars, on the brink of extinction. The three exoplanets, named TOI-2337b, TOI-4329b and TOI-2669b, were discovered using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the W. M. Keck Observatory’s High-Resolution Echelle Spectrometer (HIRES) in Hawaiʻi. “These planets are in such extreme places that … Read more
A visualization of a superflare on the recurrent nova v2487 Oph. (Image credit: LSU Prof. Robert Hynes, with his BinSim program) A rare type of white dwarf star has been erupting in the most extreme superflares of its kind ever seen, researchers find in a new study. The star in question, known as V2487 Oph, … Read more
The dwarf galaxy Mrk 462. (Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Dartmouth Coll./J. Parker & R. Hickox; Optical/IR: Pan-STARRS) A newly discovered “mini” supermassive black hole could help reveal some of the secrets behind the biggest black holes in the cosmos. Researchers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory recently discovered a monstrous black hole that was “buried” in dust … Read more
Because they emit nothing we can detect, there are many things about black holes we simply do not know. Amongst the most perplexing are supermassive black holes, millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun. Since black holes form from the cores of massive dead individual stars, how do supermassive behemoths grow so … Read more
A treasure trove of some 200 Roman-era coins was discovered in northwestern Spain thanks to the apparent efforts of a hungry badger hunting for food, archaeologists have said. Described as “an exceptional find”, the coins were discovered in April 2021 in La Cuesta cave in Bercio in the Asturias region, with details outlined in the … Read more
By Chris Simms Angustopila psammion is the smallest known land snail Contributions to Zoology 2022 A newly discovered snail species is the smallest yet found on land. Angustopila psammion, discovered in cave sediment in northern Vietnam, has a shell just 0.48 millimetres high and a shell volume of only 0.036 cubic millimetres. This makes the … Read more
Scientists have been able to observe brain activity linked with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in more detail than ever before – and if these neural signals can be identified, it opens up the possibility of being able to change them as well. OCD can affect up to two in every 100 adults, and while various … Read more