News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
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
NASA says it plans to plunge the vestiges of the International Space Station (ISS) into a remote part of the Pacific Ocean known as Point Nemo in early 2031, after passing the baton to commercial space stations. In an updated transition report just delivered to Congress, the space agency detailed the endgame for the space station, which … Read more
Scientists deliberately infected young, healthy volunteers with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 – and now, they’ve shared their first results from that experiment. The new study, published Tuesday (Feb. 1) in Springer Nature’s preprint database, In Review, has not yet been peer-reviewed, but it could provide insight into how mild COVID-19 unfolds, from the moment … Read more
Lung cancer screening has always been expensive, but a simple blood test that detects lipids associated with tumours may offer a cheaper alternative Health 2 February 2022 By Alice Klein Blood samples can now be used to search for early signs of lung cancer Medicimage/Alamy A blood test that can detect lung cancer before people … Read more
The shift to early flowering in the UK is greater for smaller plants than trees and shrubs, and is related to warming temperatures in winter and spring over the past 70 years Environment 2 February 2022 By Clare Wilson People walk past daffodils in Green Park in London TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty Images Seen any … Read more
For centuries, British flowers have been blooming like clockwork. A few months into spring, sometime around May or June, the nation bursts into color. Since the early 1980s, however, hundreds of plants have grown out of sync with the seasons, which means they’re also unraveling from the complicated tapestry of interactions that keep ecosystems sustainably … Read more
A quick and pain-free scan of the human eyeball could one day help doctors identify ‘fast agers’, who are at greater risk of early mortality. Getting older obviously has an impact on everybody’s body, but just because two people have the same number of years under their belt doesn’t mean they are physically declining at … Read more
To date, we’ve found over a hundred precious Mars rocks that have travelled from the red planet and landed on Earth at some point. Among those, specimen ALH84001 might well be one of the most enigmatic. This meteorite fragment was picked up during a snowmobile ride in the ice field of Alan Hills in Antarctica … Read more
Scientists have been doing some great work when it comes to peering back through billions of years to figure out what ancient Earth would have looked like, and a new study reveals that the earliest conditions on our planet were probably even more hostile than originally imagined. In particular, researchers now think that we’ve … Read more
Rapid COVID-19 tests that use nose swabs alone might not pick up Omicron in the early days of infection, a new study suggests – but experts don’t agree on whether you should also swab your throat. A small study from a group of US researchers, published Tuesday, found that rapid tests with nasal swabs didn’t detect Omicron … Read more