News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
If you ever feel like you’re spinning in circles, the annual pi day is a great moment to remind yourself of the power of such thinking. NASA celebrates the famous mathematical ratio each year on March 14 (3/14), which is meant to represent the 3.14 constant that results when you divide a circle’s circumference by … Read more
Astronomers may have spotted the afterglow from an epic cosmic event known as a “kilonova.” Kilonovas occur after the collision of two hyper-dense neutron stars, which are the remnants of stars that have died in supernova explosions. Astronomers think they have spotted an afterglow in X-rays from the event, which is dubbed GW170817. The discovery … Read more
An object 681 million light-years away might look like one glorious, exquisite mess, but there’s a lot more going on that a first glance indicates. The object showcased in a new Hubble image – called IC 2431 – is not one galaxy, but three, coming together in a massive galactic merger that will one day … Read more
Are there civilizations somewhere else in the Universe? Somewhere else in the Milky Way? That’s one of our overarching questions, and an answer in the affirmative would be profound. Humanity’s pursued the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) in one form or another since shortly after the advent of radio waves in the early 20th … Read more
We love it when a rocket comes together. In October 2021, NASA finished stacking the huge Space Launch System (SLS) rocket for its Artemis 1 moon mission inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. That was a big milestone for the agency and its moon-exploration plans, and a newly … Read more
Reiner Bajo/Lionsgate Watch Moonfall sees director Roland Emmerich try to top his other disaster films, such as The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day, by knocking the moon out of orbit and crashing it into Earth. In cinemas from 4 February. Read The Man Who Tasted Words and other unusually gifted or affected people are … Read more
On one level, chess seems like a simple game: 64 individual black or white squares, 16 pieces per side, and two competitors striving for conquest. Dig a little deeper though, and the game offers incredibly complex possibilities, posing challenges to chess theorists and mathematicians that can go unsolved for decades or even centuries. In … Read more
A new visualization shows the power of an epic supernova erupting in deep space. The video shows the famous explosion in the Eta Carinae star system that briefly made it the brightest object in the sky in the year 1843. More than 170 years later, the two lobes of the supernova are still expanding into … Read more
The Solar System may be an even soggier place than we suspected. New analysis of one of Saturn’s moons suggests that it may harbor a liquid ocean. No, not the usual suspects – the new culprit is Mimas, the little moon with a big crater, which gives it more than a passing resemblance to the … Read more
SpaceX has some nice before-and-after photos to mark the 10th launch of one of its Falcon 9 rockets, thanks to a satisfied customer. A Falcon 9 successfully delivered 105 satellites to orbit Thursday (Jan. 13), including 44 “SuperDove” cubesats for Planet, a San Francisco-based company that operates the world’s biggest constellation of Earth-observing satellites. The … Read more