News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Lichens are important for stabilising soils and providing some animals with food, but the algae within them are adapting to climate change at a rate of just 1°C every million years Life 15 February 2022 By Jake Buehler Lichen (Folmannia orthoclada) on rock in Atacama Desert. This lichen contains Trebouxia algae Matthew Nelsen One of … Read more
In the Cosmic Calendar, which maps the chronology of the Universe across a single Earth year, modern humans don’t appear until the very last minute of December 31. Everything we understand about the evolution of the Universe, we’ve had to piece together. We simply haven’t been around for pretty much any of the 13.7 billion-year … Read more
Peering back hundreds of millions of years into the past can turn up some astonishing findings – as it has with the discovery of a second species of opabiniid, a soft-bodied arthropod with a segmented exoskeleton that lived on the seafloor during the Miaolingian (509-497 million years ago). The original opadiniid, Opabinia regalis, was … Read more
New research suggests that stellar radiation is stripping away the “fluffy” atmospheres of exoplanets slightly smaller than Neptune, leaving behind their rocky cores and transforming them into worlds more closely resembling Earth. In the 1990s, astronomers confirmed the existence of planets outside the solar system. Known as exoplanets, they are one of the most fascinating … Read more
Japanese folk songs evolved in the same way as those sung in English even though there are significant cultural differences in musical tone and scales Humans 3 February 2022 By Jason Arunn Murugesu A woman playing a koto, a traditional Japanese musical instrument Shutterstock/PixHound Japanese folk songs evolved in the same way as English language … Read more
A flying robot with wings controlled by a magnetic field instead of heavy motors and gears slightly outperforms insect muscles Technology 2 February 2022 By Alex Wilkins A small robot with wings like an insect can fly and generate more power than a similarly-sized animal in nature. Most flying robots, whether they use wings or … Read more
Genetically identical fruit flies raised in the same environment still learn at different rates, suggesting that random differences in brain development may have evolved to produce variation in a species Life 2 February 2022 By Christa Lesté-Lasserre Fruit flies may have random variance to account for different learning styles Aleksandar Kitanovic / Alamy Genetically similar … Read more
Two tiny fossils, each smaller than an aspirin pill, contain fossilized nerve tissue from 508 million years ago. The bug-like Cambrian creatures could help scientists piece together the evolutionary history of modern-day spiders and scorpions. Still, it’s not clear exactly where these fossils – both specimens of the species Mollisonia symmetrica – fit on the arthropod … Read more
The two major groups of bats diverged tens of millions of years ago, and the main difference between them lies in a tiny inner ear bone Life 26 January 2022 By Michael Marshall The common pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pipistrellus) belongs to the Yangochiroptera group of bats David Cole/Alamy Stock Photo A single bone in the inner … Read more
The coronavirus is evolving to become more transmissible, and eventually it could even overtake measles, the most contagious virus we know of Health 26 January 2022 By Alice Klein An illustration of SARS-CoV-2 Gerd Altmann/Pixabay Over the past two years, we have witnessed evolution in action, with new variants of the coronavirus becoming increasingly contagious. … Read more