News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
On 11 March 2022, at around 9:20 pm UTC, a small asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere. This is not unusual. Space rocks enter Earth’s atmosphere all the time. What makes this asteroid so amazing is that an astronomer spotted it before it made its rendezvous with atmospheric entry. It’s named 2022 EB5, and it’s only the … Read more
Many people have experienced chronic stress since the pandemic lockdowns. Added to this are the climate crisis, the increasing cost of living and most recently threats to European and global security due to the conflict in Ukraine. To some, it may seem that there is never any good news anymore. This is of course … Read more
Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of How to Die in Space. The Hadean era was a pretty wild ride. Earth had just formed, but meteorites constantly rained from the sky, pummeling our young planet for over 700 million years. Those impacts posed a … Read more
In May 2020, as the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic chewed through Texas, I went to an Austin nature store and bought several bird feeders. The birds, drawn by seed and suet slabs, came soon afterward. They flitted down from the pecan trees and telephone wires: bold Tufted Titmice, bouncing Northern Cardinals and bullying … Read more
Converting sunlight into liquid fuel through artificial photosynthesis would be a huge environmental victory – and the latest prototypes look surprisingly effective Technology 2 March 2022 By Katharine Sanderson Graham Carter Our insatiable appetite for energy has got us into a mess, with the burning of fossil fuels releasing greenhouse gases that are heating the … Read more
A huge amount of money, skill and organizational complexity goes into testing a single new therapy in a randomized controlled trial—the “gold standard” type of study that forms the bedrock of modern medicine. Among the steps: devising a valid statistical design, determining dosages and measures of efficacy, passing ethical reviews, training collaborators in the study’s … Read more
On March 1 the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that could have an enormous impact on American medicine. The case, which involves combined appeals from two doctors, Xiulu Ruan and Shakeel Kahn, is intended to resolve an important question that has had a chilling effect on both pain and addiction care. If … Read more
Warning: Spoilers ahead for “The Book of Boba Fett” Episode 7 Everything that we’ve seen up to now in “The Book of Boba Fett” had been leading us to this moment, and it does not disappoint. Episode 7 begins right where we left off last week as Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison), Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen) … Read more
Have you looked at the international rankings of the world’s happiest countries lately? Measuring a country’s subjective levels of happiness has become something of an international sport. People look with interest (and a little jealousy) to nations such as Denmark, which consistently tops the world’s happiness rankings. It has also led to Danish practices … Read more
The world could lose half of its best coffee-growing land under a moderate climate change scenario. Brazil, which is the currently world’s largest coffee producer, will see its most suitable coffee-growing land decline by 79 percent. That’s one key finding of a new study by scientists in Switzerland, who assessed the potential impacts of … Read more