News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Life is complicated. Even the smallest cells contain a mind-blowing assortment of chemical reactions that allow them to thrive in a chaotic landscape. If we want to know where to draw the line between life and bubbles of stale old organic soup, it helps to strip away the non-essential extras to expose the core components, … Read more
In a strange encounter off the coast of western Australia, a pod of orcas seems to free a humpback whale from a rope entangling its tail. But were they really trying to rescue it? It isn’t clear whether the orcas (Orcinus orca) were trying to manipulate the rope or why they approached the humpback in the … Read more
Scientists are warning of an emerging ‘epidemic‘ of myopia or near-sightedness, having observed sharp increases in the adult onset of myopia among late baby boomers. Based on data collected from 107,442 participants in the extensive Biobank program in the UK, people born in the late 1960s are 10 percent more likely to be near-sighted than … Read more
The question of how life first sparked into existence on our planet is one we haven’t yet fully answered, but science is getting closer all the time – and a new study identifies the structures of the proteins that may well have made it happen. To begin with, the team behind the study decided … Read more
Editor’s Note (1/18/22): AT&T and Verizon will delay the debut of 5G cellular service near some airports. The decision follows concerns from U.S. airlines that the rollout, set to start on Wednesday, would interfere with aircraft equipment. This story is being republished to provide information on what to expect from the fifth-generation wireless technology. You’re … Read more
NASA’s Curiosity rover has found some interesting organic compounds on the Red Planet that could be signs of ancient Mars life, but it will take a lot more work to test that hypothesis. Some of the powdered rock samples that Curiosity has collected over the years contain organics rich in a type of carbon that … Read more
Since 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover has trundled across Mars, drilling into rocks and running the grit through a sophisticated onboard chemistry lab, aiming to tease out evidence for life. Today, a team of rover scientists announced an intriguing signal, one that may or may not be evidence of past life, but is, at the very … 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
Organic molecules found in a Mars meteorite that crash-landed on Earth are not signs of life, but instead formed in chemical reactions between water and rock on the Red Planet about 4 billion years ago, a new study finds. These findings could shed light on the origins of the building blocks of life on early … Read more
By Elle Hunt CHASTENED by the sight of her newborn baby’s face lit up by the blue light of her phone, Catherine Price set about limiting the time she spent in front of screens. The journalist and her husband stopped mindlessly scrolling on social media and started taking 24-hour “digital sabbaths”. By cutting down on … Read more