News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
A statistical tool borrowed from ecology suggests that there were originally 40,600 copies of stories about King Arthur and other western European heroes – but only 3648 survive Life 17 February 2022 By Chris Stokel-Walker A scene from the Romance of Lancelot of the Lake The Print Collector/Alamy Nine in 10 medieval manuscripts telling tales … Read more
Mars is a parched planet ruled by global dust storms. It’s also a frigid world, where night-time winter temperatures fall to minus 140 C (minus 220 F) at the poles. But it wasn’t always a dry, barren, freezing, inhospitable wasteland. It used to be a warm, wet, almost inviting place, where liquid water flowed across … Read more
Even the glaciers on Mount Everest are not safe from climate change, new research suggests. In a record-setting study, a team of scientists scaled the world’s highest peak to monitor the mountain’s highest-altitude glacier — the South Col Glacier, standing nearly 26,000 feet (8,000 meters) above sea level — for signs of climate-related ice loss. … Read more
The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet, and the toll on Greenland‘s massive ice sheet is becoming achingly clear. According to new satellite data compiled by Polar Portal, a collection of four Danish government research institutions, Greenland has lost more than 5,100 billion tons (4,700 billion metric tons) of ice in … Read more
Twice in our planet’s history, colossal mountain ranges that towered as tall as the Himalayas and stretched thousands of miles farther reared their craggy heads out of the Earth, splitting ancient supercontinents in two. Geologists call them the “supermountains.” “There’s nothing like these two supermountains today,” Ziyi Zhu, a postdoctoral student at The Australian National … Read more
The climate crisis enveloping Earth impacts the lowest depths of the sea and the most remote parts of the planet. And new research shows that it’s also causing change at the highest points of the world. Scientists studying South Col – Mount Everest’s highest glacier – have reported that rapid ice loss is occurring … Read more
For a couple of hundred years, Cahokia was the place to be in what is now the US state of Illinois. The bustling, vibrant city was at one time home to some 15,000 people, but by the end of the 14th century it was deserted – and researchers still aren’t sure why. A study … Read more
The road to life in the Arabian desert might once have been paved with the dead. In what is now Saudi Arabia, archaeologists have revealed an impressive network of lost highways, marked by human tombs, that link one oasis to another. Many thousands of years ago, these roads would have led Bedouin people and … Read more
We’re so far down the road of climate change, that even making drastic cuts to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels won’t be enough for the world’s weather systems to fall back into their previous patterns, according to a new study. But the research also suggests we still can have a huge impact on how severe … Read more
In 1949, at the height of his career, Rustin McIntosh, the director of pediatrics at Columbia University’s Babies Hospital, submitted his letter of resignation. Dr. Scott Baird, who wrote a biography on Dorothy Andersen, takes us back to this pivotal moment, which occurred at the dawn of pediatric pathology in the United States. Through archival … Read more