News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
The James Webb Space Telescope has fired its thrusters and reached its orbital destination around a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from our planet, NASA said Monday, a key milestone on its mission to study cosmic history. At around 2:00 pm Eastern Time (1900 GMT), the observatory fired its thrusters for 5 minutes … Read more
Our dating assumptions for the Red Planet might need a second look. Fresh analysis of craters on Mars suggests that asteroids have been smashing into the surface at a consistent rate for at least 600 million years. Scientists often use craters as a proxy to figure out how old a planetary surface is, since more … Read more
Antibiotic resistance is often seen as a ‘future problem’, but newly published data have revealed it’s affecting far, far more lives than you might imagine. In fact, the new estimates show that in 2019, there were 4.95 million deaths associated with bacterial antimicrobial resistance, making it the third leading cause of death worldwide. Drugs … Read more
The world now has a new COVID-19 vaccine in its arsenal, and at a fraction of the cost per dose. Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has seen over 314 million infections and over 5.5 million deaths worldwide. Approximately 60 percent of the world population has received at least one dose of a … Read more
There’s a new private space plane in the works. Washington-based Radian Aerospace emerged from “stealth mode” Wednesday (Jan. 19), announcing that it has raised $27.5 million in seed funding. The money will aid the development of Radian One, a crew-carrying orbital space plane that Radian hopes will transform spaceflight as well as travel here on … Read more
A huge asteroid made its closest approach of the next two centuries Tuesday (Jan. 18), flying quite safely past our planet. Asteroid 7482 (1994 PC1), which is classified as a near-Earth asteroid, only got within five lunar distances of our planet, the equivalent of 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers). The Virtual Telescope Project, which … Read more
In a slow-moving universe, asteroids give us a rare chance to see things moving in real time. We have such a chance coming right up on the evening of Tuesday, January 18th, when 1.1-kilometer asteroid (7482) 1994 PC1 passes 1.23 million miles (1.98 million kilometers) from Earth. This is about five times the distance … Read more
Scientists in China say they have found the oldest flower bud in the fossil record, finally aligning the fossil evidence with the genetic data suggesting flowering plants, or angiosperms, evolved tens of millions of years earlier than we initially thought. The team hopes their discovery will help “ease the pain” around a nagging, centuries-old mystery that … Read more
Scientists onboard an icebreaker in Antarctica were blown away when they spied a trove of 60 million icefish nests dotting the floor of the Weddell Sea. The bonanza of nurseries – each guarded by a ghostly looking parent – represents the largest known breeding colony of fish. Autun Purser of the Alfred Wegener Institute was on the … Read more
Astrophysicists hope a map created by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument will help answer questions about the expansion of the universe Space 13 January 2022 By Jason Arunn Murugesu The telescope where DESI is mounted at Kitt Peak National Observatory, Arizona KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Marenfeld The largest 3D map of the universe has been created by a … Read more