News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
A large, rocky asteroid is going to fly by Earth next week. At 1 kilometer (3,280 feet) long, it’s roughly two and a half times the height of the Empire State Building, and it’s been classed a “Potentially Hazardous Asteroid” due to its size and its regular close visits to our planet. But don’t … Read more
The James Webb Space Telescope fully deployed its tennis-court sized sunshield Tuesday, a critical milestone for the success of its mission to study every phase of cosmic history, NASA said. “All five layers of the sunshield are fully tensioned,” said an announcer at the observatory’s control center in Baltimore, where team members cheered, a … Read more
We sort of take for granted the depictions of prehistoric beasties illustrated in the books of our childhood. But piecing together Earth’s murky past is a lot harder than it sounds. Scientists have to rely on fragmentary bones, weathered footprints, impressions in rock – these don’t always capture the fine details of the complex, … Read more
Every geography schoolbook has them: maps that look like today’s Earth, but not quite, since all continents are merged into a single supercontinent. Those maps were used to explain why dinosaurs in South America and Africa, or North America and Europe looked so alike. Paleogeographic reconstructions like these provide context to study the processes … Read more
A sea monster that lived during the early dinosaur age is so unexpectedly colossal, it reveals that its kind grew to gigantic sizes extremely quickly, evolutionarily speaking at least. The discovery suggests that such ichthyosaurs – a group of fish-shaped marine reptiles that inhabited the dinosaur-era seas – grew to enormous sizes in a span of only 2.5 … Read more
Farmland is overtaking much of the planet. That’s the conclusion of a new satellite map, which finds that fields of corn, wheat, rice, and other crops have eaten up more than 1 million additional square kilometers of land over the past 2 decades. The study highlights how Earth’s land is becoming, in essence, a unified … Read more
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will be more extreme than its famous predecessor in a variety of ways, including its cosmic locale. The $10 billion Webb is considerably bigger, more complex and more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been studying the heavens from Earth orbit for more than three decades. And the new … Read more
The identity of Blue Origin’s spaceflight auction winner is no longer a mystery. Justin Sun, the founder and CEO of the blockchain platform Tron, announced today (Dec. 22) that he’s the person who paid $28 million for a seat aboard Blue Origin’s first crewed spaceflight. That mission launched on July 20, carrying Blue Origin founder … Read more
If creepy crawlies make you uncomfortable, be glad you weren’t living in the Carboniferous period (around 100 million years before the dinosaurs arrived) in what is now Northumberland in the UK. Scientists have made an astonishing discovery along this part of the coast of northeast England: a 326 million-year-old fossil, showing traces of the … Read more
At least a fifth of Brazil’s Pantanal region was burned in 2020 during a historic drought, and the wildfires are estimated to have killed millions of birds, snakes, rodents and primates, among other animals Environment 16 December 2021 By Adam Vaughan Land burned by a fire in the Pantanal region of Brazil Rogerio Florentino/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock Ferocious … Read more