News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
A newly released image from a Mars satellite offers a glimpse into the complex past of the now dry and dusty world. From high above the surface of Mars, the orbiting High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) homes in on the Danielson Crater, just north of the Mars equator. This region is intensely interesting to space … 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.” Globular clusters are like astronomical coelacanths — mysterious living fossils. These densely packed collections of ancient stars may hold the ultimate secrets to the formation of … Read more
Pluto may no longer be a planet, but the dwarf planet and its icy neighbors in the Kuiper Belt are about to enter the spotlight. One of the James Webb Space Telescope‘s first missions this year will be a program to study Pluto and some of the thousands of other celestial objects in the Kuiper … Read more
An ancient sculpture carved by Paleolithic humans some 30,000 years ago is evidence that our ancestors were a restless bunch who roamed far and wide, new research has revealed. Scientists have peered closely at the famous Venus of Willendorf and determined that the stone from which it is carved likely originated from Northern Italy, … Read more
Earth’s inner core may be filled with a weird substance that is neither solid nor liquid, according to a new study. For more than half a century, scientists believed that Earth‘s deepest recesses consist of a molten outer core surrounding a densely compressed ball of solid iron alloy. But new research, published Feb. 9 in the journal Nature, offers a … Read more
Scientists got a strange sense of déjà vu when they took a close look at a mysterious series of bright flashes in a galaxy just 12 million light-years away. The flashes, known as a repeating fast radio burst (FRB), appear surprisingly similar to flashes found in the Crab Nebula. The Crab Nebula is a famous … Read more
A recently discovered repeating fast radio burst (FRB) named FRB 20200120E is deepening the mystery of these already deeply mysterious space signals. Astronomers have tracked its location to a galaxy 11.7 million light-years away, which makes it the closest known extragalactic fast radio burst, 40 times closer than the next-closest extragalactic signal. But it … Read more
China’s Yutu-2 mission has made another fascinating discovery on the far side of the Moon. Glistening amid the dry, gray dust, the rover’s panoramic camera picked out two small intact spheres of translucent glass. Such spherules can record information about the Moon’s history, including the composition of its mantle and impact events. Yutu-2 was … Read more
You may already know the legend of King Tutankhamen’s space dagger – an iron weapon forged from the rock of meteorites, and entombed with the ancient Egyptian pharaoh. Now a new study has revealed more details about this most fascinating and mysterious of artifacts. A thorough chemical analysis involving high-resolution photography and X-rays has … Read more
Photosynthesis quite literally changed our world. Plants ‘eating’ sunlight and ‘breathing out’ oxygen transformed Earth’s entire atmosphere into the one we now breathe, and fuel our ecosystems with energy. Now researchers have caught a cunning species of bacteria with stolen photosynthesizing technology. And their molecular, light-eating device is unlike any we’ve ever seen. “The … Read more