News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
In a move that has been widely criticized, NASA leaders recently terminated a test project that allowed employees at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) to display pronouns in their official agency identifiers. The decision affected more than 100 employees who saw their stated pronouns vanish from communication platforms. The project’s termination attracted public … Read more
In many respects, scientists are much like detectives, solving mysteries by sifting through evidence in search of cluelike patterns. For example, any crystal, whether a granule of table salt or a diamond necklace, is just a bunch of atoms arranged in a repeating pattern. By glimpsing only a few of the crystal’s patterned atoms, a … Read more
The James Webb Space Telescope suffers from astigmatism, but that visual condition is a very good thing for astronomy, NASA assures us. A new explainer video the agency posted on YouTube talks about the huge telescope’s optics and how they will let astronomers peer deep into the universe’s history for future science work, ranging across … Read more
These are boom times for astronomers hunting black holes. The biggest ones—supermassive black holes that can weigh billions of suns—have been found at the centers of most every galaxy, and we have even managed to image one. Meanwhile, researchers now routinely detect gravitational waves rippling through the universe from smaller merging black holes. Closer to … Read more
Editor’s Note: This story was published in September. Since then, the launch of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has been delayed again. It is now scheduled to lift off no earlier than December 24. Earlier this month NASA announced that on December 18, after years of delays, the James Webb Space Telescope will finally leave Earth on a … Read more