News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
E. O. Wilson was an extraordinary scholar in every sense of the word. Back in the 1980s, Milton Stetson, the chair of the biology department at the University of Delaware, told me that a scientist who makes a single seminal contribution to his or her field has been a success. By the time I … Read more
Linked to the close of the Mayan calendar, a variety of rumors spread regarding ways the world could end back in 2012. One popular contender was Nibiru, a supposed planet that some claimed would collide with Earth at the end of that year. But despite the buzz, there’s no scientific evidence supporting the alleged planet’s … Read more
Even though any hope of resurrecting creator Joss Whedon’s “Firefly” for the small or big screen seems to be lost in a cloudy nebula of development hell, we still have the further adventures of Captain Mal and his valiant Browncoat crew in the form of many collectibles, spinoff comics, graphic novels, and tie-in canonical books. … Read more
Every year, Hubble takes a little time to turn its electronic eyes closer to home. Rather than staring into vast distances across space and time, it focuses on our very own Solar System; specifically, the heavyweight planets that lurk out past the asteroid belt – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. That’s not because they’re … Read more
In April, the Ingenuity helicopter became the first vehicle ever to attempt powered flight on another planet. Theodore Tzanetos tells New Scientist of the exhilaration he felt leading the team Technology 15 December 2021 By New Scientist The Ingenuity helicopter NASA/JPL-Caltech OF ALL the craft that visited the Red Planet this year, perhaps the biggest … Read more
If you want to be dazzled by a spectacular northern lights display, your best bet is to skywatch near the North Pole. But that wasn’t the case 41,000 years ago, when a disruption of Earth’s magnetic field sent auroras wandering toward the equator. During this geomagnetic disturbance, known as the Laschamp event or the Laschamp excursion, … Read more
NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity has soared through alien skies yet again. “The #MarsHelicopter keeps going, going, going! Ingenuity successfully completed its 18th flight, adding 124.3 seconds to its overall time aloft on the Red Planet,” officials with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which manages Ingenuity’s pioneering mission, said via Twitter today (Dec. … Read more
Collisions with high-speed space rocks in Venus’s early history could have melted most of the planet’s mantle and driven any water into the atmosphere Space 17 December 2021 By Jonathan O’Callaghan Artist’s rendering of an early, large collision on Venus Southwest Research Institute/Simone Marchi High-speed impacts on Venus early in its history could help explain … Read more
In January 2009, a German research ship set out for the Southern Ocean carrying 6 tons of iron and a boatload of controversy. The iron was meant to trigger a massive phytoplankton bloom that would suck carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, but environmentalists objected, viewing the trial as a reckless form of geoengineering. The … Read more
NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity soared through the Red Planet skies for the 17th time last weekend, but we’ll have to wait a little longer yet to get a full accounting of the flight. The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) chopper appeared to hit all of its marks during the 614-foot-long (187 meters) traverse, which occurred on Dec. … Read more