News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
By Elle Hunt CHASTENED by the sight of her newborn baby’s face lit up by the blue light of her phone, Catherine Price set about limiting the time she spent in front of screens. The journalist and her husband stopped mindlessly scrolling on social media and started taking 24-hour “digital sabbaths”. By cutting down on … Read more
Following the time of the dinosaurs, it might well be that the evolution of flowering plants drove the explosion in the diversity of life on Earth, according to a 2021 paper. Most of the plants we now eat, drink, wear, and build with are of the flowering variety. They’re called angiosperms, which roughly translates from … Read more
By Adam Vaughan Solar reflectors in Australia’s Northern Territory generating power John Warburton-Lee Photography/Alamy INDIA gained notoriety when it finished November’s COP26 climate summit by weakening a move to end the use of coal. Less widely recognised is that the country also started the Glasgow summit in a more positive fashion, with a plan to … Read more
NASA personnel are spending the day studying the power subsystem of the massive James Webb Space Telescope to ensure the observatory is ready to execute a key procedure: tensioning its vast sunshield. The Webb space telescope, which launched on Dec. 25, is conducting a month-long deployment procedure necessary to prepare the telescope to gather data. … Read more
Researchers have imagined a lightweight, flying saucer-style rover that can float across the surface of the Moon and other airless planetary surfaces such as asteroids. The ‘flying saucer’ would be powered by the electric field that builds up due to direct exposure to the Sun and its surrounding plasma. In the absence of an atmosphere, this … Read more
William of Ockham was tried for heresy before the Pope, only to make a daring escape. His big idea, known as Occam’s razor, remains the keenest tool for honing our understanding of the world Humans 15 December 2021 By Johnjoe McFadden Kiki ljung ON MY daily drive into work at the University of Surrey, I … Read more
In 1942, a peat cutter digging in a Danish bog crunched his shovel into a horned bronze helmet. Long, curving bull’s horns topped a round cap adorned with the beak and large eyes of a bird of prey. Fittings on the headgear may have made it possible to attach feathers and perhaps even a mane … Read more
Theropod dinosaurs, including carnivores like T. rex and herbivores like Therizinosaurus, evolved deeper and stronger jaws over the course of the dinosaur age Life 16 December 2021 By Cameron Duke Theropods of the Late Cretaceous, including Gigantoraptor, Garudimimus and Neimongosaurus Gabriel Ugueto No matter whether they ate meat or plants, theropod dinosaur species had one … Read more
By Adam Vaughan One of Atlantis Energy’s turbines being lowered into the water in Scotland Atlantis Energy Hello, and welcome to this week’s Fix the Planet, the weekly climate change newsletter that reminds you there are reasons for hope in science and technology around the world. To receive this free, monthly newsletter in your inbox, … Read more