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
A troubled €300 million nuclear physics research facility in Romania may now have to do without one of its main components, a gamma ray beam designed to probe the heart of atoms. That’s because the U.S. company contracted to supply the gamma ray source may be on the verge of bankruptcy, according to sources familiar … Read more
After the first-ever explosion of an atomic bomb on July 16, 1945 near Socorro, N.M., J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, recited a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Less than a month later, a quarter of a million lives were lost to the … Read more
It’s been nearly 350 years since Sir Issac Newton wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” but the sentiment certainly holds true today. Newton’s wisdom is exemplified by a grand project called the Cosmic Evolution Survey, or COSMOS. COSMOS builds on the legacy of the Hubble Space … Read more
Archaeologists deep in the Jordanian desert have discovered a 9,000-year-old ritualistic complex near what is thought to be the earliest known large human-built structure worldwide. The Stone Age shrine site, excavated last year, was used by gazelle hunters and features carved stone figures, an altar and a miniature model of a large-scale hunting trap. … Read more
For over 25 years, a group in Poulton, England has been looking for a lost Cistercian abbey. Instead, over the decades the team has found hundreds of medieval skeletons and well-traveled Roman artifacts. Now, they have discovered what they’re calling “the best preserved picture of late prehistoric life ever found in [North West England]”. … Read more
The number of active satellites in the night sky has more than doubled since 2019 – from around 2,200 to 5,000. That is mostly due to Starlink, a SpaceX project aimed at providing internet anywhere in the world through ‘mega-constellations’ of satellites. Since it began, Starlink has launched over 2,000 satellites. Unfortunately, the thousands of … Read more
A new U.S. Space Force video “demands action” on space debris and asks the private sector for their help cleaning up the growing space mess. The video was released Jan. 5 on the Space Force’s SpaceWERX website (its technology branch) to push a program called Orbital Prime, which aims to test out an on orbit-system … Read more
Paleontologists were dismayed this week to learn that early Cretaceous dinosaur prints at the Mill Canyon Dinosaur Tracksite near Moab, Utah, were damaged during efforts by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to repair a boardwalk there. A backhoe ran over some of the more than 200 tracks at the site, one of the richest … Read more
Nuclear fusion could potentially provide abundant, safe energy without the significant production of greenhouse gas emissions or nuclear waste. But it has remained frustratingly elusive as a practical technology for decades. An important milestone toward that goal has now been passed: a fusion reaction that derives most of its heat from its nuclear reactions themselves … Read more