News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Most of us have at least one moment in our lives when we wish we’d made a different choice. It’s easy to recognize what went wrong in hindsight, but key factors that could have made all the difference at the time are often easily missed as we experience them. Understanding those pivot points becomes … Read more
An extensive new study has found evidence that links physical attractiveness to the functioning of the immune system. While there are still numerous questions left to answer, the researchers suggest their findings show “a relationship between facial attractiveness and immune function is likely to exist.” Just how reliable that relationship is remains to be seen, however. … Read more
Nothing on Earth can live without water. The origin of water on Earth, therefore, is the origin of life in the Solar System (and the Universe) as we know it. Figuring out where and how our world obtained its water might be key to finding life on other worlds, but the truth is we don’t … Read more
Species can actually go extinct more than once. In a biological sense, species become extinct when the last animal of a species stops breathing. But they can also become extinct a second time, researchers say. When a species disappears from our collective memory and cultural knowledge, it becomes extinct in a different way. That second … Read more
In his theory of general relativity, Einstein predicted something called time dilation: the notion that two clocks under two different gravitational pulls will always tick at different speeds. The effect has been observed in many experiments since, but now scientists have recorded it at the smallest scale seen so far. The result was achieved using … Read more
Humpback whales can swim as far as 3,700 miles (5,955 kilometers) for the chance to mate, per a new study. Scientists analyzed a database of over 450,000 pictures of whales in the wild to track the animals. They found that some would swim thousands of miles during the mating season. Two distinctive males, which could be … Read more
A new federal report with up-to-date projections for all states and territories predicts sea levels in the United States will rise more than three times as fast as they did last century. According to new lines of data, the average sea level along the nation’s coastline could increase by 0.3 meters (or a foot) … Read more
We’ve just taken another step closer to time crystals that can be used for practical applications. New experimental work has yielded a room-temperature time crystal in a system that is not isolated from its ambient surroundings. This, the researchers say, paves the way for chip-scale time crystals that can be used in real-world settings, … Read more
A new telescope designed to peer into the twisted X-ray Universe has just sent back its first-ever imaging data. The Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), a joint project between NASA and the Italian Space Agency, fixed its gaze on one of the most famous explosions in the Milky Way: Cassiopeia A. Located 11,000 light-years … Read more
NASA and China plan to mount crewed missions to Mars in the next decade. While this represents a tremendous leap in terms of space exploration, it also presents significant logistical and technological challenges. For starters, missions can only launch for Mars every 26 months when our two planets are at the closest points in … Read more