News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
An ancient temple dating from the early centuries of Buddhism has been unearthed in the Swat Valley in northern Pakistan – part of the ancient Gandhara region that was conquered by Alexander the Great and gave rise to a mixing of Buddhist belief and Greek art. Archaeologists think that the temple dates from about the middle … Read more
People in the Chincha valley of Peru threaded the spines of the dead onto wooden rods around 500 years ago, a mostly-unknown practice only recently documented by archaeologists. It may have been an attempt to restore the bodies of the dead during the European colonization, according to a study by the researchers who unearthed … Read more
Evidence for an intense asteroid impact on Mars has been found in a Martian meteorite, which could alter the timeline for when the red planet might have been habitable. In a famous meteorite named NWA 7034, or ‘Black Beauty’, scientists discovered a shocked crystal of the mineral zircon, showing a feature only seen on Earth … Read more
The skeletal remains of a man buried 1,400 years ago near a headless horse have been discovered at an ancient cemetery in the town of Knittlingen in southern Germany. He likely was the horse’s owner/rider when he was alive. The man was buried at a time when the Merovingian dynasty (476–750 CE) flourished in … Read more
Uranus and Neptune are the most twin-like of all the planets in the Solar System. They are almost the same size and mass, have similar compositions and structures, even similar rotation rates. Which makes one glaring difference quite perplexing. Neptune is a fetching shade of azure, with visible swirling storms. Uranus is more of … Read more
Melting ice can take on different shapes depending on the temperature of the water around it, new research reveals, giving us new insights into the complex physics that underlie this deceptively complicated transition. The team behind the research created ultra-pure ‘clear’ ice for their experiments, free from bubbles and impurities, then observed the ice … Read more
For the ancient Maya people who lived across central America for thousands of years, the cacao plant that chocolate comes from was considered to be a gift from the gods – so much so that beans from these trees were used as a unit of currency. Now, researchers have been able to identify new … Read more
A jaw-dropping lightning megaflash that snaked across three states in the southern US just won a world record. A megaflash is not your standard cloud-to-ground lightning bolt. It’s an enormous electric zigzag that travels from one electrified cloud to the next, almost instantaneously. A big enough thunderstorm system can allow a megaflash to cover hundreds of … Read more
Earth has officially been joined in its orbit around the Sun by a new trojan asteroid. Named 2020 XL5, this chunk of rock is only the second object of its type ever to have been conclusively identified. Its discovery suggests that perhaps Earth trojans may be more common than we knew, and offers new insights … Read more
It’s fun sometimes when your eyes play tricks on you, and you see a face that isn’t really there, staring back at you from a power plug or a potato. This phenomenon is called face pareidolia, and it’s something that humans, and even chimps, naturally do. But it looks like facial features aren’t the … Read more