News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Human taste buds are easily manipulated. With just a few simple words, researchers have found the same chocolate chip cookie can go from tasting scrumptiously sweet and moist to unpleasantly bitter and stale. It all depends on what the label tells us. When 58 adults from Ohio State University were given three cookies to … Read more
We might finally have an explanation for mysterious shadows of falling material in the atmosphere of the Sun, observed during solar flares. First spotted in 1999, these mysterious streaks of shadow – referred to as “downward-traveling dark voids” – were thought to be related to the magnetic field interactions that trigger solar eruptions. Now, solar … Read more
You might think that clouds are clouds all over Earth, but that’s not quite so. If you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, the clouds there are different, more abundant, and more reflective than clouds found in the Northern Hemisphere, a fact scientists are well familiar with, but have not been able to fully explain. Now, … Read more
Glaciers are retreating faster globally due to climate change but they melt more quickly when they flow into a lake than when they end on land, with consequences for water supplies, a new study found on Thursday. The Swiss-funded study is the first large-scale, detailed analysis of the phenomenon in mountain glaciers and could … Read more
Early, accurate, and simple diagnosis is important in just about every health condition you could name, and that includes heart disease. New research now suggests straightforward eye scans could identify patients with an increased risk of cardiovascular problems later on in life. If this method of diagnosis can be developed, it would be a … Read more
A new image of the heart of the Milky Way is revealing mysterious structures we’ve never seen before. Taken using the ultra-sensitive MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, the images show nearly 1,000 strands of magnetic filaments, measuring up to 150 light-years in length, in surprisingly neat and regular arrangements. That’s 10 times the … Read more
On one level, chess seems like a simple game: 64 individual black or white squares, 16 pieces per side, and two competitors striving for conquest. Dig a little deeper though, and the game offers incredibly complex possibilities, posing challenges to chess theorists and mathematicians that can go unsolved for decades or even centuries. In … Read more
The engineers aboard the floating power station on Lake Kivu could only watch nervously as the volcano in the distance erupted violently, sending tremors rumbling through the water beneath them. It was not the lava shooting from Mount Nyiragongo last May that spooked them, but the enormous concentrations of potentially explosive gases within Kivu, … Read more
As cats have become domesticated over the last 10,000 years or so, their brains have shrunk significantly in size, a new study confirms – a finding that could lead to important new insights into how animals adapt when they start being regularly kept by human beings. Researchers compared the size of craniums (an indicator … Read more
The secret behind a record-breaking nuclear fusion experiment that spit out 10 quadrillion watts of power in a split second has been revealed: a “self-heating” – or “burning” – plasma of neutron-heavy hydrogen inside the fuel capsule used in the experiment, according to researchers. Last year, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in … Read more