News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
A new study adds support to the idea that eating better foods is beneficial even without obtaining weight loss – with the Nordic diet reducing blood sugar and cholesterol even when no weight was lost. “It’s surprising because most people believe that positive effects on blood sugar and cholesterol are solely due to weight loss,” … Read more
A baby in North Carolina has received a first-of-its-kind heart transplant that may prevent his body from rejecting the organ without the need for lifelong drugs to suppress the immune system. The child, Easton Sinnamon, is the first person to receive a heart transplant along with implantation of thymus tissue from the same donor, according to a statement from Duke … Read more
Indoor air quality can be significantly improved by houseplants, new research has shown – specifically in terms of removing nitrogen dioxide (NO2) from the air, a pollutant created from fuel burning that’s been linked to respiratory disease. Potted plants are simple to install, affordable to buy, and potentially a genuinely effective option when it … Read more
We know about the devastating effect that Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia can have on people – but what’s less clear is how they get started in the brain and what can be done to cure them or prevent them from happening in the first place. Some clues could be found amongst indigenous … Read more
You may well have spent hours wondering what your laptop is up to as it takes its time to boot up. Scientists have asked the same question of the human brain: How exactly does it restart after being anesthetized, in a coma, or in a deep sleep? Using a group of 30 healthy adults … Read more
Earth’s interior is not a uniform stack of layers. Deep in its thick middle layer lie two colossal blobs of thermo-chemical material. To this day, scientists still don’t know where both of these colossal structures came from or why they have such different heights, but a new set of geodynamic models has landed on a possible answer … Read more
Just over four light-years away, our Solar System’s closest neighboring stars can be found. There’s red dwarf Proxima Centauri, at a distance of 4.2 light-years; and, just a little farther, at 4.37 light-years, a binary system of Sun-like stars – Alpha Centauri AB. We don’t yet know if there are any Earth-like worlds orbiting … Read more
In the last decades of his life, Albert Einstein hoped to unite his description of gravity with existing models of electromagnetism under a single master theory. It’s a quest that continues to vex theoretical physicists to this day. Two of our best models of reality – Einstein’s general theory of relativity and the laws of … Read more
A rare star that repeatedly explodes appears to be also generating the most energetic form of light in the Universe. Analysis of an eruption from the binary system RS Ophiuchi has revealed that the shock wave expanding out into space acts as a particle accelerator that generates gamma radiation. This suggests the conditions that generate … Read more
Childhood lead exposure in the United States is ubiquitous and much more concerning than previous estimates have suggested, according to a new study. When researchers analyzed leaded gas use from 1940 and combined it with data on blood-lead levels from the mid 1970s, they found more than 54 percent of Americans alive in 2015 had … Read more