News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Our planet’s convoluted history of evolving life has spawned countless weird and wonderful creatures, but none excite evolutionary biologists – or divide taxonomists – quite like crabs. When researchers attempted to reconcile the evolutionary history of crabs in all their raucous glory just earlier this year, they arrived at the conclusion that the defining … Read more
In 2014, amateur astronomers in New Zealand glimpsed a flare of light emanating from the constellation of Centauri. NASA later confirmed this blaze was a massive supernova explosion from another galaxy an incredible 57 million light-years away from our Milky Way. “Dedicated amateur astronomers often make intriguing discoveries – particularly of fleeting astronomical phenomena … Read more
E. O. Wilson was an extraordinary scholar in every sense of the word. Back in the 1980s, Milton Stetson, the chair of the biology department at the University of Delaware, told me that a scientist who makes a single seminal contribution to his or her field has been a success. By the time I … Read more
Until recently, one of the biggest myths in science was that all dinosaurs have been extinct for the past 65 million years. But thanks to new fossil discoveries that filled in our knowledge about avian dinosaurs, we now know that only some dinosaurs went extinct following an asteroid collision with Earth – others survived and gave … Read more
The pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus northropi is the largest known flying animal to have ever existed, living on Earth more than 67 million years ago. Now new research on the creature and its newly discovered smaller relative, Quetzalcoatlus lawsoni, gives us a better idea of how Q. northropi flew and got airborne to begin with. Our knowledge of Q. … Read more
After a detailed analysis of where the James Webb Space Telescope is now (29 December 2021) and how it got there, NASA determined the observatory should have enough propellant to operate in space for significantly more than 10 years in space. Webb’s mission lifetime was designed to be at least 5-1/2 years, and mission … Read more
We’re so far down the road of climate change, that even making drastic cuts to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels won’t be enough for the world’s weather systems to fall back into their previous patterns, according to a new study. But the research also suggests we still can have a huge impact on how severe … Read more
A sugar additive used in several foods could have helped spread a seriously dangerous superbug around the US, according to a 2018 study. The finger of blame is pointed squarely at the sugar trehalose, found in foods such as nutrition bars and chewing gum. If the findings are confirmed, it’s a stark warning that … Read more
Rapid Covid home tests are more likely to give a false negative with the heavily-mutated Omicron variant compared to earlier strains, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said Tuesday. The news comes as the country is facing a massive surge in cases that experts say is being under-captured as a result of a … Read more
Scientists are working hard to make pet-related sneezes and sniffles a distant memory, and there’s promising news from researchers analyzing the potential for a vaccine against dog allergies. In what’s being described as a first step in developing such a vaccine, a team in Japan has identified certain parts of molecules that may be … Read more