News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Abraham “Avi” Loeb got the idea to hunt for aliens from cable TV. In June 2021, Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, was at home, watching NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on CNN talking about recent UFO incidents involving U.S. Navy pilots. “Do you think we have been contacted by extraterrestrials?” the CNN interviewer asked. Nelson … Read more
Imagine using any object around you—a frying pan, a glass paperweight—as the central processor in a neural network, a type of artificial intelligence that loosely mimics the brain to perform complex tasks. That’s the promise of new research that, in theory, could be used to recognize images or speech faster and more efficiently than computer … Read more
Bats use sound to hunt a dizzying array of prey. Some zero in on flowers to sip nectar, whereas others find cattle and suck their blood. Many nab insects midflight. One species of bat senses small fish beneath the water and snatches them as osprey do. Now, scientists have discovered an anatomical quirk in the … Read more
It took just one virus to cripple the world’s economy and kill millions of people; yet virologists estimate that trillions of still-unknown viruses exist, many of which might be lethal or have the potential to spark the next pandemic. Now, they have a new—and very long—list of possible suspects to interrogate. By sifting through unprecedented … Read more
When Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai, a mostly submerged volcanic cauldron in the South Pacific Ocean, exploded on 15 January, it unleashed a blast perhaps as powerful as the world’s biggest nuclear bomb, and drove tsunami waves that crashed into Pacific shorelines. But 3 hours or so before their arrival in Japan, researchers detected the waves of … Read more
Barely 2 months after it began, the Omicron wave is already ebbing in some countries. And although it has sickened huge numbers of people, caused massive disruption, and left many health care workers exhausted, it is also leaving something unusual in its wake: a sense of optimism about the pandemic’s trajectory. In countries where many … Read more
When it comes to killing and eating other creatures, chimpanzees—our closest relatives—have nothing on us. Animal flesh makes up much more of the average human’s diet than a chimp’s. Many scientists have long suggested our blood lust ramped up about 2 million years ago, based on the number of butchery marks found at ancient archaeological … Read more
NASA’s flagship James Webb Space Telescope has arrived at its destination. After unfolding the carefully packed observatory during its monthlong journey, controllers today briefly fired Webb’s thrusters to put it into a “halo orbit” around L2, a gravitational balance point 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Far from the heat and hubbub of low-Earth orbit, L2 … Read more
TAIPEI, TAIWAN—Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s most prominent academic institution, has been ordered to pay a fine for biosafety lapses after a research assistant at its Genomics Research Center contracted COVID-19 on the job in late 2021. Health minister Chen Shih-chung, who also heads Taiwan’s Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC), announced during a 20 January press conference … Read more
For the past year, the U.S. government had argued that Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineering professor Gang Chen broke the law by failing to disclose his ties to China when applying for a grant from the Department of Energy (DOE). But last week, prosecutors abruptly reversed course and dropped all charges against him, telling … Read more