News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Barely a year after vaccine developers reported spectacular successes against SARS-CoV-2, the latest variant of the virus has presented them with a new challenge. Omicron is spreading at unprecedented speed, and studies of blood samples and emerging real-world evidence show one reason is its ability to dodge immunity, whether from previous infections or vaccination. The … Read more
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The anti-seizure qualities of the cannabis plant can likely not be boiled down to a single compound, like cannabidiol (CBD), according to emerging research. Studies in Australia have recently revealed numerous other compounds in the cannabis plant that also show anticonvulsant effects. Some of them could even be more powerful than CBD. A small … Read more
When South African scientists first alerted the world to the rapid spread of a new SARS-CoV-2 variant, some speculated it might not take off in other countries. After all, an earlier variant named Beta, which dominated in South Africa between November 2020 and May, did not spread much beyond its borders and has since petered … Read more
How Earth changed from a lifeless ball of rock, water, and gases to a blue planet teeming with organisms is one of science’s greatest puzzles. Life had to assemble out of chemical building blocks about 4 billion years ago. Some scientists have invoked spectacular sources of energy for life’s spark, such as a comet impact … Read more
A long-awaited, 16-year study of an orbiting pair of spinning neutron stars has yielded the most wide-ranging tests yet of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity. Unsurprisingly, the general theory of relativity, as it’s called, passed all the tests—a sign of its soundness, but also a null result that leaves physicists looking for clues to develop … Read more
The glow of the firefly is as mysterious as it is alluring. Scientists have long argued over why the trait evolved in these adult beetles: Was it to deter predators—or identify mates? A new study argues for the latter, finding the ability arose more than 130 million years ago, tens of millions of years before … Read more
Mercury pollution is a global problem. Emissions from gold mining, coal burning, and other industrial processes travel through the atmosphere, eventually falling to Earth as rain or snow. The poison can make its way to fish and the humans who eat them, where it can damage the developing nervous system, causing problems with memory and … Read more
Things are looking up for transistors. Researchers from IBM and Samsung have made the first prototype computer chip in which the transistors stand on their ends, a change that will make it possible to pack circuitry more tightly and enable faster or more energy-efficient devices. “It’s a major breakthrough,” says Dan Hutcheson, a semiconductor industry … Read more
In a feat of scientific repurposing, a team of physicists has used a detector designed to sense gravitational waves—fleeting ripples in space and time set off by, for example, the collisions of two black holes—to search for something even more elusive, dark matter. Although researchers found no sign of the particular hypothetical particles they sought, … Read more