News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
This story is part of a special package about the barriers Black physicists face and potential models for change. Read more C. Smith/Science In the 1990s, physics departments at U.S. universities faced an existential crisis. The number of undergraduate physics majors had plummeted by 25% over 10 years, prompting fears that many departments might disappear … Read more
If the seaweeds nori, kombu, or wakame have long been part of your diet, there’s a good chance your gut bacteria harbor genes from sea life. Microbiologists have discovered the human gut microbiome has acquired this exotic DNA multiple times during the history of seaweed consumption in Asia. Whether these genes can be acquired in … Read more
The archerfish is one of Southeast Asia’s deadliest sharpshooters. When a tasty insect or spider catches its eye on the banks of a mangrove forest, the small, striped swimmer fires a precise, high-powered jet of water from its mouth, knocking the bug into the river, where it can be gobbled up. To do so, the … Read more
Patent rulings and scientific honors don’t always mesh, as the team that won the Nobel Prize for creating the genome editor CRISPR learned yesterday. After a 7-year patent battle, a U.S. court rejected its intellectual property claim to a key use of CRISPR, potentially costing it many millions in licensing fees. According to a ruling … Read more
The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) is starting its first operational science work as it embarks on a mission to better understand our sun. DKIST is a nearly $300 million science observatory perched atop the 10,062-foot (3,067 meters) Mount Haleakalā in Maui, Hawaii. One of its main functions will be to study the corona, the … Read more
Potato cyst nematodes are a clever pest. These microscopic worms wriggle through the soil, homing in the roots of young potato plants and cutting harvests by up to 70%. They are challenging to get rid of, too: The eggs are protected inside the mother’s body, which toughens after death into a cyst that can survive … Read more
University scientists and civil rights groups in the United States are offering qualified praise for the federal government’s decision last week to rename and revise the China Initiative, a controversial, 3-year-old law enforcement campaign intended to prevent the Chinese government from stealing U.S.-funded technologies. “Dropping the name is good,” says Steven Pei, an electrical engineer … Read more
On 24 February, as Russian troops poured across the border in an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, Sergei Mosyakin, director of the Institute of Botany in Kyiv, set out with a few key staff to secure the institute and its National Herbarium, which holds more than 2 million specimens representing the wealth of Ukraine’s floral and … Read more
Three new studies offer one indisputable conclusion about the origin of SARS-CoV-2: Despite the passage of 2 years and the Chinese government’s lack of transparency, data that can shed light on the pandemic’s greatest mystery still exist. And although these new analyses don’t all reach the same conclusion for how COVID-19 was sparked, each undercuts … Read more
Over the past 70 years, humanity has made great strides on a number of metrics: increasing life expectancy, cutting hunger and disease, boosting education levels. But a prime engine of these gains—the burning of fossil fuels—now threatens to slow down global development, according to a new report today from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate … Read more