News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Rising oceans bring more than high tides and nuisance flooding to coastal zones. They also carry salt water into inland aquifers where dissolved salts can spoil drinking water. A new research effort at the University of Pennsylvania aims to identify vulnerable water systems along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts where rising seas pose water quality … Read more
The James Webb Space Telescope’s main mirror is fully aligned and performing even better than it had been designed to do, NASA officials revealed in a news conference held virtually on Wednesday (March 16). The 21.3-foot-wide (6.5 meters) mirror composed of 18 hexagonal segments had to travel to space folded. Aligning it into one smooth … Read more
A new study based on NASA and ESA satellite data shows that Arctic sea ice is thinning at a “frightening rate.” Measuring the ice via satellites each month from 2018 to 2021, polar scientists Sahra Kacimi of the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Ron Kwok of the University of Washington’s Applied Physics … Read more
A newly released image from a Mars satellite offers a glimpse into the complex past of the now dry and dusty world. From high above the surface of Mars, the orbiting High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) homes in on the Danielson Crater, just north of the Mars equator. This region is intensely interesting to space … Read more
An Earthbound experiment is replicating the extreme heat found in galaxy clusters located in deep space using nearly 200 lasers. The hope is the experiment series will reveal more about the conditions within giant groups of galaxies. Here, hydrogen gas can burn at roughly the same temperatures as it does the center of our sun, … Read more
A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 375, Issue 6585. The reconnaissance trip in western Venezuela was going smoothly—until a gunman took aim at their windshield. It was March 2019, and two infectious disease specialists, Alberto Paniz Mondolfi and Carlos Hernandez, were driving back to their headquarters from villages in Venezuela’s disease-ridden Portuguesa … Read more
As planetary scientists resumed meeting in person, Venus experts had something special to celebrate. For decades, the Venus community has been crying out for missions: Only one dedicated spacecraft is currently studying our next-door neighbor, and NASA’s last robotic Venus visitor ended its mission in 1994. Within just a couple weeks in 2021, however, Venus … 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
An enormous impact crater, hiding deep beneath Greenland’s Hiawatha glacier, is probably the result of a kilometer-wide asteroid that crashed into Earth 58 million years ago. That’s much older than scientists presumed – roughly eight million years after the infamous impact that killed off most dinosaurs. When the Hiawatha crater was first discovered in … Read more
On the morning of 24 February, conservation biologist Anton Vlaschenko awoke to the sound of shelling outside his apartment in Kharkiv, Ukraine. The first thing he did was eat a big breakfast. Then, he headed straight to the Ukrainian Bat Rehabilitation Center; the bat rescue and research facility is the largest of its kind in … Read more