News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 375, Issue 6581. In a sunny room at the Boys & Girls Club in Calistoga, a tiny city in California’s Napa Valley, Veronica Ahumada is setting up her robot when a bespectacled little boy wanders in to ask what she’s doing. Ahumada points to the device—basically … Read more
With its tail flipping rhythmically from side to side, this strange synthetic fish scoots around in its salt and glucose solution, using the same power as our beating hearts. This nifty miniaturized circulatory system, developed by scientists at Harvard and Emory universities, can keep swimming to the beat for more than 100 days. The … Read more
Vaughn Cooper sees white-tailed deer every day in his neighborhood outside Pittsburgh. The species is common in most US states. Pennsylvania alone has around 1.5 million white-tailed deer – about 30 per square mile (2.6 square km) – while the US has around 30 million in total. “My dog goes ripping after the deer … Read more
How and when people first set foot in the Americas is one of the enduring mysteries of human history. Most archaeologists now agree people lived in the Americas before Clovis-style tools—once thought to be linked to the first Americans—appeared about 13,000 years ago. Last year, for example, researchers reported human footprints in White Sands National … Read more
COVID-19 has infected every part of our lives over the last two years. The ways we work, engage with our surroundings, and see family and friends have all been drastically altered during the ongoing pandemic. By far the worst have been the deaths of all the loved ones the disease has taken from us. … Read more
Twice in our planet’s history, colossal mountain ranges that towered as tall as the Himalayas and stretched thousands of miles farther reared their craggy heads out of the Earth, splitting ancient supercontinents in two. Geologists call them the “supermountains.” “There’s nothing like these two supermountains today,” Ziyi Zhu, a postdoctoral student at The Australian National … Read more
Researchers in the United Kingdom yesterday posted the results of a first-of-its-kind study in which healthy young volunteers were purposely infected with an early strain of the pandemic coronavirus. As hoped, none of the participants got seriously ill, and scientists were able to closely track their symptoms and gain unique insight into how both SARS-CoV-2 … Read more
Coral reefs have long been regarded as one of the earliest and most significant ecological casualties of global warming. In new research published in the journal PLOS Climate, we found that the future of these tropical ecosystems – thought to harbor more species than any other – is probably worse than anticipated. Climate change … Read more
On 7 December 2021, as the Omicron variant of the pandemic coronavirus began to pummel the world, scientists officially identified a related strain. BA.2 differed by about 40 mutations from the original Omicron lineage, BA.1, but it was causing so few cases of COVID-19 that it seemed a sideshow to its rampaging counterpart. “I was … Read more
An ambitious, first-of-its-kind effort to estimate how many different kinds of trees exist on Earth suggests our planet is teeming with thousands of tree species that still haven’t been discovered. The huge international research effort – involving the work of over 100 scientists – estimates that there are approximately 73,000 tree species in total … Read more