News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Pack hunting spiders exist in places other than your nightmares. While most spiders enjoy solitary lives, 20 of the roughly 50,000 known spider species live in colonies. One species, Anelosimus eximius, lives in extremely large colonies of up to 1,000 individual spiders that work together to build webs spanning several meters. When prey falls into their … Read more
Last fall my Harvard University class and I went through an exercise to help the students understand how the world might address the climate crisis and keep the average global temperature increase below two degrees Celsius. Guided by John Sterman, a management professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the students pretended to be climate … Read more
A dump truck’s worth of plastic enters our oceans every minute. Tiny bits of plastic are in many of the foods we eat, to the point we may be ingesting about a credit card’s weight of the material every week. As with climate change, we’re running out of time to solve the plastics problem. According … Read more
Between November 2020 and February 2021, Facebook introduced policies to cut down on misinformation related to covid-19 vaccines, but they only worked for about six months Technology 15 February 2022 By Chris Stokel-Walker As part of its policy on covid-19 misinformation, Facebook removed posts with false claims about vaccines Sipa US/Alamy Policies put in place … Read more
The “rolling stop” feature introduced by Tesla in October meant that cars rolled past stop signs instead of stopping, as many states require by law Technology 3 February 2022 By Matthew Sparkes A Tesla Model S in autopilot mode Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg via Getty Images Tesla is recalling more than 50,000 cars in the US because … Read more
Thanks to a combination of sensing the Earth’s magnetic field through vision and an in-built compass that allows them to orient themselves according to magnetic intensity, migratory birds don’t have much trouble finding their way. Those biological gadgets, known as magnetoreception, allow birds to not only know which direction to head in on their first outbound migration but … Read more
Eurasian reed warblers migrate to sub-Saharan Africa each year – and they seem to use the slope of Earth’s magnetic field to judge when they have reached their European breeding grounds Life 27 January 2022 By Alex Wilkins A Eurasian reed warbler Shutterstock / Rafal Szozda Some birds rely on Earth’s magnetic field to navigate and … Read more
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Jacco van Loon, Astronomer, Keele University Could the Earth stop spinning, and if it did, what would happen? – Paul, aged 12, Aberdeen, Scotland The Earth has been spinning since its birth, four and a half billion years … Read more
It takes a lot of science to stop a fire. To prevent homes and workplaces from going up in smoke, manufacturers have added flame retardants to plastic, wood, and steel building materials for decades. But such additives can be toxic, expensive, and sometimes ineffective. Now, researchers in Australia and China have come up with a … Read more
In May 2020, with anonymous callers vowing to kill him and similar threats mounting on social media, Rick Bright gave up his cellphone and went into hiding for more than a month. “If I heard tires rolling over the road in the middle of the night in the driveway where I was staying, it was … Read more