News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
A well-studied solar phenomenon may not be quite as simple as we we thought it was. New simulations suggest that what we thought were loops of plasma known as coronal loops erupting out from the surface of the Sun along magnetic field lines may, at least sometimes, be wrinkles in corrugated sheets of plasma. … Read more
A chequerboard pattern based on kirigami, the Japanese art of paper cutting, enables thin and light structures to support much heavier loads Technology 1 March 2022 By Alex Wilkins A metamaterial inspired by kirigami, the Japanese art of paper cutting, can support nearly 3000 times its own weight. Metamaterials have structures not found in nature, … Read more
A billion years ago, an absolutely monstrous collision of two clusters of galaxies produced a pair of shock waves of absolutely epic proportions. Today, the structures gleam brightly in radio wavelengths, so huge they could easily engulf the Milky Way galaxy’s estimated 100,000 light-year diameter, stretching up to 6.5 million light-years through intergalactic space. … Read more
We might finally have an explanation for mysterious shadows of falling material in the atmosphere of the Sun, observed during solar flares. First spotted in 1999, these mysterious streaks of shadow – referred to as “downward-traveling dark voids” – were thought to be related to the magnetic field interactions that trigger solar eruptions. Now, solar … Read more
A new image of the heart of the Milky Way is revealing mysterious structures we’ve never seen before. Taken using the ultra-sensitive MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, the images show nearly 1,000 strands of magnetic filaments, measuring up to 150 light-years in length, in surprisingly neat and regular arrangements. That’s 10 times the … Read more
The question of how life first sparked into existence on our planet is one we haven’t yet fully answered, but science is getting closer all the time – and a new study identifies the structures of the proteins that may well have made it happen. To begin with, the team behind the study decided … Read more
A group of mysterious, ultradense structures just outside Earth’s core may be the remnants of an ancient interplanetary collision, new research suggests. These strange structures are known as ultralow-velocity zones (ULVZs), because seismic waves generated by earthquakes travel about 50% more slowly through these zones than through the surrounding mantle. That means the ULVZs are … Read more
Bacterial biofilms, slimy collections of microbes, can develop concentric rings containing cells with different biological features Life 6 January 2022 By Alex Wilkins Bacillus subtilis, a soil bacterium, can create concentric rings when it forms a biofilm Kwang-Tao Chou Bacterial biofilms contain a level of structural organisation that we thought was unique to plants and … Read more
Roughly 13.8 billion years ago, our Universe was born in a massive explosion that gave rise to the first subatomic particles and the laws of physics as we know them. About 370,000 years later, hydrogen had formed, the building block of stars, which fuse hydrogen and helium in their interiors to create all the heavier … Read more
Orbiting more than 300 miles (480 kilometers) over Earth and separated by tens of millions of light-years from many of the interstellar objects it studies, the Hubble Space Telescope takes “working remotely” to a new extreme. Even as the world below grappled with another pandemic year, weird and wonderful space discoveries flooded in from above, … Read more