News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
At a point some 12,800 years ago, a tenth of Earth’s surface suddenly became covered in roaring fires. The firestorm rivalled the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, and it was likely caused by fragments of a comet that would have measured around 100 kilometers (62 miles) across. As dust clouds smothered Earth, they … Read more
About 40 beheaded skeletons were among 425 bodies found in a late Roman cemetery uncovered by archeologists in southern England. The team of around 50 archeologists made the discovery during an excavation at Fleet Marston, near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, on the route of the multi-billion pound high-speed rail link that is currently under construction, HS2 said. … Read more
Sweeping the ocean floor at hundreds of points throughout the world, researchers have revealed an astonishing diversity of microscopic life thriving in the deepest and darkest parts of our planet. The sediment collected at each spot was analyzed for environmental DNA (eDNA), which marine animals shed as they go about their lives. While sea … Read more
The most massive stars in the Universe are also the shortest-lived. The more mass a star has, the more quickly it burns through its fuel reserves, resulting in lifespans that are less than around 10 million years. This fascinating fact leads us to a puzzle. Most of these stars are found relatively close to … Read more
Sometimes astronomers and astrophysicists are working at such gigantic, mind-bending scales – in terms of both distance and time – that you can’t help but be awestruck at the new discoveries they keep coming out with. Case in point: a temperature check of the Universe in its youngest phase, just 880 million years after … Read more
We don’t know how life emerged on Earth, but one thing is certain: life as we know it on our planet wouldn’t exist without the water that wraps around the surface, runs in rivulets, and falls from the sky. Our planet is the only one known to have life, and the only one on … Read more
A new analysis from researchers at Stanford University and the scientific journal, The Lancet, has revealed a large number of Americans and Canadians are still becoming addicted to prescription opioids each year. Without “urgent interventions“, the members of the Stanford-Lancet Commission estimate this deepening disaster could claim the lives of up to 1.2 million people … Read more
The human gut is the host of a rampant microscopic orgy. To survive, the microbes in our digestive tract are having ‘sex’ with each other on a regular basis, all in the name of swapping secrets on how to survive deadly doses of antibiotics. A team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign … Read more
More than 1500 years ago, a vast culture known as the Hopewell tradition (or Hopewell culture) stretched across what is today the eastern United States. The cause of the culture’s decline has long been debated, with war and climate change two of the possibilities, but now a new avenue of inquiry has opened up: debris from a … Read more
For centuries, British flowers have been blooming like clockwork. A few months into spring, sometime around May or June, the nation bursts into color. Since the early 1980s, however, hundreds of plants have grown out of sync with the seasons, which means they’re also unraveling from the complicated tapestry of interactions that keep ecosystems sustainably … Read more