News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Apart from fish, scientists have found only one other animal that can regulate its buoyancy in the water using swim bladders, and it’s probably not what you were expecting. The phantom midge is a type of lake fly (genus Chaoborus), but before it can take to the air, its larvae must first grow up in the … Read more
The search for life on Mars is not an easy one. Not only is the red planet difficult to get to, it’s deeply inhospitable to life as we know it. However, there are places on Earth that could show us how life may have been able to survive on Mars – if not now, then … Read more
A star that exploded into brightness nearly 200 years ago can now be explored in glorious, multi-wavelength detail. In a new video, a team of scientists modeled the Homunculus Nebula around the star Eta Carinae in three dimensions, enabling insight into this incredible event. The binary system Eta Carinae started erupting in the late … Read more
Deep beneath the ice in Greenland and Antarctica, researchers have found signs of an enormous solar ‘tsunami‘ that once crashed against Earth’s atmosphere more than 9,000 years ago. This ancient superstorm was triggered by a wave of hot plasma and magnetism from the Sun, and it is significantly larger than anything we have recorded … 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
You might think that clouds are clouds all over Earth, but that’s not quite so. If you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, the clouds there are different, more abundant, and more reflective than clouds found in the Northern Hemisphere, a fact scientists are well familiar with, but have not been able to fully explain. Now, … Read more
Glaciers are retreating faster globally due to climate change but they melt more quickly when they flow into a lake than when they end on land, with consequences for water supplies, a new study found on Thursday. The Swiss-funded study is the first large-scale, detailed analysis of the phenomenon in mountain glaciers and could … Read more
The engineers aboard the floating power station on Lake Kivu could only watch nervously as the volcano in the distance erupted violently, sending tremors rumbling through the water beneath them. It was not the lava shooting from Mount Nyiragongo last May that spooked them, but the enormous concentrations of potentially explosive gases within Kivu, … Read more
A chunk of a SpaceX rocket that blasted off seven years ago and was abandoned in space after completing its mission will crash into the Moon in March, experts say. The rocket was deployed in 2015 to put into orbit a NASA satellite called the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR). Since then, the second … Read more
Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered two colossal limestone statues of King Amenhotep III that are fashioned to look like sphinxes, according to the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. An Egyptian-German archaeological mission discovered the sphinx-like statues, which were originally about 26 feet (8 meters) long when they were created for King Amenhotep III, an … Read more