News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
The ongoing volcanic eruption in Tonga began in December 2021, but it wasn’t until 5:15 pm local time on January 15, 2022, that the powerful explosion occurred. It generated an enormous cloud of ash, earthquakes, and tsunamis that reached as far as the distant coastlines of Peru on the other side of the Pacific. … Read more
Scientists are warning of an emerging ‘epidemic‘ of myopia or near-sightedness, having observed sharp increases in the adult onset of myopia among late baby boomers. Based on data collected from 107,442 participants in the extensive Biobank program in the UK, people born in the late 1960s are 10 percent more likely to be near-sighted than … Read more
In less than 24 hours the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will update the Doomsday Clock. It’s currently at 100 seconds from midnight – the metaphorical time when the human race could destroy the world with technologies of its own making. The hands have never before been this close to midnight. There is scant … Read more
While most of us avoid creepy-crawlies at all costs, entomologists – scientists who study insects – need to actively go looking for them. “My colleague noticed a dead tree in the middle of our university campus,” entomologist Adrian Smith from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences told ScienceAlert. “If you’re an entomologist, when you … 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 quick and pain-free scan of the human eyeball could one day help doctors identify ‘fast agers’, who are at greater risk of early mortality. Getting older obviously has an impact on everybody’s body, but just because two people have the same number of years under their belt doesn’t mean they are physically declining at … Read more
Because we can’t see black holes, it’s hard to know exactly how many are out there in the big, wide Universe. But that doesn’t mean we have no means of trying to figure it out. Stellar-mass black holes are the collapsed cores of dead massive stars, and new research incorporating how these stars and binaries … Read more
The Earth Biogenome Project, a global consortium that aims to sequence the genomes of all complex life on earth (some 1.8 million described species) in ten years, is ramping up. The project’s origins, aims and progress are detailed in two multi-authored papers published today. Once complete, it will forever change the way biological research … Read more
A team of researchers hunting for the wreck of a lost WWII destroyer ship in the Philippine Sea returned to land with another, perhaps even more exciting discovery: video evidence of the deepest-swimming squid ever recorded. Cruising just above the floor of the Philippine Trench at a staggering 20,300 feet (6,200 meters) below the … Read more
A new image of the Flame Nebula shows the interstellar cloud as we’ve never seen it before. A team of astronomers using the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope has captured the star-forming region in radio wavelengths, revealing details that we had never seen before. The Flame Nebula, which is close to the famous Horsehead … Read more