News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Cultured meat grown in a lab has the potential to be much more environmentally friendly than current practices in the agriculture industry, but a new study has revealed a looming problem: a lot of people really don’t like the idea of eating it. We’re talking here about meat produced in the laboratory from real … Read more
In a slow-moving universe, asteroids give us a rare chance to see things moving in real time. We have such a chance coming right up on the evening of Tuesday, January 18th, when 1.1-kilometer asteroid (7482) 1994 PC1 passes 1.23 million miles (1.98 million kilometers) from Earth. This is about five times the distance … Read more
Planetary-scale engineering schemes designed to cool Earth’s surface and lessen the impact of global heating are potentially dangerous and should be blocked by governments, more than 60 policy experts and scientists said on Monday. Even if injecting billions of sulphur particles into the middle atmosphere – the most hotly debated plan for so-called solar radiation … Read more
In 2018, archaeologists described a truly fascinating puzzle. It looks like this medieval Italian man went through life with a knife attached to his arm, in place of his amputated hand. The skeleton in question was found in a Longobard necropolis in the north of Italy, dating back to around the 6th to 8th centuries … Read more
The human body did not evolve to handle life in space, and it shows in our very blood. Since our species first started to spend extended periods of time beyond our planet, researchers have noticed a curious and consistent loss of red blood cells among astronauts. The phenomenon is called ‘space anemia’, and until … Read more
The Kingdom of Tonga doesn’t often attract global attention, but a violent eruption of an underwater volcano on January 15 has spread shock waves, quite literally, around half the world. The volcano is usually not much to look at. It consists of two small uninhabited islands, Hunga-Ha’apai and Hunga-Tonga, poking about 100 meters (328 … Read more
Scientists in China say they have found the oldest flower bud in the fossil record, finally aligning the fossil evidence with the genetic data suggesting flowering plants, or angiosperms, evolved tens of millions of years earlier than we initially thought. The team hopes their discovery will help “ease the pain” around a nagging, centuries-old mystery that … Read more
When the full Moon rises, strange things can happen here on Earth. Oysters snap close. Corals spawn. Zooplankton dive deeper. Seabirds stick to the shore. And lions hunt less. Several of these behaviors are tied to moonlight; others, to tides. But some have no clear explanation at all. More than 50 years’ worth of shark … Read more
It’s been half a century since the Apollo missions returned from the Moon, and yet the lunar samples they brought home continue to baffle us. Some of these rocks are more than 3 billion years old and appear to have been formed in the presence of a strong geomagnetic field, like the one on Earth. … Read more
Reanalyzing fossils can often lead to new discoveries, as has been the case with a study of an 80 million-year-old Late Cretaceous Struthiosaurus austriacus skull. A new analysis reveals the dinosaur was likely sluggish in its movements and was probably largely deaf as well. Researchers used a high-resolution 3D scan of a partial braincase section … Read more