News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
A new species of giant tortoise has been discovered in the Galapagos after DNA testing found animals living on one island had not yet been recorded, Ecuador’s environment ministry said. Researchers compared the genetic material of tortoises currently living on San Cristobal with bones and shells collected in 1906 from a cave in the … Read more
The Sun is blanketed by spiking, ultra-hot jets of plasma created from electrically charged particles, and now scientists have figured out more about how these jets (or spicules) are created and driven up into the star’s atmosphere. Via a series of laboratory experiments and models, a new study describes the spicules as being like … Read more
As people in the US prepare to turn their clocks ahead one hour in mid-March, I find myself bracing for the annual ritual of media stories about the disruptions to daily routines caused by switching from standard time to daylight saving time. About a third of Americans say they don’t look forward to these … Read more
After throwing 129 volunteers into the stressful situation of a sudden group math test, researchers found that people using a huggable ‘breathing’ cushion were more relaxed in the lead up to the questions than those without one. “We were excited to find that holding the breathing cushion, without any guidance, produced a similar effect … Read more
Across the world, girls are more likely than boys to blame academic failure on a lack of talent, according to a large study on gender stereotypes published Wednesday. Paradoxically, the idea that males are inherently more brilliant was most entrenched in countries that are more egalitarian. Such stereotypes have been explored in the past, … Read more
Earth’s interior is not a uniform stack of layers. Deep in its thick middle layer lie two colossal blobs of thermo-chemical material. To this day, scientists still don’t know where both of these colossal structures came from or why they have such different heights, but a new set of geodynamic models has landed on a possible answer … Read more
An enormous impact crater, hiding deep beneath Greenland’s Hiawatha glacier, is probably the result of a kilometer-wide asteroid that crashed into Earth 58 million years ago. That’s much older than scientists presumed – roughly eight million years after the infamous impact that killed off most dinosaurs. When the Hiawatha crater was first discovered in … Read more
A rare star that repeatedly explodes appears to be also generating the most energetic form of light in the Universe. Analysis of an eruption from the binary system RS Ophiuchi has revealed that the shock wave expanding out into space acts as a particle accelerator that generates gamma radiation. This suggests the conditions that generate … Read more
The Cambrian Explosion – around 541 million years ago – was when life and organisms really got going on planet Earth. Now new research has revealed how that explosion of life has left behind traces deep within Earth’s mantle. For scientists, it shows the connected interplay between Earth’s surface and what lies beneath, as … Read more
Explorers have found one of the most famous shipwrecks in history, Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance, deep in the icy sea off Antarctica more than a century after it sank, they announced Wednesday. Endurance was discovered at a depth of 3,008 meters (9,869 feet) in the Weddell Sea, about six kilometers (four miles) from where it … Read more