News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
It turns out there are still exciting new discoveries to be made in a field as well-studied as human anatomy: researchers have confirmed the existence of a layer of muscle in the human jaw that has until now eluded anatomists. This new muscle is a deeper, third section of the masseter muscle. It’s the most prominent … Read more
If creepy crawlies make you uncomfortable, be glad you weren’t living in the Carboniferous period (around 100 million years before the dinosaurs arrived) in what is now Northumberland in the UK. Scientists have made an astonishing discovery along this part of the coast of northeast England: a 326 million-year-old fossil, showing traces of the … Read more
You may have experienced an unsettling amount of swaying and wobbling if you’ve been on a bridge with large numbers of pedestrians traveling over it at the same time. Now, we have a fascinating new explanation for what causes this worrying movement in the structure. Until now, the thinking went as follows: people fall … Read more
A new scientific study published Monday has identified the brain region linked to genital touch in women, and found that it was more developed in volunteers who reported having more sex. The research involved stimulating the clitorises of 20 adult females while their brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The researchers … Read more
A team of physicists claims to have entangled a superconducting qubit and a tardigrade, moving the freezing, tiny, and well-controlled world of quantum into the “hot and wet” systems of life. However, the results described in this preprint paper are not quite so cut and dried, and many quantum researchers are arguing that the … Read more
In another context, Jupiter‘s moon Ganymede might have been a planet. As the largest moon in our Solar System, it’s one of the most intriguing locations in the neighborhood. Which is great, because it just so happens that Jupiter probe Juno is in the vicinity. Now, it’s sent back some curious noises. On 7 June … Read more
Famed for their swift longboats and bloody incursions, Vikings have long been associated with brutal, over-the-top violence. Between the eighth and 11th centuries, these groups left their Nordic homelands to make their fortunes by trading and raiding across Europe. Particularly infamous is the so-called “blood eagle”, a gory ritual these warriors are said to … Read more
The much-delayed launch of the James Webb space telescope will go ahead on December 24, NASA and the company overseeing the launch confirmed on Saturday. The project, begun in 1989, was originally expected to deploy the instrument – which will be the largest and most powerful telescope ever to be launched into space – in the early … Read more
The remains of an ancient female child, no more than two months of age, have been found lavishly decorated with pendants and beads in northwest Italy. The precious skeleton was discovered in the Arma Veirana cave in 2017 and has now been dated to about 10,000 old. This time is known as the early Holocene, … Read more
From Earth’s vantage point in one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, the structure of our galaxy is pretty difficult to reconstruct. That’s because gauging the distance to something in space when you don’t know its intrinsic brightness is really, really hard. And there are a lot of objects in the Milky Way whose brightness … Read more