News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
We stick calendars on the wall or load them up on our phones, but the people of the third millennium BCE used giant rocks, new research suggests. A new study explains how Stonehenge may have originally been used to keep track of a solar year (aka tropical year) of 365 and a quarter days, which … Read more
For more than 50 years, Omega has helped astronauts keep track of time as they traveled through space and walked on the moon. Now, thanks to a new collaboration, the Swiss watchmaker is lending its timing skills to help track all of the items humanity has placed and left in Earth orbit, ensuring that astronauts … Read more
The lowly Bramble Cay melomys, a small Australian rodent, wasn’t the kind of animal that often made the news. But in 2019, it splashed across headlines. The reason? It was the first mammal to go extinct because of climate change. Named for the island where it used to live, the little rodent had been declining … Read more
NONFICTION Life, Linked A reverse journey through geologic time shows the interconnectedness of Earth’s species Otherlands: Journeys in Earth’s Extinct Ecosystems by Thomas Halliday Random House, 2022 ($28.99) As a teenager, I was obsessed with dinosaurs, but I had little aptitude for what came before them. I couldn’t make sense of what John McPhee, in … Read more
Not all planetary systems are alike. Out there in the big, wide galaxy, a number of different configurations have been spotted, some vastly different from our home system. These include extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, that orbit not one, but two stars, like the fictional Star Wars world of Tatooine. Now, for the first time, astronomers … Read more
When it comes to longevity and surviving extended amounts of time without food, the Argas brumpti species of African tick is hard to beat, newly published research shows. Observed close-up in the lab over the course of 45 years by entomologist Julian Shepherd from Binghamton University in New York, some of these ticks have survived as … Read more
The Chicxulub asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaurs is one of the most momentous impact disasters in Earth’s history, and scientists have now identified the time of year when this deadly event took place. New evidence suggests the asteroid hit in the spring for the Northern Hemisphere, which would be fall (or autumn) … Read more
To sleep, perchance to dream.
For over 25 years, a group in Poulton, England has been looking for a lost Cistercian abbey. Instead, over the decades the team has found hundreds of medieval skeletons and well-traveled Roman artifacts. Now, they have discovered what they’re calling “the best preserved picture of late prehistoric life ever found in [North West England]”. … Read more
Rats trained to leave 3.2 seconds between presses of a lever or to hold it down for this length of time seem able to judge whether they were accurate enough to have earned a reward Life 21 February 2022 By Carissa Wong Rats can judge their ability to keep track of the passage of time … Read more