News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Melting ice can take on different shapes depending on the temperature of the water around it, new research reveals, giving us new insights into the complex physics that underlie this deceptively complicated transition. The team behind the research created ultra-pure ‘clear’ ice for their experiments, free from bubbles and impurities, then observed the ice … Read more
By Adam Vaughan Using a crane to lift weights and then release them to generate energy later is one novel approach being tried for energy storage. Energy Vault This is Fix the Planet, the weekly climate change newsletter that reminds you there are reasons for hope in science and technology around the world. To receive … Read more
A distant exoplanet looks more like a football than the usual sphere, researchers report in a groundbreaking new study. The strange shape of ultrahot WASP-103b, which is more than 1,000 light-years from Earth, is due to the planet being stretched by the gravitational forces of its parent star, according to the new research. WASP-103b was … Read more
China’s mysterious “Moon cube” is a mystery no longer. The big reveal: It’s a rock that’s not even shaped like a cube. The nation’s Yutu-2 rover discovered the object – which appeared to be a gray cube looming on the lunar horizon – in early December. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) dubbed it ‘mysterious hut’, playfully … Read more
A group of mysterious, ultradense structures just outside Earth’s core may be the remnants of an ancient interplanetary collision, new research suggests. These strange structures are known as ultralow-velocity zones (ULVZs), because seismic waves generated by earthquakes travel about 50% more slowly through these zones than through the surrounding mantle. That means the ULVZs are … Read more
A summary of decades of research on a rather ‘out-there’ idea involving viruses from space raises questions on just how scientific we can be when it comes to speculating on the history of life on Earth. It’s easy to throw around words like crackpot, rogue, and maverick in describing the scientific fringe, but then … Read more
One of the biggest cosmological mysteries is why the universe is made up of way more matter than antimatter, essentially why we exist. Now, a team of theoretical physicists says they know how to find the answer. All they need to do is detect the gravitational waves produced by bizarre quantum objects called Q balls. Every … Read more
Scientists have spotted a long hypothesized, never-seen-before state of matter in the laboratory for the first time. By firing lasers at an ultracold lattice of rubidium atoms, scientists have prodded the atoms into a messy soup of quantum uncertainty known as a quantum spin liquid. The atoms in this quantum magnetic soup quickly became connected, … Read more
Physicists have shown that ‘splitting’ particles of light into so-called Majorana bosons, a feat long thought to be mathematically impossible, may be achievable Physics 15 December 2021 By Leah Crane Artistic illustration of a photon split in two Trustees of Dartmouth College A type of light that was previously thought to be impossible may be … Read more