News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
A Stone Age woman who lived 4,000 years ago is leaning on her walking stick and looking ahead as a spirited young boy bursts into a run, in a stunning life-size reconstruction now on display in Sweden. Although her likeness is new – it debuted last month in an exhibit about ancient people at Västernorrlands Museum … Read more
Climate change is spiraling out of control, and that’s never been easier to see. A winding coil of global temperatures spanning 1880 to 2021 is practically a maelstrom of menace. The animation is based on data from NASA’s GISS Surface Temperature Analysis and was designed by climate scientist Ed Hawkins, who is known for … Read more
When ThankGod Echezona Ebenezer left southeast Nigeria to start a biochemistry Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 2013, he soon realized little information on the genomes of plants and animals from Africa were in existing global sequencing databases. To help protect the continent’s biodiversity and aid its agriculture, he and colleagues founded the African … Read more
After COVID appeared, a huge number of virologists, biochemists, cell biologists and immunologists shifted their work to the coronavirus, and because of that, the world got what it was desperately hoping for: a vaccine, in record time. Everything worked out better than we could have dreamed—several parallel vaccines, all with high efficacy. We are seeing … Read more
If you’ve ever lived with a cat, you’ve probably received a painful chomp from your beloved furball’s pointy canines at least once. But 42 million years ago, your kitty’s teeth would have looked very different: Evolution was only just honing the teeth of cat-like animals to a deadly sharp tip for piercing and shredding flesh. … Read more
New satellite data has revealed the Arctic is melting at a “frightening rate” due to the excess heat caused by human greenhouse gas emissions. End-of-season Arctic multiyear sea ice – the ice that persists over several years – was roughly 50 centimeters (1.6 feet) thinner in 2021 than it was in 2019, the figures show, … Read more
SpaceX celebrated its 20th anniversary Monday (March 14) with a short video showcasing Starman, Starship and company innovations in orbit and beyond. “Today we celebrate the founding of SpaceX and 20 years of accomplishments by this incredible team — here’s to creating a future that we can all get excited about,” the California-based company tweeted … Read more
Centuries before first contact with Europeans, new research suggests a strain of tuberculosis was already circulating from the South American coasts to the mountains. Deadly European diseases, like tuberculosis (TB), whooping cough, and smallpox, were spread around the world with colonization, but recent evidence indicates this wasn’t the first time TB arrived in South America. … Read more
Prehistoric sites are full of stone tools that appear to have two life cycles: They’ve been crafted, used, and discarded before being picked up a second time and used again. A new study puts forward an interesting hypothesis as to why this is. The research suggests that the recycling of these tools is about … Read more
The Apollo missions to the Moon brought a total of 2,196 rock samples to Earth. But NASA has only just started opening one of the last ones, collected 50 years ago. For all that time, some tubes were kept sealed so that they could be studied years later, with the help of the latest technical … Read more