News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
A mysterious particle thought to have existed briefly just after the Big Bang has now been detected for the first time in the ‘primordial soup’. Specifically, in a medium called the quark-gluon plasma, generated in the Large Hadron Collider by colliding lead ions. There, amid the trillions of particles produced by these collisions, physicists managed … Read more
The UK parliament passed a law to help researchers do trials of gene-edited crops in England, and the chief scientist at the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs says it would take at least five years for a product to go from research trials to market Environment 20 January 2022 By Adam Vaughan … Read more
The UK passed a law to help researchers do trials of gene-edited crops, and the chief scientist at the UK’s Department for Food, Rural Affairs & Environment says it would take at least five years for a product to go from research trials to market Environment 20 January 2022 By Adam Vaughan Stacks of wheat … Read more
The UN’s World Meteorological Organization found that 2021 was the seventh hottest year to date, at 1.11°C above pre-industrial levels Environment 19 January 2022 By Adam Vaughan In Palmdale, California, temperatures reached 41.1°C in July 2021 ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images The past seven years were the warmest on record as climate change continued apace, … Read more
A quick and pain-free scan of the human eyeball could one day help doctors identify ‘fast agers’, who are at greater risk of early mortality. Getting older obviously has an impact on everybody’s body, but just because two people have the same number of years under their belt doesn’t mean they are physically declining at … Read more
As it’s the foundation for all life on Earth, discovering carbon on other planets always gets scientists excited – and the Curiosity Rover on Mars has found an unusual mix of the chemical element that could hypothetically point to the existence of alien life. That’s by no means certain, but it’s a possibility. It’s … Read more
Scientists in China say they have found the oldest flower bud in the fossil record, finally aligning the fossil evidence with the genetic data suggesting flowering plants, or angiosperms, evolved tens of millions of years earlier than we initially thought. The team hopes their discovery will help “ease the pain” around a nagging, centuries-old mystery that … Read more
Moon phases reveal the passage of time in the night sky. Some nights when we look up at the moon, it is full and bright; sometimes it is just a sliver of silvery light. These changes in appearance are the phases of the moon. As the moon orbits Earth, it cycles through eight distinct phases. … Read more
It’s been half a century since the Apollo missions returned from the Moon, and yet the lunar samples they brought home continue to baffle us. Some of these rocks are more than 3 billion years old and appear to have been formed in the presence of a strong geomagnetic field, like the one on Earth. … Read more
Mesopotamians were using hybrids of domesticated donkeys and wild asses to pull their war wagons 4,500 years ago – at least 500 years before horses were bred for the purpose, a new study reveals. The analysis of ancient DNA from animal bones unearthed in northern Syria resolves a long-standing question of just what type of animals … Read more