News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
A new museum exhibit hopes to uncover the secrets behind the doodles, in-jokes and coded messages on a blackboard that legendary physicist Stephen Hawking kept untouched for more than 35 years. The blackboard dates from 1980, when Hawking joined fellow physicists at a conference on superspace and supergravity at the University of Cambridge in … Read more
Underneath Antarctica’s vast ice sheets there’s a network of rivers and lakes. This is possible because of the insulating blanket of ice above, the flow of heat from within the Earth, and the small amount of heat generated as the ice deforms. Water lubricates the base of the ice sheets, allowing the ice to … Read more
The Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet, identified in 2021, is officially the biggest comet ever observed. The new record, reported on the preprint website arXiv and now accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters, bumps the Hale-Bopp comet from the top spot. Hale-Bopp was discovered in 1995 and became visible to the naked eye in 1996; it … Read more
Since 2013, medical experts in West Africa have been playing whack-a-mole with what looks like the same strain of Ebola virus, and we don’t really know why it continues to pop back up. Even though we keep hammering away at the virus with effective antibody treatments and vaccines, this incredibly fatal infection keeps re-emerging … Read more
Hacking coughs, uncontrollable sneezing, high fevers and pounding headaches can make anyone miserable – even a dinosaur. Recently, researchers identified the first evidence of respiratory illness in a long-necked, herbivorous type of dinosaur known as a sauropod, which lived about 150 million years ago during the Jurassic period (201.3 million to 145 million years ago) in what is now … Read more
Homo sapiens ventured into Neanderthal territory in Europe much earlier than previously thought, according to an archaeological study published in Science magazine on Wednesday. Up to now, archaeological discoveries had indicated that Neanderthals disappeared from the European continent about 40,000 years ago, shortly after the arrival of their “cousin” H. sapiens, barely 5,000 years … Read more
Even the glaciers on Mount Everest are not safe from climate change, new research suggests. In a record-setting study, a team of scientists scaled the world’s highest peak to monitor the mountain’s highest-altitude glacier — the South Col Glacier, standing nearly 26,000 feet (8,000 meters) above sea level — for signs of climate-related ice loss. … Read more
By Michael Le Page, Clare Wilson, Jessica Hamzelou, Sam Wong, Graham Lawton, Adam Vaughan, Conrad Quilty-Harper, Jason Arunn Murugesu, Layal Liverpool, Carissa Wong and Alex Wilkins Nurses help a patient help walk again after recovering from covid-19, King’s College Hospital, London KIRSTY WIGGLESWORTH/POOL/AFP via Getty Images Latest coronavirus news as of 11am on 9 February … Read more
Peering back hundreds of millions of years into the past can turn up some astonishing findings – as it has with the discovery of a second species of opabiniid, a soft-bodied arthropod with a segmented exoskeleton that lived on the seafloor during the Miaolingian (509-497 million years ago). The original opadiniid, Opabinia regalis, was … Read more
Everyone wants to live longer. And we’re often told that the key to doing this is making healthier lifestyle choices, such as exercising, avoiding smoking, and not drinking too much alcohol. Studies have also shown that diet can increase lifespan. A new study has found that eating healthier could extend lifespan by six to … Read more