News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
Once, there were giants. Mountain ranges that rivaled the Himalayas in height used to stretch thousands upon thousands of kilometers across the seams of merging supercontinents, billions of years in the past. Like the teeth of decrepit old gods, they’ve long been worn down to their roots by time and decay. But in those … Read more
The most massive stars in the Universe are also the shortest-lived. The more mass a star has, the more quickly it burns through its fuel reserves, resulting in lifespans that are less than around 10 million years. This fascinating fact leads us to a puzzle. Most of these stars are found relatively close to … Read more
The climate crisis enveloping Earth impacts the lowest depths of the sea and the most remote parts of the planet. And new research shows that it’s also causing change at the highest points of the world. Scientists studying South Col – Mount Everest’s highest glacier – have reported that rapid ice loss is occurring … Read more
All manner of croaks, chirps, and deep trombone moans permeate Earth’s waters, just like the cacophony of sounds that fill its forest air. For example, reefs are surprisingly noisy places, and many of the noisemakers are fish. “We’ve known for a long time that some fish make sounds, but fish sounds were always perceived as … Read more
Hollywood has finally taken inspiration from the decade-ago move of a NASA space shuttle through the streets of Los Angeles and it only took the moon falling out of the sky for it to happen. “Moonfall,” which opened in theaters on Friday (Feb. 4), is the first major motion picture to use the 2012 delivery … Read more
A long-term study tracking just over a thousand participants has found regular cannabis smoking can change the function of your lungs as you age. Unlike smoking a cigarette, however, cannabis seems to impact a person’s breathing in a slightly different way. Over adulthood, tobacco smoking is associated with a progressive decline in how much air … Read more
Sometimes astronomers and astrophysicists are working at such gigantic, mind-bending scales – in terms of both distance and time – that you can’t help but be awestruck at the new discoveries they keep coming out with. Case in point: a temperature check of the Universe in its youngest phase, just 880 million years after … Read more
Two people who were among the first to get CAR-T cells as blood cancer treatment still have descendants of the cells in their bodies that are working well more than a decade later Health 2 February 2022 By Clare Wilson Illustration of a CAR-T cell KEITH CHAMBERS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY A high-tech gene therapy for treating … Read more
We don’t know how life emerged on Earth, but one thing is certain: life as we know it on our planet wouldn’t exist without the water that wraps around the surface, runs in rivulets, and falls from the sky. Our planet is the only one known to have life, and the only one on … Read more
A machine learning analysis of 50,000 privacy policy texts shows they have ballooned to an average of over 4000 words since 1996 Technology 3 February 2022 By Chris Stokel-Walker Privacy policies are getting harder to read Antons Jevterevs / Alamy Privacy policies have become longer and less readable, and require more access to user data … Read more