At the top of the panels you'll see a little arrow with dots after it, they are like add on menus (as you can use most mainly used thing's using shortcut keys rarther than menu-> select etc) so you just closed them (by clicking on them).

It lets you get more work space in your viewprots and/or multiple screens. Pressing crtl + space cycles through some defaults, there is another way but i cant remember it at the moment.