Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 689 posts.
In September 2005 (for the 50th anniversary of the atomic clock and 100th anniversary of the theory of relativity) we took several cesium clocks on a road trip to Mt Rainier; a family science experiment unlike anything you've seen before.
Interactive article explaining how sound works.
Interactive article explaining the physics of an airfoil and what makes airplanes fly
Learn how things spread with playable simulations
Interactive article explaining how curves and surfaces are modeled.
Introduction A Note on Apollo I. The Rocket II. The Capsule III. The Orbit IV. Gateway V. The Lander VI. Refueling VII. Conclusion Notes
Our state-of-the-art model delivers 10-day weather predictions at unprecedented accuracy in under one minute
The risk that cryptographically-relevant quantum computers materialize within the next few years is now high enough to be dispositive, unfortunately.
Pollution from tyre wear can be 1,000 times worse than what comes out of a car’s exhaust, Emissions Analytics has found.
Another entry into my blog series on countering misconceptions in space journalism. I discussed this post on The Space Show on November 5 2021. It has been exactly two years since my initial posts …
Want to lose abdominal fat, get smarter and live longer? New research led by USC’s Valter Longo shows that periodically adopting a diet that mimics the effects of fasting may yield a wide range of health benefits.
I recently learned that cells are extremely crowded and busy places. I knew there's a lot of activity in cells, but I didn't realize just h...
Visualizing the exponential growth of COVID-19 across the world.
The unstoppable rise of batteries is leading to a domino effect that puts half of global fossil fuel demand at risk.
My son (5y) asked me today: If there were a kind of a fireman's pole from the Moon down to the Earth, how long would it take to slide all the way from the Moon to the Earth?
We identified how millions of concepts are represented inside Claude Sonnet, the first detailed look inside a production-grade language model.
The human eye is very sensitive; but can we see a single photon? The answer is yes: sensors in the retina can respond to a single photon. But neural filters only allow a signal to pass to the brain to trigger a conscious response when at least about five to nine arrive within less than 100 ms. If we could consciously…
Before we get nerd sniped by the shiny engineering details, ask the only question that matters. Why compute in orbit? Why should a watt or a flop 250 miles up be more valuable than one on the surface? What advantage justifies moving something as mundane as matrix multiplication into LEO?
I’ve supervised a lot of great student projects in my nine years at MIT, but my inner nerdy teenager has never been as personally delighted by a project as it is right now. To…
A few weeks ago, I attended the Seven Pines Symposium on Fundamental Problems in Physics outside Minneapolis, where I had the honor of participating in a panel discussion with Sir Roger Penrose. T…
Many countries ship plastic waste overseas. How much of the world’s waste is traded, and how big is its role in the pollution of our oceans?
I've stumbled across a technique for drawing holograms directly upon a plastic plate by hand. It sounds impossible, but I've been sitting on the livingroom sofa making holographic images of floating polyhedra, words, 3D starfields, opaque objects, etc. No laser, no isolation table, no darkroom, no expensive film…
What is electricity? This question is impossible to answer because the word " Electricity " has several contradictory meanings. These different meanings are incompatible, and the contradictions confuse everyone. If you don't understand electricity, you're not alone. Even teachers, engineers, and scientists have a hard…
[Epistemic status: very speculative, asserted with only ~30% confidence. On the other hand, even though psychiatrists don’t really talk about this it’s possible other groups know this a…
All energy production takes up land, but which sources use the most land, and which use it most efficiently?
The Oh-My-God Particle
