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Impact Speed and a Pedestrian's Risk of Severe Injury or Death
This study examines how vehicle speed influences the probability that a pedestrian struck by a vehicle will sustain severe injuries or die.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 63 posts.
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Ketamine: Now By Prescription
Last week the FDA approved esketamine for treatment-resistant depression. Let’s review how the pharmaceutical industry works: a company discovers and patents a potentially exciting new drug. …
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Internet
More than half of the world is online, but the Internet is still young.
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Crop Yields
Increasing crop yields is crucial to improve food security, living standards, and reduce human impacts on the environment.
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IBM casts doubt on Google's claims of quantum supremacy
We argue that an ideal simulation of the same task can be performed on a classical system in 2.5 days and with far greater fidelity.
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Quantum supremacy: the gloves are off
Links:Google paper in NatureNew York Times articleIBM paper and blog post responding to Google’s announcementBoaz Barak’s new post: “Boaz’s inferior classical inferiority FA…
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5-HTTLPR: A Pointed Review
In 1996, some researchers discovered that depressed people often had an unusual version of the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTTLPR. The study became a psychiatric sensation, getting thousands of ci…
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Going Critical
Learn how things spread with playable simulations
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Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor
Posted by John Martinis, Chief Scientist Quantum Hardware and Sergio Boixo, Chief Scientist Quantum Computing Theory, Google AI Quantum Physicist...
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When His SR-71 Blackbird Disintegrated, This Pilot Free Fell from Space
During the early days of testing for the legendary SR-71 Blackbird there were some harrowing mishaps, the details of which have rarely come to light. On January 25, 1966, test pilot Bill Weaver and Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation systems specialist Jim Zwayer experienced their plane vanishing around…
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Project Silica proof-of-concept stores movie on quartz glass
Microsoft and Warner Brothers collaborate to store and retrieve the 1978 'Superman' movie on a piece of glass roughly the size of a drink coaster.
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Everything Is Correlated
Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as ‘null hypothesis testing’.
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Time Travel (2006)
Last time we talked about free will, superintelligent predictors, and Dr. Evil planning to destroy the earth from his moon base. Today I'd like to talk about a more down-to-earth topic: time travel. The first point I have to make is one that Carl Sagan made: we're all time travelers—at the rate of one second per…
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Eigenvectors from eigenvalues
Peter Denton, Stephen Parke, Xining Zhang, and I have just uploaded to the arXiv the short unpublished note “Eigenvectors from eigenvalues”. This note gives two proofs of a general eige…
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The SpaceX Starship is a big deal
Part of my series on common misconceptions in space journalism. Now available in audio form. SpaceX has been working on some variant of the Big Falcon Rocket for almost a decade, with a publicly an…
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Starlink is a big deal
Part of my series countering misconceptions in space journalism. Now available in audio form. Starlink, SpaceX’s plan to serve internet via tens of thousands of satellites, is a staple in the…
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Heat Pumps Work Miracles
[ An updated treatment of some of this material appears in Chapter 6 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook. ]
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Color Spaces
Interactive article explaining color spaces and how they're used to express color.
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Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely
[Related to: Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain, HPPD And The Specter Of Permanent Side Effects] I. Hallucinogen persisting perceptual disorder is a condition where people wh…
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Cancer Progress: Much More Than You Wanted To Know (2018)
Official statistics say we are winning the War on Cancer. Cancer incidence rates, mortality rates, and five-year-survival rates have generally been moving in the right direction over the past few d…
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I Survived the “Destroying Angel” (2006)
This memoir of a near-fatal mushroom poisoning was written by our most fortunate guest, Richard Eshelman. Happy Thanksgiving, all.
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Alpha Compositing
Interactive article explaining alpha compositing concepts.
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The cognitive costs of air pollution
Air pollution is a very big deal. Its adverse effects on numerous health outcomes and general mortality are widely documented . However, our understanding of its cognitive costs is more recent and those costs are almost certainly still significantly under-emphasized. For example, cognitive effects are not mentioned in…
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On whether changes in bedroom CO2 levels affect sleep quality
Self-experiment on whether changes in bedroom CO₂ levels affect sleep quality
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Amazon Braket – Get Started with Quantum Computing
Nearly a decade ago I wrote about the Quantum Compute Cloud on April Fool’s Day. The future has arrived and you now have the opportunity to write quantum algorithms and to run them on actual quantum computers. Here’s what we are announcing today: Amazon Braket – A fully managed service that allows scientists…
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Biomarker for chronic fatigue syndrome identified
Stanford scientists devised a blood-based test that accurately identified people with chronic fatigue syndrome, a new study reports.
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Domes are overrated
Part of my series on common misconceptions in space journalism. It is an unwritten rule of space journalism that any article about Moon or Mars bases needs to have a conceptual drawing of habitatio…
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