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Mechanical Watch
Interactive article explaining how a mechanical watch works.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 50 posts.
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Safe to swim in nuclear spent fuel pool?
What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface?
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The control group is out of control (2014)
I. Allan Crossman calls parapsychology the control group for science. That is, in let’s say a drug testing experiment, you give some people the drug and they recover. That doesn’t tell …
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GPS
Interactive article explaining how GPS works.
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Galactic-Scale Energy (2011)
[ An updated treatment of this material appears in Chapter 1 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook , and also appears as part of an article in Nature Physics in 2022.]
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Seriously bright light vs. winter blahs
Most SAD light therapy lamps are not bright enough. How to get brighter light than any you can buy!
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Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier
The Wirecutter’s review of the IKEA air purifier is a mishmash of scientific errors, shoddy testing, and self-contradictory logic.
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I should have loved biology
In biology class, biology wasn't presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing.
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The Scaling Hypothesis (2021)
On GPT-3: meta-learning, scaling, implications, and deep theory. The scaling hypothesis: neural nets absorb data & compute, generalizing and becoming more Bayesian as problems get harder, manifesting new abilities even at trivial-by-global-standards-scale. The deep learning revolution has begun as foretold.
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Solar-powered system offers a route to inexpensive desalination
MIT researchers developed a desalination system that is more efficient and less expensive than previous methods. In addition to providing fresh water, the process could be used to treat contaminated wastewater or generate steam for sterilizing medical instruments, all without requiring a power source other than…
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A number of countries have decoupled economic growth from energy use, even if we take offshored production into account
Energy use is declining in some countries, despite economic growth.
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How much did the Apollo program cost?
The U.S spent $25.8 billion on Project Apollo ($309 billion when adjusted for inflation). This dataset provides annual expenditures and additional cost…
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Why I Am Not An Integrated Information Theorist (or, The Unconscious Expander)
Happy birthday to me! Recently, lots of people have been asking me what I think about IIT—no, not the Indian Institutes of Technology, but Integrated Information Theory, a widely-discussed &#…
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Futurist prediction methods and accuracy
I've been reading a lot of predictions from people who are looking to understand what problems humanity will face 10-50 years out (and sometimes longer) in order to work in areas that will be instrumental for the future and wondering how accurate these predictions of the future are. The timeframe of predictions that…
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Sound
Interactive article explaining how sound works.
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Ocean plastics: How much do rich countries contribute by shipping their waste?
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?
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Holography without Lasers: Hand-drawn Holograms (1999)
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…
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How does the land use of different electricity sources compare?
All energy production takes up land, but which sources use the most land, and which use it most efficiently?
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We're going to need a lot of solar panels
The team at Terraform Industries is now 11 people working towards a near term future where atmospheric CO2, much of it centuries of unpriced industrial waste, becomes the preferred default source o…
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MIT engineers fly first-ever plane with no moving parts (2018)
MIT engineers have flown the first silent, fuel-free “ion plane.” The light aircraft is the first plane to fly with no propellers, turbine blades, or other moving parts.
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Lab Leak 2.0?
“If a $1000 PhD side project could kill millions of people, we must end viral [gain-of-function research], or it may end us.”
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You're Not Losing Fat Because You're Eating Too Damn Much (2016)
The environmental and cognitive factors at play that have people eating more without realising.
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The rise and fall of peer review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
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The swimming of a dead fish (2018)
When I was a child, my father would take me trout fishing, and I spent hours marveling from the riverbank at the trouts’ ability to, seemingly effortlessly, h
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Covid and the Heart: It Spares No One – Johns Hopkins
New evidence suggests anyone infected with COVID is at higher risk for heart issues—a risk that persists even in relatively healthy people long after the illness has passed.
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Adversarial Collaboration
[EDITOR'S NOTE: In marking this year's 25th anniversary of Edge , we are presenting original lectures from eminent scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who are changing the way we think about science and our place in the world.]
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Ctcctcggcgggcacgtag is unique to both SARS-CoV-2 and Moderna's 2015/2016 patents
Using BLAST is easy. I'm going to show you how easy and how to prove that SARS-Cov-2 is man-made
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Noether's Theorem in a Nutshell (2020)
Noether's theorem is an amazing result which lets physicists get conserved quantities from symmetries of the laws of nature. Time translation symmetry gives conservation of energy; space translation symmetry gives conservation of momentum; rotation symmetry gives conservation of angular momentum, and so on.
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FAA approves unleaded fuel for piston fleet
The FAA delivered September 1 the long-sought approval of an unleaded fuel now cleared to power every spark-ignition engine on any airframe in the general aviation fleet.