1021
Milky Way, 12 years, 1250 hours of exposures and 125 x 22 degrees of sky
This blog is all about astrophotography and it works mainly as an imaging diary. J-P Metsavainio is a Finnish astrophotographer,
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
1022
Reprojecting the Perseverance landing footage onto satellite imagery
The landing of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover last month amazed the world. The stunning footage of the descent shows each stage of the sequence. If you have not seen it already you can watch it here .
1023
Why are most climate models in Fortran?
An examination of the software that powers modern Climate simulations.
1024
Humble tokamak physicist owns generations of cosmological wankers
It’s not often I get excited about papers from the physics community. The field I used to love has turned into a dreary ghetto of noodle-theory wankers, experimental particle physics bureaucr…
1025
Irish teen invents magnetic liquid trap to remove microplastics in water (2019)
Read about the Irish teenager who won the Google Science award for the magnetic liquid trap that could clean an ocean of microplastics.
1026
The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science
Much of climate research is focused on implausible scenarios of the future, but implementing a course correction will be difficult
1027
Why does an A note sound different across instruments?
If you pull up a tuner app on your phone and play an A note on a piano, the tuner will say ~440 hz. Do the same thing on a violin's A note and you'll also get 440 hz.
1028
In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)
examines claims that the big five personality traits is more scientifically valid than the myers briggs personality indicator
1029
The Cuboid: A DIY air purifier that's better than a box fan
Designs for a quieter, more energy efficient purifier, and data proving it really works.
1030
Complexity No Bar to AI
Critics of AI risk suggest diminishing returns to computing (formalized asymptotically) means AI will be weak; this argument relies on a large number of questionable premises and ignoring additional resources, constant factors, and nonlinear returns to small intelligence advantages, and is highly unlikely.
1031
How to Destroy the Earth (2006)
Preamble Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe. You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing...
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Kill the Alarm Clock (2017)
Few upwardly mobile people in the modern rat-race society can live without an alarm clock. With a shot of strong coffee and round-the-clock stress, most people learn to live and survive with an alarm clock. Half of the population wakes up with an alarm, 9% are woken by a partner, 4% by pets, 3% by children, etc. That…
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Turtle visual cortex is non-retinotopic
Most of the visual cortex studies I’ve read have been about mammalian vision. But mammals are not the only organisms with cortex, or at least tissue resembling cortex. This paper explores turtle visual cortex, in an area known as dCx. This dorsal region plays the role of the turtle primary vision center — as close as…
1037
RNA Memory Hypothesis
There’s an old theory that memory is actually encoded in part in RNA. The argument is pretty simple: there’s no obvious way for all that sensory data to be captured in synapses as long …
1038
What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars?
Starlink is a point of departure to consider the costs of the unrelenting drive toward artificial illumination, a technological development most of us now take for granted.
1039
Ontology of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics
Is mental illness a thing? What kind of thing is it?
1040
Greens: why we eat the leaves that we do (2013)
Jeanne reveals which branches of the evolutionary tree of plants bear edible leaves and speculates about why that is. Most of the 300,000 + plant species have leaves, and the function of all of the…
1041
Exploring the Supply Chain of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 Vaccines
Sections of this post were co-authored by Cornelia Scheitz. Noah Leidinger created a German translation. Piotr Kwapin created a Polish translation. Last updated on February 7, 2021. Bert Hubert’s excellent and widely shared article about Reverse Engineering the source code of the Pfizer-BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine is…
1042
Mammalian Aggression
Introduction
1043
The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998)
Combining standard stories of biologists, astronomers, physicists, and social scientists would lead us to expect a much smaller filter than we observe. Thus one of these stories must be wrong. To find out who is wrong, and to inform our choices, we should study and reconsider all these areas. For example, we should…
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The Newton hypothesis: Is science done by a small elite?
In previous posts I said that the extent to which "Fund people" works will depend on the distribution of scientific talent. Think about the following …
1046
Chemistry of Cast-Iron Seasoning (2010)
The post after this one on “black rust” describes why you should heat the pan before applying oil for seasoning. This helps the seasoning to adhere and makes the pan pleasantly black.
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Groundhog: Addressing the Threat That R Poses to Reproducible Research
R, the free and open source program for statistical computing, poses a substantial threat to the reproducibility of published research. This post explains the problem and introduces a solution. The…
1049
Greenland Sharks
Greenland shark swimming under an ice flow in the Canadian arctic WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 4.0)
1050
How Ray Kurzweil’s 1998 predictions about 2019 are faring
This is the fourth…and LAST…entry in my series of blog posts analyzing the accuracy of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions about what things would be like in 2019. These predictions come from hi…