The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
The number of researchers and peer-review publications is growing exponentially. It has been estimated that the number of researchers in the world doubles every 16 years and the number of research outputs is increasing even faster. If you accept that published research papers are an accurate measure of our scientific…
All BNT162b2 vaccine data on this page is sourced from this World Health Organization document. This is a living page, shared already so people can get going! But check back frequently for updates. Translation: Français / 日本語 In short: the vaccine mRNA has been optimized by the manufacturer by changing bits of RNA…
What is life? This question keeps many people awake at night and has led to rafts of definitions, some involving features (procreation, metabolism and so forth), some involving chemistry, entropy or energy flux and some are of a more philosophical bent. A BBC article noted there are over 100 definitions of life and it…
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
Almost exactly twenty years ago I started writing a short article about the problems with string theory. I had been thinking about doing this for quite a while, and the timing of entering the twent…
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If you regularly read cognitive science or psychology blogs (or even just the lowly New York Times!), you’ve probably heard of something called the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger e…
I frequently read about proposals for new solar power developments where the resulting power is moved great distances to less sunny places, such as northern Europe from the Sahara, the US North Eas…
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Ian Harris explains that more than half of commonly performed surgical operations may be placebos. Adequate studies using a blinded control group are essential. Ian Harris, a Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, wrote a book titled Surgery, The Ultimate Placebo. I…
As the first crop of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are being rolled out, we can start to see the light at the end of this pandemic tunnel. Still, in the US alone there will probably be another 200,000 deaths before we reach herd immunity. Further, as fast as this vaccine development and deployment was, it's not clear
In 2013 I decided to quit my career in astrophysics, move back “home” and become a data scientist. The blog post I wrote about my decision was probably my best read publication as a professional astronomer and it was moving to read all the reactions from people who were struggling with similar decisions. I meant every…
You can make a DIY air purifier in 30s. To test if it works, I generated smoke, and measured how well it removes tiny particles.
A deep dive summary into on of the most interesting books I read this year.
Writings on artificial intelligence, personalization, recommendations, and the tech industry.
The past week was a momentous occasion for protein structure prediction, structural biology at large, and in due time, may prove to be so for the whole of life sciences. CASP14, the conference for …
Interactive article explaining how cameras and lenses work.
Update (12/5): The Google team, along with Gil Kalai, have raised questions about whether the results of the new BosonSampling experiment might be easier to spoof classically than the USTC team tho…
AlphaFold from Google DeepMind is said to solve the protein folding problem. What is that, and why is it hard?
Today, I want to address an issue with statements involving chance. To demonstrate, let’s first consider a statement that doesn’t involve chance:
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
Chang’e 5 is a Chinese lunar sample return mission. It was launched a few days ago on 2020-11-23 from Wenchang and is estimated to perform lunar orbit injection on Saturday. Since then, a number of Amateurs such as USA Satcom , Paul Marsh M0EYT , Scott Tilley VE7TIL , Fer IW1DTU and others have been receiving the…
(On this page in Dutch I post daily bits of realistic but hopeful Corona news. Here is a somehat rough translation of an article on our immune system I posted there, because I think it might also be useful for people that don’t speak Dutch). Wednesday, April 1st COVID-19 can only live thanks to us. Viruses cannot…
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
This post is inspired by the recent press release about the Rolls Royce Accel, an experimental electric aircraft being built to attempt the electric speed record. Close friends know I’ve been…
