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I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert
A Two Part Post on the Immense Promise and Ecological Tragedy of Natural Herbertsmithite Crystals
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
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Solar-based sleep patterns compared to modern norms
ex program, en farm
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Naturally Occurring Quasicrystals
I love quasicrystals—like crystals, but with patterns that never repeat, like Penrose tiles. But they’ve very rare in nature. They’re created only by the most exotic and violent e…
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Heritability of human life span is ~50% when heritability is redefined
ratios will be ratios
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Extremely Low Frequencies
The submarine is a surprisingly ancient technology—at least in its early, primitive forms. The idea is quite simple, that a well-enough-sealed boat ought to be able to submerge and resurface. It's the practicalities that make the whole thing difficult. It is generally considered that the US Civil War was the first use…
96
An idiot’s guide to lead optimisation for proteins
Lead optimisation is the step in drug design where you take a molecule that sort of works and try to make it actually work, and it’s arguably the step where most real-world design campaigns succeed or die. Due to the influence of a couple of my pals , I have recently become interested in using machine learning to do…
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Bitter Lessons from the ISSpresso
Why launch costs aren't the reason it costs a fortune to do things in space
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I'm scared about biological computing
I’ve been in the AI space since ChatGPT first dropped. I’ve toyed around with a lot of Language Models, built random side projects, built a couple from scratch and I’ve spent hours looking at the math behind it all.
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How an oil refinery works
Though wind and solar continue to carve out larger and larger shares of world energy supply, the modern world still runs on petroleum, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
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Why Not Venus?
The planet next door may be rough, but it has a lot of atmosphere
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3.4M Solar Panels
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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How does GPS work?
An interactive exploration of how GPS works: from the speed of light and trilateration to the cheap clock problem and Einstein's relativity corrections.
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How does Shazam work?
Explore how Shazam and song identification work through interactive visualizations: spectrograms, constellation maps, hash fingerprints, and time-offset matching.
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MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science
When a political movement believes that ignorance is strength
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Scientific datasets are riddled with copy-paste errors
Initial results from scanning through Excel files belonging to 600 published scientific papers.
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Notes from the SF peptide scene
Pulling together disparate thoughts from two weeks wandering around SF
108
God sleeps in the minerals
I took this snapshot, and the rest of them, at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County’s Unearthed: Raw Beauty exhibition yesterday. Enjoy.
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Let's talk space toilets
You should have gone before you left Earth
110
The paper computer
Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes: I could write down a date that would…
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The Physics of GPS
An interactive exploration of how GPS works: from the speed of light and trilateration to the cheap clock problem and Einstein's relativity corrections.
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Helium is hard to replace
The war in Iran, and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has unfortunately made us all familiar with details of the petroleum supply chain that we could formerly happily ignore.
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Bitcoin and quantum computing
Neha Narula
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A cryptography engineer's perspective on quantum computing timelines
The risk that cryptographically-relevant quantum computers materialize within the next few years is now high enough to be dispositive, unfortunately.
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Some Unusual Trees
One of my favorite pastimes is exploring old bookstores.
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Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools
For those of you who haven’t seen, there were actually two “bombshell” QC announcements this week. One, from Caltech, including friend-of-the-blog John Preskill, showed how to do quantum faul…
117
Artemis II is not safe to fly
On Wednesday, NASA will attempt to send four astronauts around the moon on a mission called Artemis II. This will be second flight of NASA’s SLS rocket, and the first time the 20-year-old Orion capsule flies with people on board.
118
Bird brains (2023)
A kea parrot in New Zealand learned to drag traffic cones onto a highway so cars would stop and humans would feed it. That sent me down a rabbit hole on how we actually measure bird intelligence.
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A Primer on Long-Duration Life Support
Life support is the hardest technical obstacle to the human exploration of Mars.
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China is mass-producing hypersonic missiles for $99,000
The Radical Asymmetry of Modern Warfare (P2)