151
Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants
An accessible deep dive into the science (⏱️ 30 min read)
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
152
The mountain that weighed the Earth
Suppose you want to find out how much you weigh. It’s easy enough – get a scale, stand on it, and read the number. Now suppose you want to know how much the Earth weighs. You get out a scale and…hm…
153
A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times
In a post entitled, “How Institutional Failures Undermine Trust in Science: The Case of a Landmark Study on Sustainability and Stock Returns,” Andy King (my collaborator on the project on scheduled post-publication review ) tells a disturbing story of the failure of the scholarly publication process :
154
The hidden engineering of runways
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] September 2025 was an unusually bad month for runway overruns in the US. On the night of September 24th, an Embraer 145 with 53 people on board landed long at the Roanoke-Blacksburg Regional Airport in Virginia, overshooting the
155
The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
New : You can now watch a recording of my talk on my YouTube channel ! Or you can just click "play" below, I suppose.
156
Oral microbiome sequencing after taking probiotics
Recently, a friend recommended BioGaia Prodentis to me. It is a DTC oral probiotic you can buy online that is supposedly good for oral health. I thought it would be interesting to do some sequencing to see what, if anything, it did to my oral microbiome.
157
Dude, where's my supersonic jet?
3 innovators reimagining how we fly
158
When Kitty Litter Caused a Nuclear Catastrophe
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] Late in the night of Valentine’s Day 2014, air monitors at an underground nuclear waste repository outside Carlsbad, New Mexico, detected the release of radioactive elements, including americium and plutonium, into the environme
159
The likely cheapest home-made Michelson interferometer
Lately, I’ve been really into 3D printing along with asking myself what we can do with this technology now that it’s become, well, a technology. (At least, in the “this is a thing that can now be used, is robust, and is generally accessible to many people” sense of technology.) The first thing to print on a 3D printer…
160
What an unprocessed photo looks like
The image isn't even black-and-white , it's gray-and-gray: While the sensor's ADC can theoretically output values from 0 to 16382, the data doesn't cover that whole range.
161
NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cut
If you were 5 microseconds late today, blame it on NIST. Their facility in Boulder Colorado just had its power cut for multiple days. After a backup generator failed, their main ensemble clock lost track of UTC, or Universal Time Coordinated. But even if you used the NTP timing servers they run, they were never off by…
162
More on whether useful quantum computing is “imminent”
These days, the most common question I get goes something like this: A decade ago, you told people that scalable quantum computing wasn’t imminent. Now, though, you claim it plausibly is immi…
163
Erdős Problem #1026
Problem 1026 on the Erdős problem web site recently got solved through an interesting combination of existing literature, online collaboration, and AI tools. The purpose of this blog post is to try…
164
Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
Before we get nerd sniped by the shiny engineering details, ask the only question that matters. Why compute in orbit? Why should a watt or a flop 250 miles up be more valuable than one on the surface? What advantage justifies moving something as mundane as matrix multiplication into LEO?
165
If a Meta AI model can read a brain-wide signal, why wouldn't the brain?
In 2023, Meta researchers were able to decode images in thoughts from the brain's magnetic fields. What if that's how the brain coordinates it's own global state?
166
The tiniest yet real telescope I've built
76/300 Pocket Dobson: a tiny yet real telescope that comes with you everywhere
167
$5 whale listening hydrophone making workshop
Whale songs were first noticed by accident, when analysts tracking Russian submarines at the height of the cold war heard cetacean interference instead. An engineer sent some recordings to Roger Payne, a biologist friend of his, who did something that proved pivotal: he played the hours-long recordings on his hi-fi at…
168
Beautiful Abelian Sandpiles
I can't remember where I first saw them, but ever since, I have been unable to forget them: abelian sandpiles. I'm far from the only one . They're remarkably simple, yet produce lovely symmetric patterns. I loved them so much that I adorned the title banner of this blog with an animation of an abelian sandpile. But…
169
Autism's confusing cousins
A differential diagnosis for the weird and the awkward
170
Tides are weirder than you think
Our world relies on the sea more than ever: 80% of goods traded worldwide move by ship. Today’s mariners take it for granted that they can get an accurate chart of the tides for any location on Ear…
171
Datacenters in space aren't going to work
There is a rush for AI companies to team up with space launch/satellite companies to build datacenters in space. TL;DR: It's not going to work.
172
173
The 101 of analog signal filtering (2024)
Some intuition about this topic can be developed without summoning the ghost of Pierre-Simon Laplace.
174
It's hard to build an oscillator
Especially if you want it to work.
175
The Boring Part of Bell Labs
How Bell Labs supported itself between moonshots
176
Aldous Huxley predicts Adderall and champions alternative therapies
If delivered today, the last of Huxley’s 7-part lecture series at MIT would probably be categorised under motivational talks or self-help strategies. It surv...
177
How Tube Amplifiers Work
How Tube Guitar Amplifiers Work
178
A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition
A mysterious new model currently in testing on Google’s AI Studio is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition but it is also showing signs of spontaneous, abstract, symbolic reasoning.
179
Metabolic and cellular differences between sedentary and active individuals
We're discussing a paper that demands attention...
180
Study finds memory decline surge in young people
A Large US Study Finds Memory Decline Surge in Young People