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Your TV can see through walls
Walking between the receiver and TV station causes a slight disturbance to the signal, but it's nothing to write home about:
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 159 posts.
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AI is dramatically accelerating AI research
If acceleration compounds, the naive extrapolation implies superintelligence within a year
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Ozempic-style drugs now in trials for heart failure, addiction and even aging
Ozempic-style drugs are being tested far beyond diabetes, for heart failure, addiction, Alzheimer's and aging. The share of such trials has roughly tripled in fifteen years.
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Image of our satellite-choked night skies
To create this composite image, photographer Brendan Larsen captured almost 600 photographs over a two-hour period and then manually stitched them together. Thi
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Insects don't swarm at LED lights
Remember when you used to encounter swarms of insects around outdoor electric lights? Their well known attraction to outdoor lights is used by entomologists and moth lovers to conduct insect surveys. All you need is a light and a white sheet to see who’s flying at night.
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Mathematics has changed. Let's act like it
[This is a guest post by Frank Calegari. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Why we should not be sad The release by OpenAI on Octobe…
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Simple circuits can create complex behaviors
How simple circuits can create complex behaviors
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How is music possible
If you take a scene from a horror movie and add funny music, the killer suddenly looks hilarious. Isn’t it strange that that happens?
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Whatever Happened to Fire Escapes
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] The idea is simple: If there’s a fire in a tall building that blocks the main stairwell, people need an alternative way to evacuate, preferably one that is somewhat protected or at least far away from where the fire is happening
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Will it be a golden age or a dark age for mathematics (and science)?
[This is a guest post by Francesco Maggi. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Large language models (LLMs) and the research systems b…
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Making chicken transparent using Dorito dust
Modifying the optical properties of biological tissues with tartrazine
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The Economic Complexity of the Western Roman Empire
I am one of those people who think about the Roman Empire daily – possibly out of my worrying addiction to Crusader Kings III and similar games. I also spent some time working on estimating economic complexity , a neat measure that can be used to explain economic development trajectories. One fateful day, I was…
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A Visual Intro to Complex Numbers
A visual and intuitive intro to complex number system providing a historical overview of how it was developed and why it is useful.
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Illustration Beyond Proof
[This is a guest post by Kate Stange and Edmund Harriss. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] In January a group of mathematicians, hi…
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Pointing AI at archives found a forgotten meteorite, lost rhinos, and more
How I used AI to investigate millions of historical records and surfaced a forgotten meteorite report, three lost rhinos, and unrecorded volcano eruptions.
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The Mathocalypse
More Updates (Oct. 12): Jeffrey Ketchersid has used Claude Code agents to show that BusyBeaver(10) exceeds Graham’s number, beating the previous best result that BB(13) does so. In response t…
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What's Earth's dominant species by mass?
You might have heard that all the ants in the world weigh as much combined as all the humans. That isn’t true. We outweigh ants 5 to 1.1 Termites might have us beat, though.2 Either way, it’s not r…
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The Future of Mathematics
[This is a guest post by Jeremy Avigad. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] “Mathematics underwent, in the nineteenth century, …
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Using A.I. to decode communication of sperm whales
David Gruber wants to know what sperm whales are saying. He thinks it might actually be possible.
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Loss of cell identity drives human aging: Two new papers
That’s What Biological (Epigenetic) Aging Clocks Are Measuring
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Nicholas Polson has authored 258 academic papers in 2026 so far
Nicholas Polson has, by my count using his SSRN page, already written 258 working papers in 2026 alone. He’s already written (or at least published to SSRN), six papers today, August 26, 2026.
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Lunar Terminator Paradox
There's an optical illusion known by names like the "lunar terminator paradox". This has much discussion and descriptions online, but none made sense in my head, so I wrote this program to figure out what was going on. The paradox:
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What is the size of Yemen? (2024)
Uncovering a century-old misinformation
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Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?
the question everyone is asking
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The mystery animal on an ancient god's head
Several Egyptian gods are depicted with animal heads. Horus has a falcon head, Anubis has a jackal head, Thoth has an ibis head (except when he’s a baboon), and Set has…uhh, what is that, exactly? …
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How do traffic signals work? (2019)
If you live in a major city, I can take a pretty good guess at one of your most common frustrations: traffic. In city driving, the journey is rarely better than the destination. In most cases, we just want to get where we’re going. Traffic is not just frustrating, but it has consequences to the envi
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If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it
[This is a guest post by Grant Sanderson. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] A sentiment echoing throughout the mathematics communit…
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Science Is Open Software
TL;DR I claim that modern science is synonymous with open source software. This post explains why, why it matters, and what you can (and should) do next. Why do you care about (open source) software? - Everyone I spend a lot of my time working on software. I have been asked why software matters more times than I can…
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Saving Jet Fuel
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...