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Johns Hopkins engineering students build custom walker for tiny toddler
A group of Hopkins students have a special gift just in time for Christmas for a 2-year-old with a rare genetic disorder
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,457 posts.
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The ABC conjecture has still not been proved
Five years ago, Cathy O’Neil laid out a perfectly cogent case for why the (at that point recent) claims by Shinichi Mochizuki should not (yet) be regarded as constituting a proof of the ABC conjecture. I have nothing further to add on the sociological aspects of mathematics discussed in that post, but I just wanted to…
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What are the complex numbers, really?
Where did complex numbers come from? You might think that people invented \(i\) just so that they had a solution to the quadratic equat...
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The United States of Toxins
Ranking the cities and states and release the most toxins into the environment.
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Electromagnetic Water Cloak Eliminates Drag and Wake
After a major metamaterials breakthrough, David Smith learned how to turn promising research into real-world applications.
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New silicon structure opens the gate to quantum computers
In a major step toward making a quantum computer using everyday materials, a team led by researchers at Princeton has constructed a key piece of silicon hardware capable of controlling quantum behavior between two electrons with extremely high precision.
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An Interactive Introduction to Quantum Computing
This article was originally written in 2014, but has had some minor improvements in December 2017 and January 2018 when I received some useful feedback after the article had unexpectedly been posted on Hacker News in December 2017.
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Spiders eat astronomical numbers of insects
With a portfolio of over 2,700 journals and 220,000 books, Springer is a global leader in academic and scientific publishing.
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Vitamin D toxicity: What if you get too much?
Understand the risks of taking high doses of this vitamin in supplement form.
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3-D printed plastic objects that can communicate with WiFi devices
UW engineers have developed the first 3-D printed plastic objects that can connect to other devices via WiFi without using any electronics, including a laundry
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Andrew Wiles on the struggle and beauty of mathematics
Roger Highfield explores the beauty of mathematics at a recent event at the Science Museum
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A faster way to make Bose-Einstein condensates
MIT physicists have developed a faster way to make Bose-Einstein condensates, to speed up investigations into magnetism and superconductivity.
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Origami-inspired soft artificial muscles
By Lindsay Brownell (CAMBRIDGE, Mass.) — Soft robotics has made leaps and bounds over the last decade as researchers around the world have experimented with different materials and designs to allow once rigid, jerky machines to bend and flex in ways that mimic and can interact more naturally with living organisms…
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The impossibility of intelligence explosion
In 1965, I. J. Good described for the first time the notion of “intelligence explosion”, as it relates to artificial intelligence (AI):
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Photovoltaic growth: reality versus projections of the IEA
This is a guest blog by Auke Hoekstra, senior adviser electric mobility at the Eindhoven University of Technology and developer of agent-based models for electric vehicles and renewable energy adop…
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The Shortest Papers Ever Published (2016)
A few of the most concise papers ever published.
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The Coin Flip: A Fundamentally Unfair Proposition? (2009)
Douglas G. Steigerwald joined the faculty of the Department of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara after completing an M.A. in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research and teaching focus on frontier econometric methods at the intersection of…
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LIGO and Virgo announce the detection of a black hole binary merger
Scientists searching for gravitational waves have confirmed yet another detection from their fruitful observing run earlier this year. Dubbed GW170608, the latest discovery was produced by the merger of two relatively light black holes, 7 and 12 times the mass of the sun, at a distance of about a thousand million…
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Closest Temperate World Orbiting Quiet Star Discovered
A temperate Earth-sized planet has been discovered only 11 light-years from the Solar System by a team using ESO’s unique planet-hunting HARPS instrument. The new world has the designation Ross 128 b and is now the second-closest temperate planet to be detected after Proxima b. It is also the closest planet to be…
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Can a Human See a Single Photon? (1996)
The human eye is very sensitive; but can we see a single photon? The answer is yes: sensors in the retina can respond to a single photon. But neural filters only allow a signal to pass to the brain to trigger a conscious response when at least about five to nine arrive within less than 100 ms. If we could consciously…
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IBM Q system in development with working 50 qubit processor
Learn about IBM's performance and progress to become a more innovative and focused company.
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