The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,457 posts.
We employ deep multi-agent reinforcement learning to model the emergence of cooperation. The new notion of sequential social dilemmas allows us to model how rational agents interact, and arrive at more or less cooperative behaviours depending on the nature of the environment and the agents’ cognitive capacity. The…
The molecule DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) is a psychoactive chemical that causes intense visions and can induce its users to quickly enter a completely different "environment" that some have likened to an alien or parallel universe. The transition from our world to theirs occurs with no cessation of consciousness or…
Technical nuclear forensics-themed discussion of the age, activity, and grade of plutonium found in a KI-1 Soviet smoke detector.
When discussing the validity of the Axiom of Choice, the most common argument for not taking it as gospel is the Banach-Tarski paradox. Yet, this never particularly bothered me. The argument …
I read a fantastic article in Nature magazine (vol 459, pp931-939 (18 June 2009)) that summarizes not only the current state of novel H1N1 (aka Swine Flu) understanding, but also a compares H1N1 against other flu strains. In particular, it discusses in-depth how the pathogenic components — i.e., the stuff that kills…
A Harvard Chan School study has found that drinking-water samples near industrial sites, military fire-training areas, and wastewater-treatment plants have the highest levels of fluorinated compounds, which have been linked with cancer, hormone disruption, high cholesterol, and obesity.
Lecture 1: Tutorial on Deep Learning I Lecture 2: Tutorial on Deep Learning II Lecture 3: Tutorial on Deep Learning III Lecture 4: Tutorial on Deep Learning IV
In hopes of creating better access to medical care, Stanford researchers have trained an algorithm to diagnose skin cancer.
Very few think the world is making progress. In this article, we look at the history of global living conditions and show that the world has made immense progress in important aspects.
How common are armed conflict and peace between and within countries? How is this changing over time? Explore research and data on war and peace.
2016 so far wins my lifetime award for most depressing and disturbing year ever (on the front of the larger world one reads about in the newspaper and elsewhere, personally things are fine, thanks)…
Read the latest news stories from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Discover breakthroughs, events, and campus updates.
Explore the science behind the headlines with our leading experts.
I was staring at a bonfire on a beach the other day and realized that I didn’t understand anything about fire and how it works. (For example: what determines its color?) So I looked up some s…
This package provides an essential feature to LaTeX that has been missing for too long. It adds a coffee stain to your documents. A lot of time can be saved by printing stains directly on the page rather than adding it manually.
How close are we to building the hosts?
For those who just want the survey itself, not the backstory, it’s here. (Note: Partly because of the feedback I’ve gotten on this blog, it’s now expanded to 121 pages!) Upda…
… and post a write-up on this blog. That sounds crazy of course – who has the time to read a paper every weekday? Let alone write it up! I’ve done it for each of the last two calendar y…
Rubin confirmed the existence of dark matter—the invisible material that makes up more than 90% of the mass of the universe.
Hackernews linked to a Medium post on ultrasound devices today, entitled " Why are Ultrasound Machines So Expensive? " which, being my cor...
Nuclear power is cost competitive with other forms of electricity generation, except where there is direct access to low-cost fossil fuels. In assessing the economics of nuclear power, decommissioning and waste disposal costs are fully taken into account.
