The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 356 posts.
The fact that oats have a beneficial effect on the metabolism is nothing new. German medic Carl von Noorden treated patients with diabetes with the cereal at the beginning of the 20th century – with remarkable success. “Today, effective medications are available to treat patients with diabetes,” explains…
An accessible deep dive into the science (⏱️ 30 min read)
The first images from the Meteosat Third Generation-Sounder satellite have been shared at the European Space Conference in Brussels, showing how the mission will provide data on temperature and humidity, for more accurate weather forecasting over Europe and northern Africa.
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…
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 :
On March 14, 2025, Albedo's first satellite, Clarity-1, launched on SpaceX Transporter-13. We took a big swing with our pathfinder. The mission goals:
Blue Origin today announced TeraWave, a satellite communications network designed to deliver symmetrical data speeds of up to 6 Tbps anywhere on Earth.
The western flank of the Hoover Dam holds a celestial map that marks the time of the dam’s creation based on the 25,772-year axial precession of the earth.
[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
Compare live air quality rankings for major cities worldwide. See real-time AQI levels and pollution conditions by location.
Labs at Stanford and MIT built Claude-powered systems that run genome-wide studies in minutes and automate gene cluster interpretation.
UC Berkeley’s SETI@home, one of the most popular crowd-sourced research projects ever, turned up some 12 billion signals of interest. A lengthy analysis found 100 worth another look.
Summary : Inspired by the definition of temperature in statistical mechanics and the possibility for it to be below zero, we try sampling LLaMA at T = − 0.001 T=-0.001 T = − 0.001 . The results are maximally weird.
Our landmark agreements with Vistra, TerraPower, and Oklo will expand the operation of three nuclear power plants, boost the development of nuclear technology, and foster job growth in American communities.
New : You can now watch a recording of my talk on my YouTube channel ! Or you can just click "play" below, I suppose.
Ushikuvirus, an amoeba-infecting giant virus, joins the family of giant viruses that may have driven the evolution of co...
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.
3 innovators reimagining how we fly
[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
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…
As of January 1, 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library are now open access. This change reflects the long-standing and growing call across the global computing community for research to be more accessible, discoverable, and reusable.
