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Rosetta catches dusty organics
Follow ESA's mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,457 posts.
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Can computers read through a book page by page without opening it?
A. R. Sanchez, B. Heshmat*, A. Aghasi, M. Zhang, S. Naqvi, J. Romberg, R. Raskar
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Recreating Our Galaxy in a Supercomputer
A new simulation of our Milky Way galaxy has solved a decades-old mystery.
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Carbon nanotube transistors outperform silicon
For decades, scientists have tried to harness the unique properties of carbon nanotubes to create high-performance electronics that are faster or consume less power. Now, for the first time, University of Wisconsin–Madison materials engineers have created carbon nanotube transistors that outperform state-of-the-art…
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The neurology of self-awareness
What is the self? How does the activity of neurons give rise to the sense of being a conscious human being? Even this most ancient of philosophical problems, I believe, will yield to the methods of empirical science. It now seems increasingly likely that the self is not a holistic property of the entire brain; it…
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A Rocket to Nowhere (2005)
The Space Shuttle Discovery is up in orbit, safely docked to the International Space Station, and for the next five days, astronauts will be busy figuring out whether it's safe for them to come home. In the meantime, the rest of the Shuttle fleet is grounded (confined to base, not allowed to play with its spacecraft…
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Hunger and Undernourishment
What are the consequences of undernourishment and how can we make progress against hunger and undernourishment?
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Speech Is 3x Faster Than Typing for English and Mandarin on Mobile Devices
With the ubiquity of mobile devices like smartphones, two new widely used methods have emerged: miniature touch screen keyboards and speech-based dictation. It is currently unknown how these two modern methods compare. We therefore evaluated the text entry performance of both methods in English and in Mandarin Chinese…
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On Two Views of Computation in Computer Science
Abstract: Machine and language models of computation differ so greatly in the computational complexity properties of their representation that they form two distinct classes that cannot be directly…
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The first autonomous, entirely soft robot
Developed by a team of Harvard researchers, the first autonomous, entirely soft robot is powered by a chemical reaction controlled by microfluidics. The 3-D-printed “octobot” has no electronics.
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Why bad scientific code beats code following “best practices” (2014)
I've just read " The Low Quality of Scientific Code ", which claims that code written by scientists comes out worse than it would if "software engineers" were involved.
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An Interesting SETI Candidate in Hercules
Although the presence of ET planetary-based life as we know life and don’t know it, is all, comparatively as, and less and in gradations more technologically and cognitively achieved or advanced than our species, such life, in mathematical and thermochemical terms, is a must on a vast in raw numbers but quite possibly…
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Why cities keep growing, corporations and people die, and life gets faster
This is in complete contrast to companies. The Google boys in the back garage so to speak with ideas of the search engine, were no doubt promoting all kinds of crazy ideas and maybe having even crazy people around them.
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Planet Found in Habitable Zone Around Nearest Star
Astronomers using ESO telescopes and other facilities have found clear evidence of a planet orbiting the closest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri. The long-sought world, designated Proxima b, orbits its cool red parent star every 11 days and has a temperature suitable for liquid water to exist on its surface. This…
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Computers do better than pathologists in predicting lung cancer type, severity
Automating the analysis of slides of lung cancer tissue samples increases the accuracy of tumor classification and patient prognoses, according to a new study.
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Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
Some people on the internet are getting very excited at the (unconfirmed) reports of an "Earth-like" exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri , a mere 4.25 light-years away from Earth. If correct, the planet is orbiting in the liquid water zone around our nearest stellar neighbour and is of the same order of mass as the…
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Life Expectancy
People are living longer across the world, but large differences remain. Explore global data on life expectancy and how it has changed over time.
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Unsafe levels of toxic chemicals found in drinking water for 6M Americans
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health2016318 points147 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details
The latest public health news delivered right to your inbox.
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The LHC “nightmare scenario” has come true
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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What is the roundest country?
We can define roundness in many ways. For example, as you may know, the circle is the shape that given a fixed perimeter maximizes the area. This definition has many problems. One of the problems is that countries generally have chaotic perimeters (also known as borders), so they tend to be much longer than they seem…
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What makes music sound “good?”
When listening to music, however, we are not just listening to a series of disconnected instants. Instead, the way things sound depends on the notes we have heard. In other words, we integrate over time . One of the most important functions of a musical scale is to limit the overall pitch content of what we're hearing…
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My biology paper in Science
Think I’m pranking you, right? You can see the paper right here (“Synthetic recombinase-based state machines in living cells,” by Nathaniel Roquet, Ava P. Soleimany, Alyssa C. Fer…
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Space Emerging from Quantum Mechanics
The other day I was amused to find a quote from Einstein , in 1936, about how hard it would be to quantize gravity: “like an attempt to breathe in empty space.” Eight decades later, I think we can still agree that it’s hard.
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Fewer Allergies: A Possible Upside of Thumb Sucking and Nail Biting
It’s no surprise that children suck their thumbs or bite their nails. These behaviors are often discouraged, as they can go on to cause damaged teeth, infections, or even elicit teasing from othe...