391
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 409 posts.
392
Three reasons fungi are not plants
Fungi are more closely related to us than they are to plants. Yet, fungi have been grouped with plants historically, with an impact felt even today.
393
Mammalian Aggression
Introduction
394
The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998)
Combining standard stories of biologists, astronomers, physicists, and social scientists would lead us to expect a much smaller filter than we observe. Thus one of these stories must be wrong. To find out who is wrong, and to inform our choices, we should study and reconsider all these areas. For example, we should…
395
396
Why cancer cells waste so much energy
MIT biologists have found a possible explanation for the Warburg effect, first seen in cancer cells in the 1920s. They found cancer cells use fermentation, an inefficient metabolic pathway, because it helps them to generate large quantities of a molecule called NAD+, which they need to synthesize DNA and other…
397
The Newton hypothesis: Is science done by a small elite?
In previous posts I said that the extent to which "Fund people" works will depend on the distribution of scientific talent. Think about the following …
398
Energy Production and Consumption
Explore data on how energy production and use varies across the world.
399
Antioxidants Vitamin C and Vitamin E associated with lower risk of Parkinson’s
MINNEAPOLIS - People who consume high levels of vitamin C and E in their diet may have a lower risk of Parkinson’s disease than people who get only small amounts of these nutrients, according to a new study published in the January 6, 2021, online issue of Neurology ® , the medical journal of the American Academy of…
400
401
Chemistry of Cast-Iron Seasoning (2010)
The post after this one on “black rust” describes why you should heat the pan before applying oil for seasoning. This helps the seasoning to adhere and makes the pan pleasantly black.
402
403
Research team demonstrates world’s fastest optical neuromorphic processor
An international team of researchers has demonstrated the world’s fastest and most powerful optical neuromorphic processor for artificial intelligence, which is capable of processing ultra-large scale data.
404
Groundhog: Addressing the Threat That R Poses to Reproducible Research
R, the free and open source program for statistical computing, poses a substantial threat to the reproducibility of published research. This post explains the problem and introduces a solution. The…
405
Greenland Sharks
Greenland shark swimming under an ice flow in the Canadian arctic WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 4.0)
406
Mealworms can compost styrofoam
Within our living systems, we have been raising several types of mealworms in order to compost polystyrene (styrofoam). We recently came across the study by 2015 Standard University that confirms our suspicions that they are indeed turning styrofoam into usable organic matter! Their notes are not m
407
How Ray Kurzweil’s 1998 predictions about 2019 are faring
This is the fourth…and LAST…entry in my series of blog posts analyzing the accuracy of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions about what things would be like in 2019. These predictions come from hi…
408
Peer-reviewed papers are getting increasingly boring
The number of researchers and peer-review publications is growing exponentially. It has been estimated that the number of researchers in the world doubles every 16 years and the number of research outputs is increasing even faster. If you accept that published research papers are an accurate measure of our scientific…
409
Desalination Breakthrough Could Lead to Cheaper Water Filtration
AUSTIN, Texas — Producing clean water at a lower cost could be on the horizon after researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and Penn State