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Are Placebos Really Sugar Pills?
Bioinformatics, genomics, and Javascript
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,457 posts.
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We don't know why lithium batteries work
If you are a scientist, you confront ignorance as soon as you open your eyes. For example -- I am typing this post on a laptop computer that is powered by a lithium battery. No one has the slightest idea how and why it works. Metallic lithium can intercalate between the graphene sheets in graphite…
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I sent a balloon up to capture 360x180 degree imagery/video from 100K feet
It turns out that launching, losing, finding, and recovering a balloon is way easier than getting the imagery ready. Let's find out why! (If you see an image in this post, click it. If you regret i...
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Thorium Reactors
My last article about thorium as an alternative nuclear reactor fuel drew way more readers than I expected. I intentionally glossed over the complexities of specific reactor designs for the sake of simplicity, but in this article I want to go deeper. This article explains some of the differences between traditional…
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Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.
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Negative temperatures are not colder than absolute zero
There’s been a lot of buzz lately in the science blogosphere about a recent experiment where physicists created a gas of quantum particles with a negative temperature – negative as in, …
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English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited
Here's what we can do with today's computing power (using publicly available data and the processing power of my own personal computer; I'm not relying on access to corporate computing power):
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The physics of that ‘kickalicious’ kick
Last Friday, the New York Times ran a cover page story about Håvard Rugland, a Norwegian man who scored an NFL tryout for the Jets, based on a youtube video called Kickalicious that has picked up n…
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How we gave colors names
“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter in…
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What does randomness look like?
On 13 June 1944, a week after the allied invasion of Normandy, a loud buzzing sound rattled through the skies of battle-worn London. The source of the sound was a newly developed German instrument …
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23andMe raises $50M, cuts price to $99, sets goal of 1M genotyped customers
A statement upon 23andMe reaching its first one million customers.
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Nobel Prize winning biochemist says all biofuels are nonsense
Similar posts from ClimateSanity Taking Measure of Biofuel Limits 9/24/2009 Biofuels Leading to Disasters 12/28/2011 Hartmut Michel won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on photosynthesis. …
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Elon Musk and the Hyperloop
For a while now there have been tantalizing hints that Elon Musk is at it again. His usual way of approaching a problem is to look at an industry, find some fatal flaw in it, fix that flaw and then leave everybody else in the dust, wondering why they didn’t do what he did. He’s one of the most interesting people on…
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The Year 2512
Usually when I speculate about the future, I stick to two areas; either the really near future (within the next couple of decades), or the really far future (so far out that signs of continental drift should be glaringly obvious). But what about the medium term?
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9 Gigapixel Image of the Milky Way
VISTA gigapixel mosaic of the central parts of the Milky Way
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Restoration of defocused and blurred images
Restoration of distorted images is one of the most interesting and important problems of image processing - from the theoretical, as well as from the practical point of view. There are especial cases: blurring due to incorrect focus and blurring due to movement - and these very defects, which each of you knows very…
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A new kind of fractal?
Experimenting with the "divisibility" of complex numbers, I stumbled across this thingy. It looks like a fractal. Although the formula does not do any iterations. It reminds me of something. But I dont know what. Doing a Google image search brings up a couple of galaxies :) This image shows the region from (-1/-1) to…
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What number is halfway between 1 and 9?
A new information-theoretical model of human sensory perception and memory sheds light on some peculiarities of the nervous system.
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Yale scientists explain how ketamine vanquishes depression within hours
Ketamine may regenerate synaptic connections between brain cells damaged by stress and depression, according to new Yale-led research.
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All Rational Approximations of Pi Are Useless
Investigation to find a better rational approximation for pi. Can we get out more digits than we put in? Chance to win a prize if you can do bette