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Things you can do with diodes
Paying homage to the component we usually don't think about.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,455 posts.
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Ioannis Yannas, who invented artificial skin for treatment of burns, has died
Professor Ioannis V. Yannas, a physical chemist and engineer known for the invention of artificial skin for the treatment of severe burns and an MIT faculty member for nearly 60 years, died at age 90.
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Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category
arXiv’s computer science (CS) category has updated its moderation practice with respect to review (or survey) articles and position papers. Before being…
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Attention lapses due to sleep deprivation due to flushing fluid from brain
An MIT study reveals what happens in the brain as lapses of attention occur following sleep deprivation. During these lapses, a wave of cerebrospinal fluid flows out of the brain — a process that typically occurs during sleep and helps to wash away waste products that have built up during the day.
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How the cochlea computes (2024)
Sensory coding 2: electric boogaloo
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Signs of introspection in large language models
Research on the ability of large language models to introspect on their own internal states.
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A century of reforestation helped keep the eastern US cool (2024)
Throughout the 20th century, as most of the world warmed, the eastern US remained mysteriously cool. Now, scientists think they have an explanation: trees.
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Why do some radio towers blink?
One day on my drive home, I saw three towers. One of them had a bunch of blinking white lights, another one had red lights that kind of faded in and out, and the third one, well, it wasn't doing anything. I'm lucky to have a radio engineer for a dad, so Dad: why do some towers blink?
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Mapping the off-target effects of every FDA-approved drug in existence
6.2k words, 29 minutes reading time
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Cancer survival rates are misleading
UPDATE: I submitted a more formal version of this article to the UMAP Journal (Undergraduate Mathematics and Its Applications), which publishes articles that use mathematical modeling for real-world problems, often with a pedagogical or expository angle. A preprint is available on arXiv at…
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Why does Swiss cheese have holes?
Swiss cheese gets holes from carbon dioxide bubbles during the cheese-making process. Learn more about what causes the holes in Swiss cheese at U.S. Dairy.
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Alzheimer's disrupts circadian rhythms of plaque-clearing brain cells
A mouse study at WashU Medicine shows how Alzheimer’s disease reprograms genes in specialized cells involved in amyloid plaque removal.
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How the brain's activity, energy use and blood flow change as people fall asleep
Read the latest articles, insights, and press releases from Mass General Brigham.
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Interstellar Mission to a Black Hole
If DM could form a BH at the center of a planet, wouldn’t that then collapse the planet into that BH, consuming it? Wouldn’t the same apply to stars, extinguishing them?
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New updates and more access to Google Earth AI
Earth AI is helping enterprises and cities with everything from environmental monitoring to disaster response.
438
Unexpected patterns in historical astronomical observations
Researchers at Nordita at Stockholm University have analyzed flashes of light on astronomical plates from the early 1950s and found statistical connections between the times of these flashes, nuclear weapons tests and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). The results are presented in two studies published…
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Eye prosthesis is the first to restore sight lost to macular degeneration
In a Stanford Medicine-led clinical trial of a wireless retinal prosthesis, people with advanced macular degeneration regained enough vision to read books and subway signs.
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Willow quantum chip demonstrates verifiable quantum advantage on hardware
Our latest quantum breakthrough, Quantum Echoes, offers a path toward unprecedented scientific discoveries and analysis.
441
The Hidden Engineering of Niagara Falls
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] Niagara Falls is one of the most spectacular waterfalls in the world. With a vertical drop of more than 50 meters or 164 feet and a flow rate that often exceeds 2800 cubic meters per second or 100,000 cubic feet per second, it’s
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Abandoned land drives dangerous heat in Houston, study finds
Research highlights how a lack of vegetation and shade exposes vulnerable residents to heightened health risks.
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How to sequence your DNA for <$2k
a cheap and bloody experiment
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Live Stream from the Namib Desert
https://www.looduskalender.ee/n/en - check these as well (not so exotic, but still a lot of fun)
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Lace: A New Kind of Cellular Automata Where Links Matter
This article is about a new kind of simple computational rule ("LACE rules" running on LACE, the Link Automata Computing Engine platform) which, when applied locally on a grid of cells, demonstrates fascinating emergent "artificial life" behavior.
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Electricity can heal wounds three times as fast (2023)
Chronic wounds are a major health problem for diabetic patients and the elderly – in extreme cases they can even lead to amputation. Using electric stimulation, researchers in a project at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and the University of Freiburg, Germany, have developed a method that speeds up the…
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A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway
We’re launching a new 27 billion parameter foundation model for single-cell analysis built on the Gemma family of open models.
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What Americans die from vs. what the news reports on
What do Americans die from, and what do the New York Times, Washington Post, and Fox News report on?
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Astronomers 'image' a mysterious dark object in the distant Universe
Scientists detect the lowest mass dark object currently measured
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No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off
Tons of words have been written about the Trump Administrations war on Science in Universities. But few people have asked what, exactly, is science? How does it work? Who are the scientists? What d…