The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 208 posts.
The human eye is very sensitive; but can we see a single photon? The answer is yes: sensors in the retina can respond to a single photon. But neural filters only allow a signal to pass to the brain to trigger a conscious response when at least about five to nine arrive within less than 100 ms. If we could consciously…
Learn about IBM's performance and progress to become a more innovative and focused company.
A Stanford study of nearly 24,000 patients with kidney cancer concluded that robot-assisted laparoscopic surgeries are associated with increases in operating times and cost compared with conventional laparoscopic surgeries.
The unit Energy and Materials Transition will focus primarily on the themes of a sustainable energy system and sustainable industry, including circularity.
Researchers have pinpointed the date of what could be the oldest solar eclipse yet recorded. The event, which occurred on 30 October 1207 BC, is mentioned in the Bible and could have consequences for the chronology of the ancient world.
Out there in the wider world—OK, OK, among Luboš Motl, and a few others who comment on this blog—there appears to be a widespread opinion that P≠NP is just “a fashionable dogma of…
Why neurons have thousands of synapses, a theory of sequence memory in neocortex Hawkins & Ahmad, Front. Neural Circuits 2016 It all began with a fascinating lunchtime conversation with Martin …
There’s growing scientific consensus that one of the most common types of sugar, fructose, is toxic to the liver, just like alcohol.
Hopkins researchers identify specific exercise that boosts memory, attention
The more I read about cryonics—i.e. freezing yourself after death—the more I realized it's something we should all be talking about.
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Feynman (just off centre) at Wangerooge in 1987 I started my career as a theoretical physicist, and in the late-80s I co-organised a specialist workshop on a small island, Wangerooge, off the coast…
Now you can visit many planets and moons in Google Maps right from your computer.
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
ESO’s fleet of telescopes in Chile have detected the first visible counterpart to a gravitational wave source. These historic observations suggest that this unique object is the result of the merger of two neutron stars. The cataclysmic aftermaths of this kind of merger — long-predicted events called kilonovae …
Media Advisory: Press Conference at ESO HQ Announcing Unprecedented Discovery
Auto-Tune — one of modern history’s most reviled inventions — was an act of mathematical genius.
After a major metamaterials breakthrough, David Smith learned how to turn promising research into real-world applications.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 was awarded jointly to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson "for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution"
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 was divided, one half awarded to Rainer Weiss, the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves"
Think about how you choose a route to work, where to move house, or even which move to make in a game like Go. All of these scenarios require you to estimate the likely future reward of your decision. This is tricky because the number of possible scenarios explodes as one peers farther and farther into the future…
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2017 was awarded jointly to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young "for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm"
Wikipedia graph dynamic pattern discovery. Dynamic graph analysis in GraphX. Collective memory research. Gephi graph visualization.
[Epistemic status: Total wild speculation] I. The predictive processing model offers compelling accounts of autism and schizophrenia. But Surfing Uncertainty and related sources I’ve read are…
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