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BusyBeaver(6) Is Quite Large
For overdetermined reasons, I’ve lately found the world an increasingly terrifying and depressing place. It’s gotten harder and harder to concentrate on research, or even popular scienc…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,455 posts.
572
10 Years of Pomological Watercolors
A decade ago today I published a blog post calling for the US government to release its paintings of fruits. The Pomological Watercolor Collection, as I had recently come to know, is a beautiful and remarkable corpus of over 7,000 pictures of fruits and other biological specimens, made between the 1880s and 1940s…
573
The Effect of Noise on Sleep
Using Apple Watch noise and sleep stages to quantify the effect of noise on sleep
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Biomolecular shifts occur in our 40s and 60s (2024)
Time marches on predictably, but biological aging is anything but constant, according to a new Stanford Medicine study.
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AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome
Introducing a new, unifying DNA sequence model that advances regulatory variant-effect prediction and promises to shed new light on genome function — now available via API.
577
Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience
Transit time of 6,600 years; that long ago, around 4,600 BCE, the state of human civilization was devoid of technology. Hard to imagine what would happen back home on Earth during a journey of that length.
578
How renewables are saving Texans billions
A dive into ERCOT data reveals how solar energy is driving down electricity costs for Texas
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'Sticky thinking' hampers decisions in depression
New study finds rumination can cause those with depression to get ‘stuck’ on thoughts, limiting their ability to mentally juggle options available to them when making decisions.
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Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything
Batteries are now cheap enough to unleash solar energy’s full potential, getting as close as 97% of the way to delivering constant electricity supply 24 hours across 365 days cost-effectively in the sunniest places.
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Requiem for a Solar Plant
"...requiring reconductoring of 1.71 miles at a cost of $795,150...limiting output to 3MW..."
583
Oklo, the Earth's Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor (2018)
Physicist Francis Perrin sat at a nuclearfuel-processing plant down in the south of France, thinking to himself: “This cannot be possible.” It was 1972.
584
I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia using machine learning
The Fall of Civilizations podcast put out a 6¾-hour episode on the history of the Mongol Empire, which I eagerly listened to. After finishing the episode I wondered about contemporary Mongolian society, I wanted to learn what the lands that the Mongol Empire exploded from are like in our current day. There are many…
585
Honda conducts successful launch and landing of experimental reusable rocket
Honda Global | Honda R&D Co., Ltd., a research and development subsidiary of Honda Motor Co., Ltd., today conducted a launch and landing test of an experimental reusable rocket*1 (6.3 m in length, 85 cm in diameter, 900 kg dry weight/1,312 kg wet weight) developed independently by Honda. The test was completed…
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Real-time CO2 monitoring without batteries or external power
< (From left) Master's Student Gyurim Jang, Professor Kyeongha Kwon > KAIST (President Kwang ...
589
Childhood leukemia: how a deadly cancer became treatable
Before the 1970s, most children affected by leukemia would quickly die from it. Now, most children in rich countries are cured.
590
Endometriosis is an interesting disease
5k words, 23 minutes reading time
591
Worldwide power grid with glass insulated HVDC cables
Moving electricity around the world has huge financial and environmental benefits. Unfortunately, current power transmission systems are both lossy and expensive to build. This post explores an alternative design for cables to make undersea power transmission substantially cheaper.
592
First 2D, non-silicon computer developed
In a world first, a team led by researchers at Penn State used two-dimensional materials, which are only an atom thick and retain their properties at that scale, unlike silicon, to develop a computer capable of simple operations. The advancement, published in Nature, represents a major leap toward the realization of…
593
Solar Orbiter gets world-first views of the Sun's poles
Thanks to its newly tilted orbit around the Sun, the European Space Agency-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft is the first to image the Sun’s poles from outside the ecliptic plane. Solar Orbiter’s unique viewing angle will change our understanding of the Sun’s magnetic field, the solar cycle and the workings of space…
594
Research suggests Big Bang may have taken place inside a black hole
In this blog, Professor Enrique Gaztanaga from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation writes for The Conversation.
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Student discovers fungus predicted by Albert Hoffman
Making a discovery with the potential for innovative applications in pharmaceutical development, a West Virginia University microbiology student has found a long sought-after fungus that produces effects similar to the semisynthetic drug LSD, which is used to treat conditions like depression, post-traumatic stress…
596
The new Gödel Prize winner tastes great and is less filling
David Zuckerman The 2025 Gödel Prize has been awarded to Eshan Chattopadhyay and David Zuckerman for their paper Explicit two-source extrac...
597
Forests offset warming more than thought: study
Replanting forests can cool the planet even more than some scientists once believed, especially in the tropics. But even if every tree lost since the mid-19th century is replanted, the total effect won’t cancel out human-generated warming.
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Administering immunotherapy in the morning seems to matter. Why?
3k words, 14 minutes reading time
599
Gaussian integration is cool
Brief discussion on gaussian quadrature and chebyshev-gauss quadrature
600
Why are smokestacks so tall?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] “The big black stacks of the Illium Works of the Federal Apparatus Corporation spewed acid fumes and soot over the hundreds of men and women who were lined up before the red-brick employment office.” That’s the first line of one