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What methylene blue can (and can’t) do for the brain
Methylene blue is touted as yet another universal boost-all, fix-all drug, the ultimate biohacking tool. Find out why that's not exactly true.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,455 posts.
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Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first
A team of scientists and students from TU Delft has taken first place at the A2RL Drone Championship in Abu Dhabi - an international race that pushes the limits of physical artificial intelligence, challenging teams to fly fully autonomous drones using only a single camera. The TU Delft drone competed against 13…
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Just how bad are we at treating age-related diseases?
Whether you believe in preventing damage (the core aim of the aging field, though that's not the focus of this post) or treating damage as it arises, our current best efforts in both treatment and mechanism selection haven't yielded promising results. None of the approved drugs for age-related diseases reverse any…
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Deep learning gets the glory, deep fact checking gets ignored
AI, science, education, & ethics
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A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine
How the Darwin-Gödel Machine rewrites its own code to improve, and whether we can trust it
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New adaptive optics shows details of our star's atmosphere
Scientists from the U.S. NSF National Solar Observatory and New Jersey Institute of Technology produced the finest images in the Sun’s corona to date. Using a new 'coronal adaptive optics' system that removes blur caused by Earth's atmosphere, their ground-breaking results were recently published in Nature Astronomy…
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A Lean companion to Analysis I
Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a textbook in real analysis called “Analysis I”. It was intended to complement the many good available analysis textbooks out there by focusing more on foun…
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Nitrogen Triiodide (2016)
Nitrogen Triiodide
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The Blowtorch Theory: A new model for structure formation in the universe
How early, sustained, supermassive black hole jets carved out cosmic voids, shaped filaments, and generated magnetic fields
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Square Theory
The story starts in Crosscord, the crossword Discord server. Over 5,000 users strong, the server has emerged as a central hub for the online crossword community, a buzzing, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes delightful town square where total noobs, veteran constructors, and champion solvers alike come together to talk…
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The Art of Fugue – Contrapunctus I (2021)
JS Bach’s last set of works, collectively titled The Art of Fugue, was published shortly after his death. It was not a big hit. Dense counterpoint was deeply unfashionable at that time, as We…
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Dr John C. Clark, a scientist who disarmed atomic bombs twice
One scientist did it twice
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A new class of materials that can passively harvest water from air
Researchers from Penn Engineering have discovered nanostructured materials that can passively harvest water from the air without energy input, enabling water-harvesting systems for arid regions.
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What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond Ours
Stephen Wolfram explores how the number of neural connections affects capabilities like language and abstraction. How far we could go accounting for neural nets and LLMS, the fundamental nature of computation, neuroscience and the operation of brains.
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Modification of acetaminophen to reduce liver toxicity and enhance drug efficacy
2025 Science Talent Search Project Showcase: Chloe Yehwon Lee, 17, of Murphy, explored a way to lower the toxic effects of acetaminophen (Tylenol) on the liver for her Regeneron Science Talent Search chemistry project.
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Caesar's Last Breath
Caesar’s Last Breath — Charlie Sabino.
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That fractal that's been up on my wall for years
Warning: Math, Handwaving I spent a lot of time doodling in middle school instead of whatever middle schoolers are supposed to do. Somewhere between the Cool S’s and Penrose triangles I found a neat way to fill up graph paper by combining and copying squares.
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Planetfall
Gentle readers, I have just wrapped up a fun side project that will be of great interest to a very small number of you. The result of one of the most technically demanding efforts of my career, I a…
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The scientific “unit” we call the decibel
Celebrating a rare dumpster fire in the kingdom of science.
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Getting a paper accepted
Page 1 Accepts, the Rest Avoids Rejection
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ZEUS – A new two-petawatt laser facility at the University of Michigan
Hitting 2 petawatts, the NSF-funded ZEUS facility at U-M enables research that could improve medicine, national security, materials science and more.
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Satellites Spotting Depth
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected
I used AI in my plasma physics research and it didn’t go the way I expected.
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Dead Stars Don’t Radiate
Three guys claim that any heavy chunk of matter emits Hawking radiation, even if it’s not a black hole: • Michael F. Wondrak, Walter D. van Suijlekom and Heino Falcke, Gravitational pair…
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MIT asks arXiv to withdraw preprint of paper on AI and scientific discovery
Following the posting of the preprint paper “Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation” on arXiv in November 2024, concerns were raised about the integrity of the research. MIT conducted an internal, confidential review and concluded that the paper should be withdrawn from public discourse.
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“The Mind in the Wheel” lays out a new foundation for the science of mind
OR: the ideas your mother warned you about
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Fingers wrinkle the same way every time they’re in the water too long
A question from a child inspired a new biomedical engineering paper.
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It Awaits Your Experiments
You may have heard of Christian Bök. You may have read about him on this very blog if you’ve been hanging out here long enough. Perhaps you were even one of the very select few to witness the seminal talk I gave back in 2016 [1] —“ScArt: or, How to Tell When You’ve Finished Fucking”— which climaxed with a glowing…