The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 248 posts.
Observations made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope have for the first time revealed the effects predicted by Einstein’s general relativity on the motion of a star passing through the extreme gravitational field near the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way. This long-sought result represents the…
The world has become increasingly alarmed at the amount of plastic in its oceans. But where does all this plastic waste come from?
Quantum computers might sound a bit exotic and far into the future, but in reality, they are now accessible in the cloud or through emulators for everyone to write quantum code. In this tutorial, we’ll go through how you can program a simple quantum computer to generate random numbers.
Introduction I read a lot of deep learning papers, typically a few/week. I've read probably several thousands of papers. My general problem with papers in machine learning or deep learning is that often they sit
How much time do people across the world spend working? How have working hours changed over time, and what do these changes matter for people’s lives? Explore data and research on working hours.
I’m late to posting this, but it’s important enough to be worth sharing anyway: Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord on Dissolving the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox asks: given the immense num…
ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has achieved first light with a new adaptive optics mode called laser tomography — and has captured remarkably sharp test images of the planet Neptune, star clusters and other objects. The pioneering MUSE instrument in Narrow-Field Mode, working with the GALACSI adaptive optics module…
Posted by Viren Jain, Research Scientist and Technical Lead and Michal Januszewski, Software Engineer, Connectomics at Google The field of connecto...
Let’s talk about a small question as a way of introducing a big question. How thick is the atmosphere? How far does Earth’s atmosphere extend into space? In other words, how high can y…
(1) The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
Neural network-based models continue to achieve impressive results on longstanding machine learning problems, but establishing their capacity to reason about abstract concepts has proven difficult. Building on previous efforts to solve this important feature of general-purpose learning systems, our latest paper sets…
This post is adapted from this research paper that you can read/cite for more info. It analyzes and visualizes 100 cities around the world.
This post is adapted from this research paper that you can read/cite for more info. It analyzes and visualizes 100 cities around the world.
John D. Cook, Greg Egan, Dan Piponi and I had a fun mathematical adventure on Twitter. It started when John Cook wrote a program to compute the probability distribution of distances $latex |xy R…
In science fiction, it is pretty standard fare to introduce some form of faster-than-light communication or travel. After all, space is big, and you can't write your swashbuckling Hornblower-in-space novel if you have to wait for a generation ship to crawl painfully slowly between the nearest stars,
We investigate and campaign against environmental crime and abuse
MIT cognitive scientists have found that engaging children in conversation is more critical to their language development than the number of words they hear early in life. In a study of children 4 to 6, they found differences in the number of “conversational turns” accounted for much of the differences in language…
Why Spaniards have dinner so late? A map of the difference between solar time and clock time around the world.
Sabine Hossenfelder’s new book Lost in Math should be starting to appear in bookstores around now. It’s very good and you should get a copy. I hope that the book will receive a lot of a…
It’s a fascinating concept but I’d like to see a comparison toDr. Young Bae’s laser thruster concept for solar system travel.
Researchers from Loughborough University, Western General Hospital, the University of Edinburgh, and the Edinburgh Cancer Centre in the United Kingdom, recently developed a deep learning-based method…
A completely new approach suggests the validity of the 110-year-old Lindelöf hypothesis, opening up the possibilities of new discoveries in quantum computing, number theory and cybersecurity
In the past experimentation round Wendelstein 7-X achieved higher temperatures and densities of the plasma, longer pulses and the stellarator world record for the fusion product. Moreover, first confirmation for the optimisation concept on which Wendelstein 7-X is based, was obtained. Wendelstein 7-X at Max Planck…
Neuroscientists at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT have discovered that when a synapse strengthens, neighboring synapses weaken based on the action of a crucial protein called Arc. The finding provides an explanation of how synaptic strengthening and weakening combine in neurons to produce…
