The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 409 posts.
As promised, here is the first post in our “The Student of Life” series. This essay, focusing on the fascinating subject of the shrinkage of our brain over the last 70,000 years, was masterfully penned by USF student Savannah Robison during the Fall 2017 semester of BIOL100. It is a wonderful example of student…
Since around 2009, methamphetamines have been made with phenylacetone (P2P). Is there a chemical different causing schizophrenia?
Another entry into my blog series on countering misconceptions in space journalism. I discussed this post on The Space Show on November 5 2021. It has been exactly two years since my initial posts …
This blog is all about astrophotography and it works mainly as an imaging diary. J-P Metsavainio is a Finnish astrophotographer,
Does cola contain a drug to prevent you from throwing up from the sugar? And is Mexican Coke somehow better than American Coke?
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) auction in February, 2016, for oil and gas drilling rights near Arches National Park was unremarkable. The high bidder, Tempest Exploration Co. LLC, paid $2,500 for the 1,120 acre lease by credit card and began paying annual rental fees. What soon did prove remarkable, though, was…
An MIT study suggests our brains are not optimized to calculate the shortest possible route when navigating on foot. Instead, pedestrians use vector-based navigation, choosing “pointiest” paths that point most directly toward their destination, even if the routes are longer.
2011 was an important year in the history of psychology, especially social psychology. First, it became apparent that one social psychologist had faked results for dozens of publications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel). Second, a highly respected journal published an article with the incredible claim…
On 22 September, around midday, ESA’s Integral spacecraft went into emergency Safe Mode. One of the spacecraft’s three active ‘reaction wheels’ had turned off without warning and stopped spinning, causing a ripple effect that meant the satellite itself began to rotate.
Can #psilocybin help smokers quit? #NIH National Institute on Drug Abuse has funded @HopkinsMedicine Matthew Johnson, Ph.D., to find out. @Drug_Researcher ›
A new study from the University of California, Davis, Genome Center, UC San Francisco and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub shows no significant difference in viral load between vaccinated and unvaccinated people who tested positive for the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2. It also found no significant difference between infected…
New compound also could be effective against other coronaviruses
The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) has taken the first ever image of a young, Sun-like star accompanied by two giant exoplanets. Images of systems with multiple exoplanets are extremely rare, and — until now — astronomers had never directly observed more than one planet orbiting a…
William Shatner's profound words about his experience in space after returning on Blue Origin NS-18:
Scientists at Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) and EPFL have discovered a highly potent monoclonal antibody that targets the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and is effective at neutralizing all variants of concern identified to date, including the delta variant. Their findings are published in the prestigious journal Cell…
Ignition is a key process that amplifies the energy output from nuclear fusion and could provide clean energy and answer some huge physics questions.
Researchers funded by the federal BRAIN Initiative have mapped all the cell types — more than a hundred — in the motor cortex of the brain
The unique mineral composition of the 2,050-year-old Roman tomb of Caecilia Metella could point the way toward more resilient and sustainable modern concrete structures.
Americans' estimates of both the risk of hospitalization due to COVID-19 and the efficacy of the vaccine for the disease vary widely by their political affiliation and vaccination status.
People who drink a lot of alcohol have a high alcohol tolerance. By this, I mean two things:
Build AI responsibly to benefit humanity
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021 was awarded jointly to Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan "for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis"
Intermittent Fasting is an effective means of improving long term memory retention and generating new adult hippocampal neurons in mice
It is possible to compute over encrypted data without access to the secret key: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 was awarded "for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems" with one half jointly to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann "for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming" and the other half…
