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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 440 posts.
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Ozone hole goes large again
Measurements from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite show that this year’s ozone hole over Antarctica is one of the biggest on record. The hole, which is what scientists call an ‘ozone depleting area,’ reached a size of 26 million sq km on 16 September 2023. This is roughly three times the size of Brazil.
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ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades
Cornell Tech has announced a total of more than $10 million in gifts and grants from the Simons Foundation and the National Science Foundation, respectively, to support arXiv, a free distribution service and open-access archive for scholarly articles.
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Ketamine's effect on depression may hinge on hope
In an unusual trial, Stanford Medicine researchers found that a patient’s belief that they had received ketamine, even if they didn’t, could improve their depression.
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Scientists discover links between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiota
New research has identified links between gut bacteria, inflammation and brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
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This is what the year actually looks like (2018)
A few weeks back, I asked the Norwegian public what the year looks like inside their heads. It led to a deluge of responses. Here's a summary of more than 75 000 month placements, and nearly 40 000 questionnaire responses.
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Fractional Factorial Experiment Design: There Are Too Many Experiments to Do
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you had a bunch of parameters to tune for a better result, but there were just too many to exhaustively search all possibilities? I recently saw a …
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A successful example of "adversarial collaboration"
We synthesized the vast, contradictory scholarly literature on gender bias in academic science from 2000 to 2020. . . . Claims and counterclaims regarding the presence or absence of sexism span a range of evaluation contexts. Our approach relied on a combination of meta-analysis and analytic dissection. We evaluated…
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Mindblowing dissertations
We don’t generally see PhD dissertations as an exciting genre to read, and that is wholly our loss. As the…
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Tumor-destroying sound waves receive FDA approval for liver treatment in humans
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of sound waves to break down tumors—a technique called histotripsy—in humans for liver treatment.
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"Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People", 7 Years Later
In the post about GPT-4V, I mentioned the paper “Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People” (https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.00289) by Brenden Lake, Tomer Ullman, Joshua Tenenbaum, and Samuel Gershman.
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Histotripsy – a technique that harnesses soundwaves to attack cancer
It’s called histotripsy. And it could change cancer treatment forever.
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Sodium ascorbate treatment for sepsis moves to next phase of human trials
Promising results from an initial clinical trial show that sodium ascorbate – a pH-balanced formulation of vitamin C – is effective in treating sepsis.
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Revisited mass of the Milky Way is much smaller than expectations from cosmology
Grâce au dernier catalogue du satellite Gaia de l'ESA, une équipe internationale, conduite par des astronomes de l'Observatoire de Paris - PSL et du CNRS, obtient la mesure la plus précise de la…
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First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student
Vesuvius Challenge \$700,000 Grand Prize “now definitely achievable”
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Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves
Rice neuroengineers designed the first self-rectifying magnetoelectric material and showed it can not only precisely stimulate neurons remotely but also reconnect a broken sciatic nerve in a rat model.
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Make your own pyramid salt crystals
This guide teaches you how to make pyramid salt crystals at home. Follow these simple steps to turn regular salt into premium artisan salt.
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Impacts of lack of sleep
Sleep is important. People vastly underestimate the extent to which not sleeping is harmful, viewing it as a valid trade off for productivity and overlooking all of the longterm negative effects.
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Metals Fuse Together in Space
Is it true that two pieces of metal will permanently join together if they touch in a vacuum? In theory, yes.
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An implantable device could enable injection-free control of diabetes
MIT engineers designed an implantable device that carries hundreds of thousands of islet cells along with its own on-board oxygen factory to keep the cells healthy. Such a device could help Type 1 diabetes patients eliminate the need for insulin injections.
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Lasers deflected using air
Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY A Research Centre of the Helmholtz Association
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Nobel Prize Chemistry 2023
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2023 was awarded to Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Aleksey Yekimov "for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots"
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Passive Solar Water Desalination
I know we are supposed to be worried about the world supply of fresh water. I have been hearing that at least for the last 40 years, and the statistics are alarming. According to the Global Commission on the Economics of Water: "We are seeing the consequences not of freak events, nor of population growth
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Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to Agostini, Krausz, and L’Huillier
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter"
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Days of Awe: The clinical trial drug that might save my husband's life
"G’mar Chatimah Tovah” – May you be inscribed into the Book of Life
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The world needs computational social science
The world needs computational social science, and it is not only, or even primarily, about the AI revolution. The reasons follow below and I also cover what a computational social scientist should …
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Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023 was awarded jointly to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman "for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19"