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Solving methane mysteries with satellite imagery
By combining two types of remote sensing data, we can see hidden leaks from ships
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 384 posts.
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What P vs. NP is about
We recently made a Polylog video about a nonstandard way of understanding the P vs NP problem. As usual, our goal was to present an underrated idea in a broadly understandable way, while being slig…
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Is the world really running out of sand?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] If you have to know the answer right away, it’s no; or at least, my goal with this video is to convince you that the world is not running out of sand. But if it were that simple, I wouldn’t be here (right?) and you probably woul
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ESO telescope captures the most detailed infrared map of the Milky Way
Astronomers have published a gigantic infrared map of the Milky Way containing more than 1.5 billion objects ― the most detailed one ever made. Using the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA telescope, the team monitored the central regions of our Galaxy over more than 13 years. At 500 terabytes of data, this is the…
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Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
A wintertime climate change solution
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A pilot project in universal algebra to explore new ways to collaborate
Traditionally, mathematics research projects are conducted by a small number (typically one to five) of expert mathematicians, each of which are familiar enough with all aspects of the project that…
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Italian music through the lens of complex networks
Last year I was talking with a non-Italian, trying to convey to them how nearly the entirety of contemporary Italian music rests on the shoulders of Gianni Maroccolo — and the parts that don’t, should. In an attempt to find a way out of that conversation, they casually asked “wouldn’t it be cool to map out who…
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Global EV Charging Points with Open Charge Map
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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The Gravo-Thermal Catastrophe
In 1962, V. A. Antonov did some remarkable simulations showing that in Newtonian mechanics, gravitating systems can violate the usual rules of thermodynamics. Instead of reaching equilibrium they c…
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Diatom Arrangements
An odd post. Diatoms are single-celled algae with glass shells, and people arrange them into patterns under a microscope.
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Reports of the death of dental cavities are greatly exaggerated
If I asked you to name the most common chronic disease in children, what would you say? Asthma comes top of mind, but there is something five times more common in kids: cavities. We don’t typically think of dental cavities as a chronic disease—in part because of the separation between medicine and dentistry—but it is…
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If I could dissect a sauropod
Luke Horton asked in a comment on a recent post: Given the chance to examine a titanosaur cadaver with your hypothetical army of anatomists, what would you look for first? *FACEPALM* How we’v…
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We're not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon
[This post received first place in the 2024 Blog Extravaganza at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History. Many thanks, Adam!] I first had this thought in 2019, and I started this draft in ear…
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The magic of DC-DC voltage conversion (2023)
Resistor-based dividers, linear regulators, buck converters, and other ways to adjust voltages.
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Chai-1: Decoding the molecular interactions of life
Building frontier artificial intelligence to predict and reprogram the interactions between biochemical molecules.
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The disunity of consciousness in everyday experience
A substantial philosophical literature explores the " unity of consciousness ": If I experience A, B, and C at the same time, A, B, and C will normally in some sense (exactly what sense is disputed) be experientially conjoined. Sipping beer at a concert isn't a matter of experiencing the taste of beer and separately…
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Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript
(with thanks to René Zandbergen, Ray Clemens, Roger Easton, Claire Bowern, Bill Endres, and the curatorial and conservation staff at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library) I have some exc…
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Satellites Spotting Aircraft
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Radiology-specific foundation model
Harrison.ai builds AI-native medical imaging technology for radiology, used by hospitals and radiology providers worldwide. See our products and solutions.
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How on-the-wrist sleep apnea detection works
80% of sleep apnea cases are undiagnosed, and undiagnosed sleep apnea causes $150B of wasted medical spend every year.
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The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it
Very few think the world is making progress. In this article, we look at the history of global living conditions and show that the world has made immense progress in important aspects.
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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Can Be Cleaned for $7.5B
The eradication of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is achievable within a decade, and The Ocean Cleanup aims to make it happen faster and more cost effectively.
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A new rare high-rank elliptic curve, and an orchard of Diophantine equations
I got an email the other day from mathematician Bogdan Grechuk, whose book Polynomial Diophantine Equations: A Systematic Approach ( was recently released. This is to my mind a rather remarkable bo…
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Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?
I happened to look at a slide deck from Sandia National Laboratories from 2007 that someone had posted on Reddit late last night (you know, as one does,...
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What happens when you touch a pickle to an AM radio tower
A few months ago, our AM radio hot dog experiment went mildly viral. That was a result of me asking my Dad 'what would happen if you ground a hot dog to one of your AM radio towers?' He didn't know, so one night on the way to my son's volleyball practice, we tested it. And it was awesome. There's a video and some…
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AlphaProteo generates novel proteins for biology and health research
New AI system designs proteins that successfully bind to target molecules, with potential for advancing drug design, disease understanding and more.
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Origami-Inspired Phased Arrays Are Reshaping the Future of Antennas
Folding antennas into different shapes to create near infinite radiation patterns.
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Tire-related chemical responsible for salmon deaths in urban streams (2020)
A team led by researchers at UW Tacoma, UW and Washington State University Puyallup has discovered a chemical that kills coho salmon in urban streams before the