The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,455 posts.
I live in Seattle on a fairly wooded property. Every summer since we’ve moved here, we end up with swarms of fruit flies in the kitchen. They congregate around the compost bin and the fruit bowl (where there are always lots of bananas). We aren’t slobbish - I do the dishes and wipe down the counters every night, take…
At 1.00 a.m. + 17 seconds on Monday, 17 July, the LHC beams were dumped after only 9 minutes in collision due to a radiofrequency interlock caused by an electrical perturbation. Approximately 300 milliseconds after the beams were cleanly dumped, several superconducting magnets around the LHC quenched – i.e. they lost…
The fastest way to heat food and drink might also rank as the fastest route to ingesting massive quantities of minuscule plastic particles, says new research led by Husker engineers.
AI and the ruliad in the Wolfram Physics Project provide a new way to consider how alien minds might perceive the world. Stephen Wolfram explains how this artificial neuroscience experiment works.
a cutting-edge method for reconstructing and retrieving images from fMRI brain activity. Discover how fMRI enables detailed analysis of brain functions and aids in evaluating brain treatments. MindEye's training on the Natural Scenes Dataset brings new insights to neuroscience research. Explore the
the territory under dispute
Programming note: the subscribe link was broken for a while because I am bad at computers (yet another case of "forgot to enable the systemd unit"). It's fixed now. The unsubscribe link was also broken and is now fixed but, you know, maybe that was a feature. Did wonders for reader retention.
Explaining Y Combinator
Biologists present the latest innovation in nest building: bird nests made from anti-nesting spikes.
More green spaces were associated with slower biological aging, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. People who lived near more green spaces were biologically 2.5 years younger, on average, than those who live near less greenness.
MIT physicists captured the first images that directly show the pairing of fermions. The snapshots of particles pairing up in a cloud of atoms can provide clues to how electrons pair up in a superconducting material.
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] This is the Carlsbad Desalination Plant outside of San Diego, California. It produces roughly ten percent of the area’s fresh water, around 50 million gallons or 23,000 cubic meters per day. Unlike most treatment plants that cle
Renewable power generation in the first half of 2023, with a share of 57.7 percent of the net electricity generation for public power supply, was significantly higher than in 2022.
Like it or not, there’s a clear scientific consensus
June 29, 2023. Some scientists seek to clarify reality, others to mystify it. Physicist David Bohm seemed driven by both impulses. He is renowned for promoting a sensible (according to experts like Einstein, John Bell and philosopher Tim Maudlin) interpretation of quantum mechanics. But Bohm also a
Physics researchers from Drexel University at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory led the production of the unique neutrino-based image of the Milky Way Galaxy using particles of matter instead of the usual electromagnetic energy.
Work to develop a reusable engine for European rockets is progressing, with full ignition of an early prototype of Prometheus. These images were taken on 22 June 2023 at ArianeGroup’s test facility in Vernon, France during a 12-second burn.
Dear Doctors: I’ve been hearing a lot about PFAS and how they have an adverse effect on our health. I read that some food wrappers, like bags for microwave popcorn, use PFAS to keep food from sticking. My kids eat microwaved popcorn almost every night. Should I be worried?
This is the introduction to a four-part series of posts detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino. In 2021, we and a team o…
30 Maps to Rethink the World
Large language models are valuable research assistants, especially when they refuse to follow instructions.
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
The mathematical field of information theory attempts to mathematically describe the concept of “information”. In the first two posts, we discussed the concepts of self-information and information entropy. In this post, we step through Shannon’s Source Coding Theorem to see how the information entropy of a probability…
