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“Gravity is worth asking about”
A blog about software craft and quality
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,455 posts.
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Underwater oxygen loss threatens earth's stability, researchers warn
A new review paper led by scientists at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography warns that the rapid loss of oxygen from the ocean and other aquatic ecosystems is pushing Earth toward an “unsafe space,” with consequences that could be irreversible on human timescales.
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New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study
Vaccine approach yields high numbers of HIV-neutralizing antibodies in non-human primates
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The Strongest El Niño Ever
With all the July runs in, dynamical models give a ~90% chance of a record-setting event
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Alien World Chemistry Found Inside Meteorite That Struck New Jersey Home
Fragment of the Hillsborough meteorite, broken on impact, with fusion crust from passing at high speed through the Earth’s atmosphere.
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Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota
The project is an upscale of a successful pilot built in 2013, and can be expanded further to a network of hubs producing fertiliser for farmer cooperatives.
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Sperm Whales blow bubbles to achieve restful, vertical sleep
New research from the University of St Andrews and Université de Neuchâtel, has uncovered the mechanism which allows sperm whales to sleep in a unique vertical position, just under the ocean surface.
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How to survive boiling water
A probiotic paradox
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A solid-state “atomic channel” for separating rare earth elements
Rare earth elements like lanthanum, neodymium, and dysprosium are used to build the electric motor in your car, the LED lights in your house, and the MRI machine at your doctor’s office.
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Astronomers may have found the first exomoon
Observations made with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) have revealed evidence for a moon-like object in the CD-35 2722 system. Unlike moons in our Solar System, the newly found object does not orbit a planet, raising questions about what to name it. Instead, it circles a brown…
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Does creatine make you smarter?
And why does the brain use creatine anyway?
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An old patent inspired the new "Y-zipper", a three-sided fastener
A new system developed at MIT CSAIL helps users design three-sided fasteners called “Y-zippers,” then 3D prints them. The devices can be attached or embedded to camping equipment, medical gear, robots, and art installations, seamlessly switching each item between soft and rigid.
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What's Under Your Feet in New York City?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] New York City is unlike any other city in the United States. It’s the most densely populated area in the country by far, absolutely packed with buildings, business, homes, and people. But for all that you can see walking the str
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A digestion of the Jacobian conjecture counterexample
The notorious Jacobian conjecture can be formulated concretely over the complex numbers as follows. Conjecture 1 (Jacobian Conjecture) Let $latex {F:{\bf C}^n \rightarrow {\bf C}^n}&fg=000000$ …
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Heavy TV watching associated with smaller brain structures, study finds
Reduced volume was found in areas of the brain connected to memory formation, indicating a potential link between TV watching and higher dementia risk.
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The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal
Somewhere at the bottom of the Forth and Clyde Canal, buried in the silt, there is a box of custom silicon that was right about almost everything. Back in 1988 a Scottish hi-fi company shipped a processor that checked the type and bounds of every memory access in hardware, garbage-collected its own heap in silicon, […]
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More Bounce to the Ounce
A love letter to the rocket that everyone is too chicken to build
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'Likweli': A new monkey species discovered in the Congo Basin
Yale researchers have helped to describe a new species of Colobus monkey living high in the forest canopies of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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A metallurgist's doubts about self-replicating probes
Thanks for this. These are the sorts of clearheaded questions that must be asked if discussions of advanced and/or extraterrestrial technologies are to move beyond pleasant speculation and “get real.”
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Weightlifting beats running for blood sugar control, researchers find (2025)
Virginia Tech scientists at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute show that resistance training outperforms endurance exercise in improving insulin sensitivity in obesity and Type 2 diabetes models.
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Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows
Researchers have shown the first direct experimental evidence that the textbook triple bond structure breaks down in heavy elements, where relativity makes the rules.
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Silent speech with ultrasound
We trained a model to predict speech from ultrasound video of the tongue, no speaking required. It reads open text, generalizes across people, and reaches a 15.6% word error rate on open-vocabulary speech.
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Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)
Het Tulp Fonds dat in 2025 door OCW en NWO in het leven werd geroepen, biedt internationale toponderzoekers de kans om hun onderzoek in Nederland voort te zetten: enerzijds omdat wereldwijd de academische vrijheid onder druk staat, anderzijds omdat hun kennis en expertise een enorme impuls geeft aan de innovatiekracht…
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How to sequence your own DNA at home
I have now sequenced my own genome 5 times with an Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION. This means collecting them from a swab, prepping them for sequencing, running them through a sequencer, then doing analysis over them.
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A global workspace in language models
Interpretability research on Claude's internal thoughts.
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Aluminum foil (2021)
It’s typically 10 μm thick and 400 mm wide, giving it an aspect ratio of 40000 in that dimension, and rolls are commonly some ten meters in length, for an aspect ratio of 1 000 000; heavy-duty versions can reach 30 μm or more. Despite their thinness, foils of 25 μm or more are impermeable to oxygen, water, and light…
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Scientists reverse brain aging, with a nasal spray
New therapy is turning back the clock in aging brains, healing inflammation, restoring memory and reshaping the future of brain age-related therapies.
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Jellyfish can heal wounds in minutes. Scientists want their secrets
A decade ago this summer, at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Jocelyn Malamy watched jellyfish cells “walk” toward each other to close a wound for the first time. An associate professor in Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology at the University of Chicago, Malamy had received transparent, dime-sized medusae of the…