The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 248 posts.
By 400 BC, Persian engineers had mastered the technique of storing ice in the middle of summer in the desert. The ice was brought in during the winters from nearby mountains in bulk amounts, and stored in a Yakhchal , or ice-pit. These ancient refrigerators were used primarily to store ice for use in the summer, as…
There are large differences in the land of different diets, mostly depending on how much meat people eat.
One year after researchers published their work on a physiological test for autism, a follow-up study confirms its exceptional success in assessing whether a child is on the autism spectrum.
Exploring a simple machine I took apart a simple spray bottle to see how it kept fluid flowing only in one direction from the reservoir to the nozzle. It does so with simple check valves made of two pieces of plastic, a spring, and a small sphere. It’s a simple way to solve a tricky problem. A simple spray bottle One…
This tipping point — roughly 25% of people — applies to any kind of movement or initiative.
Das Team Media Relations steht Journalistinnen und Journalisten gerne zur Verfügung. Suchen Sie unsere Expertinnen und Experten direkt, finden Sie Bilder der UZH und Medienberichte oder kontaktieren Sie Ihre Medien-Ansprechpartner.
MIT researchers have developed a new way to power and communicate with devices implanted deep within the human body. Such devices could be used to deliver drugs, monitor conditions inside the body, or treat disease by stimulating the brain with electricity or light.
Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), an ambitious social experiment, combines community programs with charter schools. We provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ charters on educational outcomes. Both lottery and instrumental variable identification strategies suggest that the effects of attending an HCZ…
A study of over 60,000 people who were followed for as long as two decades found that people’s perceptions about their level of activity have a more significant effect on their longevity than the...
A global array of telescopes, including APEX, reveals the finest details so far on event horizon scales in the centre of our Galaxy
My son (5y) asked me today: If there were a kind of a fireman's pole from the Moon down to the Earth, how long would it take to slide all the way from the Moon to the Earth?
AUGUSTA, Ga. – A daily dose of baking soda may help reduce the destructive inflammation of autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, scientists say.
How many deaths make a natural disaster newsworthy?
Recently, AI systems have mastered a range of video-games such as Atari classics Breakout and Pong. But as impressive as this performance is, AI still relies on the equivalent of thousands of hours of gameplay to reach and surpass the performance of human video game players. In contrast, we can usually grasp the…
In 1949, in a festschrift devoted to Einstein , Kurt Gödel published a very short but profound paper titled “A Remark About the Relati...
Observations on Frank Herbert’s 𝐷𝑢𝑛𝑒 series—the notes are probably overstated, the Butlerian Jihad was 𝑛𝑜𝑡 a robot uprising seeking to exterminate humanity, and precognition/prescience in the Dune universe appears to work backwards allowing for retro-causality and stable time-loops as exemplified by Leto II’s Golden…
Seaweed could be the key to stopping industrial agriculture from destroying the planet
1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.
Time crystals — a form of matter that “ticks” when exposed to an electromagnetic pulse — may help to build better atomic clocks, gyroscopes, and quantum tech.
I’ve supervised a lot of great student projects in my nine years at MIT, but my inner nerdy teenager has never been as personally delighted by a project as it is right now. To…
An allegory against complacency about aging and death.
[Note: There is a followup to this post .] There has been a lot written over the past decade (and even longer) about problems associated with null hypothesis statistical testing (NHST) and p values. Personally, I have found most of these arguments unconvincing. However, one of t
