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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 399 posts.
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Disney's mosquito control program
Mosquitoes are some of the most annoying (and most deadly) pests out there. If you're from a country without mosquitoes- like Iceland- then you might not realise just how annoying mosquitoes can be. Just imagine returning to your hotel with not only tired feet, a sunburn but also itchy mosquito
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The worst dam idea: evaporating the Mediterranean to power Europe
Lessons from Atlantropa, the megaproject to unite Europe (& erase Africa)
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Shor, I’ll do it (2007)
I’ve been talking a lot recently about how quantum algorithms don’t work. But last week JR Minkel, an editor at Scientific American, asked me to write a brief essay about how quantum al…
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MIT engineers develop stickers that can see inside the body
MIT engineers designed an adhesive patch that produces ultrasound images of the body. The stamp-sized device sticks to skin and can provide continuous ultrasound imaging of internal organs for 48 hours.
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Finding the biological roots for pathological social withdrawal, Hikikomori
Researchers identify a number of key biomarkers in Hikikomori patients and show their promise for predicting the severity of the condition
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Scientists discover new “origins of life” chemical reactions
The reaction generates amino acids and orotic acid, the building blocks of proteins and DNA.
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Is the Kalman filter just a low-pass filter?
Exploring the relationship between Kalman filtering and optimal frequency domain filtering.
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AlphaFold reveals the structure of the protein universe
Today, in partnership with EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), we’re now releasing predicted structures for nearly all catalogued proteins known to science, which will expand the AlphaFold DB by over 200x - from nearly 1 million structures to over 200 million structures - with the potential to…
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Propagation of mistakes in papers
A blog by and for database architects.
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Does the Past Still Exist?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Health effects of the use of non-sugar sweeteners: a review and meta-analysis
Non-sugar sweeteners have been developed as an alternative to sugars and are widely used both as an ingredient in pre-packaged foods and beverages and added to food and beverages directly by the consumer.
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Galactic-Scale Energy (2011)
[ An updated treatment of this material appears in Chapter 1 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook , and also appears as part of an article in Nature Physics in 2022.]
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We're going to need a lot of solar panels
The team at Terraform Industries is now 11 people working towards a near term future where atmospheric CO2, much of it centuries of unpriced industrial waste, becomes the preferred default source o…
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For the first time in four decades, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque is dry
For the first time in ~40 years (? – see below) New Mexico’s Rio Grande has “broken” – is no longer flowing – in what we call “the Albuquerque reach”…
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Migratory monarch butterfly now endangered
Gland, Switzerland, 21 July 2022 (IUCN) – The migratory monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus plexippus), known for its spectacular annual journey of up to 4,000 kilometres across the Americas, has entered the IUCN Red List of Threatened SpeciesTM as Endangered, threatened by habitat destruction and climate change. All…
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Can the knees go over the toes? (2016)
Just last week, I was guest lecturing to a class of physical therapy students at the University of Missouri. I asked a simple question, “How many people here think we should never have our knees go…
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How do other animals see the world?
Take a look through the eyes of a dog, a spider and three other creatures.
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What happens when a reservoir goes dry
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] In June of 2022, the level in Lake Mead, the largest water reservoir in the United States formed by the Hoover Dam, reached yet another all-time low of 175 feet or 53 meters below full, a level that hasn’t been seen since the la
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We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
Actually no, the results will probably not surprise you.
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What I learned trying to classify abortion access across the rich world
Rich countries are not monolithic. However, outside the US and a few microstates, they vary in a limited range.
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We could have universal Covid vaccines soon
Bureaucratic and logistical roadblocks, not the science, stand in our way
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Training my sense of CO2 ppm
Posted on Thursday 14 Jul 2022. 1,157 words, 9 links. By Matt Webb.
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Why rails buckle in Britain
Why don’t rails get hot in Europe? The truth is they do.
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Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II
As I noted in Part I, the general idea of using heat and steam for mechanical work had a long and continuous history back to ancient times. But when we talk of the breakthrough “steam engine” in the eighteenth-century sense, we don’t mean a machine that exploits steam’s expansive, or pushing force. We actually mean a…
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Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares
Earlier this year, in the bitter cold of Kansas winter, we began field testing our first scaled pyrolyzer, designed to process 10 tons of biomass per day. The pyrolyzer processed California wheat straw just fine. But now in Kansas, corn stover turned out to be a bit different. The bales not only had leaves and stalks…
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Helion Needs You
Helion has been progressing even faster than I expected and is on pace in 2024 to 1) demonstrate Q > 1 fusion and 2) resolve all questions needed to design a mass-producible fusion generator. ...
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A doctor who treated Bach and Handel with disastrous results
Dr. John Taylor treated Bach and Handel with disastrous results, perhaps causing the death of both composers. Did it impact the course of Western music?