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Quark Stars
Wow — evidence that very massive neutron stars may have cores made of deconfined quark matter! The idea of a ‘quark star’ is not new, but I didn’t know it was a serio…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 384 posts.
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How I got my laser eye injury
It has been brought to my attention that I have never actually written this story down before, merely told it in person to many students for valuable lessons and also for laughs over cocktails. It is a litany of bad ideas from several people that all came together at once to reach out and zap … Continue reading "How I…
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Butterflies accumulate static electricity to attract pollen without contact
Butterflies and moths collect so much static electricity whilst in flight, that pollen grains from flowers can be pulled by static electricity across air gaps of several millimetres or centimetres.
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Do Penguins Have Knees? (2019)
What is the penguin’s skeleton truly made of? Do penguins actually have knees? Why do penguins walk that way. Find out here!
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New study simulates gravitational waves from failing warp drive
Warp drives are staples of science fiction, and in principle could propel spaceships faster than the speed of light. However, there are many problems with constructing them in practice, such as the requirement for an exotic type of matter with negative energy. Nevertheless, physicists have been exploring the…
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Tritone Substitutions
A ‘tritone substitution’ is a popular trick for making your music sound more sophisticated. I’ll show you a couple of videos with lots of examples. But since I’m mathematici…
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STS-93: We don’t need any more of those (2014)
It was about a quarter past midnight on July 23, 1999 when the Ralph Roe, the Shuttle Launch Director, told Eileen’s crew that they were go for launch and wished them good luck. The launch, which h…
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Humans 1, Chimps 0: Correcting the Record
Behavioural economics, data science and artificial intelligence.
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MPPP – The first 'designer drug' disaster (2023)
The origin of the term is credited to Dr Gary L. Henderson, of the University of California at Davis. A designer drug is based on the structure of an existing drug – which may be naturally sourced from a plant (like cocaine or morphine ) or be synthetic (like amphetamine ) - but with a slightly different structure…
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Turing's topological proof that every written alphabet is finite (2010)
Recently one of my colleagues was reading Alan Turing’s groundbreaking 1936 article “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” This is the article in…
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Cure for male pattern baldness given boost by sugar discovery
The key to curing male pattern baldness - a condition that affects up to 50 per cent of men worldwide - could lie in a sugar that naturally occurs in the human body, according to scientists at the University of Sheffield.
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What Is Entropy?
I wrote a little book about entropy; here’s the current draft: • What is Entropy? If you see typos and other mistakes, or have trouble understanding things, please let me know! An altern…
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Double trouble: ESA's Gaia hit by micrometeoroid and solar storm
Launched in December 2013, ESA’s Gaia spacecraft is on a mission to map the locations and motions of more than a billion stars in the Milky Way with extreme precision.But it’s not easy being a satellite: space is a dangerous place. In recent months, hyper-velocity space dust and the strongest solar storm in 20 years…
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The Second Law of Thermodynamics (2011)
Web site content explains the modern view of entropy change and the dispersal of energy in a process (at a specific temperature). It has been selected for instructors in general and physical chemistry by Dr. Frank L. Lambert, Professor Emeritus (Chemistry) of Occidental College, Los Angeles.
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The fascinating and complicated sex lives of white-throated sparrows
With their quadruple personalities, those little brown birds at your feeder are a lot more interesting than they might appear.
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The Illustrated AlphaFold
A visual walkthrough of the AlphaFold3 architecture, with more details and diagrams than you were probably looking for.
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GE Aerospace Successfully Develops and Tests New Hypersonic Dual-Mode Ramjet
A dual-mode ramjet was developed and tested in less than 11 monthsTesting demonstrates a threefold increase in airflow compared to previously flight-tested hypersonic technology
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Gene-silencing tool shows promise as a future therapy against prion diseases
MIT Whitehead and Broad Institute researchers designed an epigenetic editor that can silence the prion protein gene, which could potentially be developed into a therapy against fatal prion diseases. The same approach could be used against other genetic diseases.
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Scientists discover a cause of lupus, possible way to reverse it
Scientists have discovered a molecular defect that promotes the pathologic immune response in lupus and demonstrated that reversing the defect may potentially reverse the disease.
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Europe's new heavy-lift rocket, Ariane 6, made its inaugural flight
Europe's new heavy-lift rocket, Ariane 6, made its inaugural flight from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana at 16:00 local time on 9 July (20:00 BST, 21:00 CEST).
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The Seal Failure in the SRB That Doomed Challenger (2021)
Update 7-15-2024 : This article suddenly saw a brief spike of enormous readership in July of 2024! It became the all-time most-viewed-ever...
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The zombie misconception of theoretical computer science
In Michael Sipser’s Introduction to the Theory of Computation textbook, he has one Platonically perfect homework exercise, so perfect that I can reconstruct it from memory despite not having …
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Guide to attending a space launch in person
Learn what it's like to attend a launch, which launches you can attend, how much it costs and other launch questions
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First anode-free sodium solid-state battery
UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering2024352 points129 commentsHardware & Electronics details
UChicago Pritzker Molecular Engineering Prof. Y. Shirley Meng’s Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion has created the world’s first anode-free sodium
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