The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 374 posts.
Topology is the study of the properties of geometric objects which aren’t changed by continuous deformation. A standard low-grade math joke is that toplogists consider a coffee mug and a doughnut equivalent because they’re both torii—(pauses for laughter)—one can be continuously deformed into the other, called a…
The technology pioneered by the ETH spin-off incon.ai allows blocks to be positioned with pinpoint accuracy, creating structures with aesthetic designs and augmented acoustics.
Interactive article explaining how lights and shadows behave.
Marco Bonvini’s personal website.
Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With specfp, Sun managed to increase its score on 179.art (a sub-benchmark of specfp) by 12x with a compiler tweak that…
Tracking brainwave patterns and symptoms in patients with depression, researchers used artificial intelligence to predict best treatment options.
The first thing I wanted to do with my Saab 96 was to establish a baseline weight.
How exactly does the antiviral drug remdesivir counter SARS-CoV-2 - the coronavirus strain responsible for COVID-19? And how well?
Neurons that fire together, wire together... Ok, but how? One of my little pet projects is a neurology book for psychologists, coaches and the like. What most people in these fields imagine about the brain is somewhere between perplexing, preposterous and potentially poisonous. (Seriously, I could tell you stories...)…
Radio signals from deep space: Astronomers including researchers at MIT have detected the first periodic fast radio burst from 500 million light years away.
A new study from Penn State tracked excess influenza-like illness data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to estimate that the number of early COVID-19 cases in the U.S. may have been more than 80 times greater and doubled nearly twice as fast as originally believed.
That crows can recognize humans faces (and other physical attributes) has been a staple of our experiences with them for thousands of years. It’s part of what has allowed them to take s…
Following a low carb, high fat diet shortly after being diagnosed with…
A Q&A style dialogue to separate fact from fiction.
When COVID-19 burst on to the scene, tests quickly showed that the everyone was susceptible - no pre-existing antibodies were found that bound to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This led to dire predictions that over 80% of the population might eventually fall ill. Now more than six months in, this has not happened, and it does…
New study suggests that plasma exchange could be the key to unlocking the body’s regenerative capacities
Available at the arXiv this evening is something quite fascinating. Jim Cline has posted course notes from Feynman’s last course, given in 1987-88 on QCD. There are also some audio files of a…
Physics blog quantum computation
Springer was very generous with free access to their material for some months, but this period has unfortunately passed. You can no longer access the following books for free, but you can still support them by purchasing the ones you find useful. 🙏😇
Making catalysts to convert waste carbon dioxide into useful industrial products has been expensive and complicated – until now. UNSW engineers show it’s as easy as playing with Lego.
Researchers have identified two brain phenomena that may explain some of the side-effects of ketamine. Their measurements of the brain waves of sheep sedated by the drug may explain the out-of-body experience and state of complete oblivion it can cause.
I. Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciou…
Why 5G's faster data rates are possible: Shannon's Law explained in plain language.
What is electricity? This question is impossible to answer because the word " Electricity " has several contradictory meanings. These different meanings are incompatible, and the contradictions confuse everyone. If you don't understand electricity, you're not alone. Even teachers, engineers, and scientists have a hard…
Scientists tie disrupted slumber to deadly plaque buildup known as atherosclerosis
Hundreds of published studies over the last decade have claimed it's possible to predict an individual’s patterns of thoughts and feelings by scanning their brain in an MRI machine as they perform some mental tasks.
