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Batteries: How cheap can they get?
How dirt cheap batteries will completely transform our electricity grid, paving the way for solar and wind and replacing grid reinforcements with grid buffers.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 384 posts.
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Gravitational wave researchers cast new light on Antikythera mechanism mystery
Techniques developed to analyse the ripples in spacetime detected by one of the 21st century’s most sensitive pieces of scientific equipment have helped cast new light on the function of the oldest known analogue computer.
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Mechanical computer relies on kirigami cubes, not electronics
The mechanical computer uses a complex structure of rigid, interconnected polymer cubes to store, retrieve and erase data without relying on electronic components.
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Why Bridges Don't Sink
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] The essence of a bridge is not just that it goes over something, but that there’s clear space underneath for a river, railway, or road. Maybe this is already obvious to you, but bridges present a unique structural challenge. In
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Why is Chile so long?
Chile is so long, it's curved. How long is it? Why not longer? Why is no other country as thin? How does that make Chileans incomprehensible?
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The physics of airplane flight
A common misconception about wings is that they need to have the classic airfoil shape to work. In reality, just about any surface can create lift and function as a wing.
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Trilobites killed by volcanic ash
Some of the most perfectly preserved trilobite fossils ever found have revealed details of the extinct arthropod unknown until now.
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Researchers develop the fastest possible flow algorithm
Rasmus Kyng has written the near-perfect algorithm. It computes the maximum transport flow at minimum cost for any kind of network – be it rail, road or electricity – at a speed that is, mathematically speaking, impossible to beat.
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Is Clear Air Turbulence becoming more common?
In recent years there has been a noticeable uptick in publicized incidents of turbulence affecting commercial aircraft. These events, sometimes unexpected and severe, have led to passenger injuries, emergency landings, and a recent rare fatality. Turbulence can be caused by a variety of factors, from the mixing of air…
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The Rhisotope Project: Insertion of radioisotopes into live rhinoceros
The Rhisotope Project at Wits is entering a new testing phase with the insertion of radioisotopes into 20 live rhinoceros.
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Will we ever get fusion power?
“Every one of the stars in the sky uses fusion to generate enormous amounts of energy. Why shouldn’t we?”
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The Point of the Banach Tarski Theorem (2015)
One of my favourite Limited Audience Jokes (although technically it's actually a riddle) goes:
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Moving objects precisely with sound
EPFL researchers have succeeded in directing floating objects around an aquatic obstacle course using only soundwaves. Their novel, optics-inspired method holds great promise for biomedical applications such as noninvasive targeted drug delivery.
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Why your brain is 3 milion more times efficient than GPT-4
Wild ramblings, raport from the field about choosing Vector Database for a particular project and a little bit of a rant about the current state of AI and how it's perceived, why human brains are a wonder of nature, and why it's far from 'thinking' and 'consciousness'.
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Solar generates fifth of global electricity on summer solstice midday peak
Today across midday peaks on the summer solstice, the world will generate about a fifth of its electricity from solar. This milestone highlights the rapid growth and impact of solar power, which has seen unprecedented expansion in recent years.
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Twitter and the spread of academic knowledge
Serendipity without physical proximity? Maybe, maybe not.
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How does a computer/calculator compute logarithms?
Summer of Math Exposition 3 - How does a computer/calculator compute logarithms?
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Rotation curves: still flat after a million light-years
That rotation curves become flat at large radii is one of the most famous results in extragalactic astronomy. This had been established by Vera Rubin and her collaborators by the late 1970s. There …
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Astronomers see a black hole awaken in real time
Ende 2019 begann die zuvor unauffällige Galaxie SDSS1335+0728 plötzlich heller zu leuchten als je zuvor. Um den Ursachen auf den Grund zu gehen, haben Astronom*innen Daten von mehreren weltraumbasierten und bodengebundenen Observatorien, darunter das Very Large Telescope (VLT) der Europäischen Südsternwarte (ESO)…
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Monitoring marine litter from space
Every 60 seconds the equivalent of a lorry-load of plastic enters the global ocean. Where it goes after that remains largely unknown. But a new ESA Discovery study reported in Nature Communications has proven the concept of monitoring floating plastic litter using satellites.
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Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before it collapsed
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] On January 28, 2022, about an hour before dawn, the four-lane Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, collapsed without warning. Five vehicles, including an articulating bus, fell with the bridge, and another car drove o
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Satellites Spotting Ships
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago
Each of us individually is the accumulated product of thousands of generations that have come before us in an unbroken line. Our culture and technology today are also the result of thousands of years of accumulated and remixed cultural knowledge.
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Does anybody know this fractal? (2012)
Experimenting with the "divisibility" of complex numbers, I stumbled across this thingy. It looks like a fractal. Although the formula does not do any iterations. It reminds me of something. But I dont know what. Doing a Google image search brings up a couple of galaxies :) This image shows the region from (-1/-1) to…
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Fungus breaks down ocean plastic
A fungus living in the sea can break down the plastic polyethylene, provided it has first been exposed to UV radiation from sunlight. Researchers from, among others, NIOZ published their results in the scientific journal Science of the Total Environment. They expect that many more plastic degrading fungi are living in…
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New algorithm discovers language just by watching videos
Mark Hamilton, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science and affiliate of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), wants to use machines to understand how animals communicate. To do that, he set out first to create a system that can learn human language “from…
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Mouth-based touchpad enables people living with paralysis to use computers
MIT Media Lab Spin-off Augmental has developed the MouthPad, a device that allows users to interact with phones and computers using their tongue and other head gestures.
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Diffractive Chocolate
Turn your chocolate into an edible color spectrum…