The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,455 posts.
Next week in Manhattan, the sunset will align perfectly with the east-west streets of the city grid. It’s beautiful, and people know it. Twice a year, crowds gather to see the brief moment when the sun sits perfectly on the horizon, framed by skyscrapers on either side. It’s called Manhattanhenge , after Stonehenge.
Scientists have uncovered how tobacco plants naturally make nicotine, solving a mystery that has puzzled researchers for nearly two centuries.
At NAB, I found a demo of Wi-Wi STAMP, a wireless time synchronization protocol that came out of Japan's NICT. Wi-Wi stands for Wireless 2Way interferometry, and it uses the 900 MHz band for picosecond-level time sync, and mm-level distance accuracy, in a tiny box, currently the size of a smartphone. The system is…
Blood is pumped from the heart through arteries to the hoof and is assisted in its return through a “pumping mechanism” in the hoof. This mechanism is necessary due to the position of the hoof in relation to the heart. There are no muscles in the lower leg or hoof to aid in the return of venous blood to the heart…
Humans are the only primates with a population-wide hand preference. A new Oxford-led study, 'Bipedalism and brain expansion explain human handedness', published in PLOS Biology, traces it back to bipedalism and brain expansion.
Agora-1, a multi-agent world model, enables multiple participants—human or AI—to share and interact within the same world simulation in real-time.
A Two Part Post on the Immense Promise and Ecological Tragedy of Natural Herbertsmithite Crystals
ex program, en farm
More than 60 percent of the United States is experiencing drought conditions, with more than 20 percent in an extreme drought. Andrew Ellis, a climatologist at Virginia Tech said the current conditions are among the worst in decades because the combination of intensity and aerial coverage is rare. He explained why…
I love quasicrystals—like crystals, but with patterns that never repeat, like Penrose tiles. But they’ve very rare in nature. They’re created only by the most exotic and violent e…
Background: Although people are familiar with loud automobiles, equipped with modified mufflers to increase the volume, it is unclear who is most attracted to these vehicles. Participants and procedure: A sample of 529 (52% men) undergraduate business students were surveyed and were asked if...
ratios will be ratios
The submarine is a surprisingly ancient technology—at least in its early, primitive forms. The idea is quite simple, that a well-enough-sealed boat ought to be able to submerge and resurface. It's the practicalities that make the whole thing difficult. It is generally considered that the US Civil War was the first use…
A new study by UCLA Health has discovered what researchers say is the first drug to fully reproduce the effects of physical stroke rehabilitation in model mice.
Lead optimisation is the step in drug design where you take a molecule that sort of works and try to make it actually work, and it’s arguably the step where most real-world design campaigns succeed or die. Due to the influence of a couple of my pals , I have recently become interested in using machine learning to do…
Once completed the tunnel located in the Fehmarn Belt will hold the record as the longest immersed tunnel in the world.
CU Boulder researchers have developed 3D-printable materials embedded with living bioluminescent algae that can produce sustained light.
Why launch costs aren't the reason it costs a fortune to do things in space
I’ve been in the AI space since ChatGPT first dropped. I’ve toyed around with a lot of Language Models, built random side projects, built a couple from scratch and I’ve spent hours looking at the math behind it all.
Engineering and computing researchers create simple metal tags with unique ultrasonic fingerprints to detect door openings and other movements.
Studying brain scan data from individuals — not group averages — reveals key brain-function differences in children who struggle with goal-oriented tasks, a Stanford Medicine study found.
Though wind and solar continue to carve out larger and larger shares of world energy supply, the modern world still runs on petroleum, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
As global battery demand continues to surge, the number of end-of-life batteries from electric vehicles alone is expected to grow from 1.2 million in 2030 to 14 million by 2040. Battery circularity technologies enable the reuse and recycling of these batteries and, as with battery technologies more generally, Asia…
La Jolla, California—April 29, 2026—The J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) announced that J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., the Institute’s founder,...
Old fashioned sleuthing and the help of modern technology leads to discovery of manuscript with poem composed by a farm labourer 1,300 years ago.
The planet next door may be rough, but it has a lot of atmosphere
Penn State experts in meteorology and atmospheric science made their way down the nation’s eastern coast in June 2024 in search of corona discharges, a long-hypothesized atmospheric weather phenomenon where miniscule pulses of electricity dance at the tips of tree leaves, causing the canopy to glow in the ultraviolet…
