211
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 399 posts.
212
Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier
The Wirecutter’s review of the IKEA air purifier is a mishmash of scientific errors, shoddy testing, and self-contradictory logic.
213
Why does science news suck so much?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
214
Consciousness is not computation
Spend enough time in the tech world and you will sooner or later find that itis a common article of faith that comput...
215
Alien intelligence and the concept of technology
Learn how alien intelligence connects to human intelligence through science and technology using the Principle of Computational Equivalence, the ruliad, rulial space, tiny spacecraft and the Wolfram Language.
216
Probiotics can support the effect of antidepressants
Intestinal flora plays an important role in health – including mental health. Researchers from the University of Basel and the University Psychiatric Clinics Basel (UPK) have shown that probiotics can support the effect of antidepressants and help to alleviate depression.
217
218
Gaia sees strange stars in most detailed Milky Way survey to date
Today, ESA’s Gaia mission releases its new treasure trove of data about our home galaxy. Astronomers describe strange ‘starquakes’, stellar DNA, asymmetric motions and other fascinating insights in this most detailed Milky Way survey to date.
219
220
ACM Makes Thousands of Research Articles Freely Available; Opens First 50 Years
World’s Largest Computing Society Makes Thousands of Research Articles Freely Available; Opens First 50 Years Backfile
221
How far behind a plane is its noise?
If you’re ever near a relatively low flying airplane, you may have noticed that it sounds like it’s in a different spot in the sky than where it actually is. You can hear the loud engines, and your ears tell you it should be in one place, but your eyes tell you it’s clearly well ahead of its noise. It’s a funny visual…
222
The Philosophy of Linear Algebra (2021)
Whenever a student wonders why linear algebra, matrices, and vectors are important, the response from teachers usually sounds like this:
223
Generating true random numbers from bananas
It was a dreary afternoon in Milan last year when, procrastinating on studying, I was struck by a flash of genius. “What would happen if I made a banana-powered random number generator?“. I immediately went to tell my roommate, who was also an electronic engineer.He looked me in the face and burst out laughing. At ……
224
225
226
New CRISPR-based map ties every human gene to its function
A new CRISPR-based map ties every human gene to its function using a tool called Perturb-seq. The work was led by Jonathan Weissman and colleagues at MIT and the Whitehead Institute, and is free for other scientists to use.
227
You need to know what right-half-plane zeros are
Why some systems -- as a consequence of their intrinsic dynamics -- require a control action that first pushes them the wrong way and makes things worse before it gets better.
228
How much did the Apollo program cost?
The U.S spent $25.8 billion on Project Apollo ($309 billion when adjusted for inflation). This dataset provides annual expenditures and additional cost…
229
Scientists Discover Ways of Making Old Blood New Again
University of Colorado School of Medicine researchers joined a study that restored the blood-making process in old mice, making their blood look new again.
230
40k coin tosses yield ambiguous evidence for dynamical bias
However, no experiment with actual coin-tosses has been done to investigate whether the predicted effect is empirically observed. Diaconis et al noted, correctly, that to estimate the probability with a S.E. of 0.1% would require 250,000 tosses, but this seems unnecessarily precise. Let's work with numbers of tosses…
231
Science Is Getting Harder
Evidence that discoveries are getting smaller on average
232
233
After millennia of expansion, the world has passed ‘peak agricultural land’
The world produces more food than ever, but the amount of land we use is now falling. This means we can feed more people while restoring wild habitat.
234
235
The Scaling Hypothesis (2021)
On GPT-3: meta-learning, scaling, implications, and deep theory. The scaling hypothesis: neural nets absorb data & compute, generalizing and becoming more Bayesian as problems get harder, manifesting new abilities even at trivial-by-global-standards-scale. The deep learning revolution has begun as foretold.
236
What caused the hallucinations of the Oracle of Delphi?
Why did the oracle of Delphi go into a trance state? Does it have anything to do with ethylene?
237
Qantas ferried an engine on the wing of a 747 (2016)
When Qantas 747 VH-OJU had engine trouble in Johannesburg, VH-OJS came to the rescue ferrying a spare Rolls Royce engine from Sydney to Johannesburg for the stricken plane. We wanted to find out more, so we talked with Qantas about how they go about carrying an extra engine across the ocean. After considering its…
238
Earthworms after rain (2019)
What’s really happening when we see earthworms on a soggy sidewalk? It's probably not what you think.
239
Chaos: The real problem with quantum mechanics
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
240
Once in a Lifetime
Here is what might possibly be my single favorite song in the world: