The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,456 posts.
Foraging humans find food, reproduce, share parenting, and even organise their social groups in similar ways as surrounding mammal and bird species, depending on where they live in the world, new research has found.
23andMe to Merge with Virgin Group’s VG Acquisition Corp. to Become Publicly-Traded Company Set to Revolutionize Personalized Healthcare and Therapeutic Development through Human Genetics January 15, 2021 Medscape study in collaboration with 23andMe finds Primary Care Physicians are increasingly more comfortable with…
The Arctic Ocean was covered by up to 900 m thick shelf ice and was filled entirely with freshwater at least twice in the last 150,000 years. This surprising finding, reported in the latest issue of the journal Nature, is the result of long-term research by scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute and the MARUM…
It takes the most exquisite measurements you can imagine, recording the changes in current associated with different bits of DNA.
There’s an old theory that memory is actually encoded in part in RNA. The argument is pretty simple: there’s no obvious way for all that sensory data to be captured in synapses as long …
Analyses reveal single standard dose efficacy from day 22 to day 90 post vaccination of 76% with protection not falling in this three-month periodAfter the second dose vaccine efficacy from two standard doses is 82.4% with the 3-month interval being used in the UK. (82.4% effective, with a 95% confidence interval of…
Starlink is a point of departure to consider the costs of the unrelenting drive toward artificial illumination, a technological development most of us now take for granted.
Is mental illness a thing? What kind of thing is it?
Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today. None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true. What follows is a collection of notably wild predictions from notable people in government and science.
Regular cannabis use has harmful effects regardless of the age a person starts using, a University of Queensland-led study has found.
Jeanne reveals which branches of the evolutionary tree of plants bear edible leaves and speculates about why that is. Most of the 300,000 + plant species have leaves, and the function of all of the…
The International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook 2020 report has found that, in most major countries, solar power is now cheaper than coal and gas.
A new study suggests that a lot of people might be going through life with symptoms that resemble concussion – a finding supporting researchers’ argument that athletes recovering from a brain injury should be assessed and treated on a highly individualized basis.In the national study, between 11% and 27% of healthy…
Crystal close up. Capturing the Moment of Emergence of Crystal Nucleus from Disorder. © 2021 The University of Tokyo by T. Nakamuro, M. Sakakibara, H. Nada, K. Harano, and E. Nakamura
Scientists have identified a key factor in mental aging and shown that it might be prevented or reversed by fixing a glitch in the immune system's front-line soldiers.
Running a biotech company is capital intensive, and this can make it intimidating to get started. Founders sometimes face a chicken and egg problem: how do you make progress without millions of dollars in funding, and how do you raise millions of dollars in funding without having made progress? However, it is quite…
Sections of this post were co-authored by Cornelia Scheitz. Noah Leidinger created a German translation. Piotr Kwapin created a Polish translation. Last updated on February 7, 2021. Bert Hubert’s excellent and widely shared article about Reverse Engineering the source code of the Pfizer-BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine is…
Magicicada periodical cicadas often emerge one or four years earlier or later than their main brood is expected to emerge. When they do, we call them precursors or stragglers (the most common name in scientific literature). This behavior is natural and expected, and how Magicicada have branched off into new broods…
Fungi are more closely related to us than they are to plants. Yet, fungi have been grouped with plants historically, with an impact felt even today.
Introduction
Combining standard stories of biologists, astronomers, physicists, and social scientists would lead us to expect a much smaller filter than we observe. Thus one of these stories must be wrong. To find out who is wrong, and to inform our choices, we should study and reconsider all these areas. For example, we should…
MIT biologists have found a possible explanation for the Warburg effect, first seen in cancer cells in the 1920s. They found cancer cells use fermentation, an inefficient metabolic pathway, because it helps them to generate large quantities of a molecule called NAD+, which they need to synthesize DNA and other…
In previous posts I said that the extent to which "Fund people" works will depend on the distribution of scientific talent. Think about the following …
Explore data on how energy production and use varies across the world.
MINNEAPOLIS - People who consume high levels of vitamin C and E in their diet may have a lower risk of Parkinson’s disease than people who get only small amounts of these nutrients, according to a new study published in the January 6, 2021, online issue of Neurology ® , the medical journal of the American Academy of…
