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3.4M Solar Panels
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,455 posts.
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How does GPS work?
An interactive exploration of how GPS works: from the speed of light and trilateration to the cheap clock problem and Einstein's relativity corrections.
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How does Shazam work?
Explore how Shazam and song identification work through interactive visualizations: spectrograms, constellation maps, hash fingerprints, and time-offset matching.
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Sauna effect on heart rate
We analyzed 59,000+ daily records from 256 sauna users to quantify what saunas actually do to your body. Using paired t-tests on same-day wearable data, we…
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MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science
When a political movement believes that ignorance is strength
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Scientific datasets are riddled with copy-paste errors
Initial results from scanning through Excel files belonging to 600 published scientific papers.
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Notes from the SF peptide scene
Pulling together disparate thoughts from two weeks wandering around SF
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All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)
When the Apollo astronauts returned from the Moon, the dust that clung to their spacesuits made their throats sore and their eyes water. Lunar dust is made of sharp, abrasive and nasty particles, but how toxic is it for humans?
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GPT‑Rosalind for life sciences research
OpenAI introduces GPT-Rosalind, a frontier reasoning model built to accelerate drug discovery, genomics analysis, protein reasoning, and scientific research workflows.
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God sleeps in the minerals
I took this snapshot, and the rest of them, at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County’s Unearthed: Raw Beauty exhibition yesterday. Enjoy.
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Good sleep, good learning, good life (2012)
The good educator insists on exercise, play, and plentiful sleep: "the great cordial of nature."
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Let's talk space toilets
You should have gone before you left Earth
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The paper computer
Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes: I could write down a date that would…
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Uncharted island soon to appear on nautical charts
A 93-strong international expedition team has been exploring the northwestern Weddell Sea in the Antarctic on board the Alfred Wegener Institute's icebreaker Polarstern since 8 February 2026. In this key region for global ocean currents, the focus has been on the outflow of ice and water from the Larsen Ice Shelf and…
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The Physics of GPS
An interactive exploration of how GPS works: from the speed of light and trilateration to the cheap clock problem and Einstein's relativity corrections.
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Helium is hard to replace
The war in Iran, and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has unfortunately made us all familiar with details of the petroleum supply chain that we could formerly happily ignore.
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Penguin 'Toxicologists' Find PFAS Chemicals in Remote Patagonia
Penguins can serve as living monitors of their environment by using small, chemical-detecting leg bands, according to a study from UC Davis and SUNY-Buffalo.
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Team from ETH Zurich make high quality quantum swap gate using a geometric phase
Researchers at ETH Zurich have realised particularly stable quantum logical operations with qubits made of neutral atoms. Since these operations, called quantum gates, are based on geometric phases they are extremely robust against experimental noise and can be used in quantum computers in the future.
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Emperor penguin and Antarctic fur seal now endangered
Gland, Switzerland, 9 April 2026 (IUCN) – The emperor penguin and Antarctic fur seal are now both Endangered, according to The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™. Climate change in Antarctica is leading to changes in sea-ice that are projected to cause the emperor penguin population to halve by the 2080s, while…
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Bitcoin and quantum computing
Neha Narula
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A cryptography engineer's perspective on quantum computing timelines
The risk that cryptographically-relevant quantum computers materialize within the next few years is now high enough to be dispositive, unfortunately.
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Bacteria found in the human intestine capable of improving muscle strength
The University of Granada participates in research linking a bacterium of the Roseburia genus with improved physical condition. This finding could lead to a probiotic for human consumption that helps maintain strength and fitness during aging. The study has been published in the prestigious scientific journal Gut
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Scientists observe an immune signaling complex forming inside cells
SLAC scientists observed an immune signaling complex forming inside cells for the first time, revealing insights that could guide new treatments.
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Some Unusual Trees
One of my favorite pastimes is exploring old bookstores.
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Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
All modern language models sometimes act like they have emotions. What’s behind these behaviors? Our interpretability team investigates.
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Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools
For those of you who haven’t seen, there were actually two “bombshell” QC announcements this week. One, from Caltech, including friend-of-the-blog John Preskill, showed how to do quantum faul…
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AI for American-produced cement and concrete
Meta is continuing its long-term roadmap to help the construction industry leverage AI to produce high-quality and more sustainable concrete mixes, as well as those exclusively produced in the Unit…
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CERN levels up with new superconducting karts
The race is on to test new vehicles in the underground Large Hadron Collider tunnel, ahead of major works starting this summer
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Artemis II is not safe to fly
On Wednesday, NASA will attempt to send four astronauts around the moon on a mission called Artemis II. This will be second flight of NASA’s SLS rocket, and the first time the 20-year-old Orion capsule flies with people on board.
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Bird brains (2023)
A kea parrot in New Zealand learned to drag traffic cones onto a highway so cars would stop and humans would feed it. That sent me down a rabbit hole on how we actually measure bird intelligence.