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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 440 posts.
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Full ignition for ESA’s reusable rocket engine
Work to develop a reusable engine for European rockets is progressing, with full ignition of an early prototype of Prometheus. These images were taken on 22 June 2023 at ArianeGroup’s test facility in Vernon, France during a 12-second burn.
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Eating microwave popcorn increases the level of PFAS in body (2022)
Dear Doctors: I’ve been hearing a lot about PFAS and how they have an adverse effect on our health. I read that some food wrappers, like bags for microwave popcorn, use PFAS to keep food from sticking. My kids eat microwaved popcorn almost every night. Should I be worried?
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[109] Data Falsificada (Part 1): “Clusterfake”
This is the introduction to a four-part series of posts detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino. In 2021, we and a team o…
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Maps distort how we see the world
30 Maps to Rethink the World
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Using GPT-4 to measure the passage of time in fiction
Large language models are valuable research assistants, especially when they refuse to follow instructions.
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The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
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Shannon’s Source Coding Theorem (2020)
The mathematical field of information theory attempts to mathematically describe the concept of “information”. In the first two posts, we discussed the concepts of self-information and information entropy. In this post, we step through Shannon’s Source Coding Theorem to see how the information entropy of a probability…
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Scientists create contained ball of turbulence in a tank
Scientists create contained ball of turbulence in a tank that could help answer longstanding questions
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Metformin shown to prevent long Covid
A 14-day course of metformin, a common drug used to manage type 2 diabetes, prevents long COVID, according to a new study in The Lancet Infectious Diseases .
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Cement's future could be a combination of carbon capture and electrification
Cement is an industry where capturing carbon emissions may be necessary. A combination with process heat electrification could be better than CCS alone.
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Why does nuclear power plant construction cost so much?
The source of clean energy shouldn't be displaying "negative learning" over time
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Brain fog after Covid-19 has similarities to ‘chemo brain’ in humans and mice
Researchers found that damage to the brain's white matter after COVID-19 resembles that seen after cancer chemotherapy, raising hope for treatments to help both conditions.
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Oyster: Towards Unsupervised Object Detection from Lidar Point Clouds
Transform your supply chain with Waabi’s AI-first autonomous trucking solution. Scale freight operations, improve safety, and boost efficiency. Learn more.
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Ancient Carthaginians did sacrifice their children (2014)
Shocking new research confirms the ancient Carthaginians ritually sacrificed children as offerings to the gods, overturning decades of denial. Uncover the dark secrets of this long-forgotten civilisation.
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How to Grow a Three Sisters Garden (2016)
By Melissa Kruse-Peeples For many Native American communities, three seeds - corn, beans, and squash represent the most important crops. When planted together, the Three Sisters, work together to help one another thrive and survive. Utilizing corn, beans, and squash together in your garden draws upon centuries of…
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Helplessness is not learned (2022)
Română On the sixth day of our science advent, we would like to talk about a debunked concept in neuroscience. The purpose of this prompt and of science debunking, in general, is not to make fun of how scientists in the past got things so wrong and how we’re so much smarter now. The point […]
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Over 70% of US household Covid spread started with a child
A study published yesterday in JAMA Network Open suggests that 70.4% of nearly 850,000 US household COVID-19 transmissions originated with a child.
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Why do railway tracks have crushed stones alongside them?
Track ballast is the name for the crushed stones next to railway tracks. They are used by Railway Track Designers for numerous reasons
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Sleight-of-hand magic trick only fools monkeys with opposable thumbs
Illusion involving a hidden thumb confounds capuchin and squirrel monkeys for the same reason as humans – it misdirects the expected outcomes of actions they can carry out.
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Intelligent Brains Take Longer to Solve Difficult Problems
Do intelligent people think faster? Researchers at the BIH and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, together with a colleague from Barcelona, made the surprising finding that participants with higher intelligence scores were only quicker when tackling simple tasks, while they took longer to solve difficult problems…
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A new class of tiny, self-propelled robots that can zip through liquid at speed
CU Boulder engineers have designed a new class of "microrobots" several times smaller than the width of a human hair that may be able to treat human illnesses
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LHC experiments see first evidence of a rare Higgs boson decay
The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 marked a significant milestone in particle physics. Since then, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations have been diligently investigating the properties of this unique particle and searching to establish the different ways in which it is produced…
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Admiral Rickover's 'Paper Reactor' Memo (1953)
Rickover's famous speech about the distinction between academic (paper) reactors and practical reactors.
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Emissions are no longer following the worst case scenario
So where might we be headed instead?