The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 356 posts.
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…
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
An interactive exploration of how GPS works: from the speed of light and trilateration to the cheap clock problem and Einstein's relativity corrections.
Explore how Shazam and song identification work through interactive visualizations: spectrograms, constellation maps, hash fingerprints, and time-offset matching.
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…
When a political movement believes that ignorance is strength
Initial results from scanning through Excel files belonging to 600 published scientific papers.
Pulling together disparate thoughts from two weeks wandering around SF
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?
OpenAI introduces GPT-Rosalind, a frontier reasoning model built to accelerate drug discovery, genomics analysis, protein reasoning, and scientific research workflows.
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.
The good educator insists on exercise, play, and plentiful sleep: "the great cordial of nature."
You should have gone before you left Earth
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…
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…
An interactive exploration of how GPS works: from the speed of light and trilateration to the cheap clock problem and Einstein's relativity corrections.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Neha Narula
The risk that cryptographically-relevant quantum computers materialize within the next few years is now high enough to be dispositive, unfortunately.
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
SLAC scientists observed an immune signaling complex forming inside cells for the first time, revealing insights that could guide new treatments.
One of my favorite pastimes is exploring old bookstores.
All modern language models sometimes act like they have emotions. What’s behind these behaviors? Our interpretability team investigates.
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…
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…
The race is on to test new vehicles in the underground Large Hadron Collider tunnel, ahead of major works starting this summer
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.
