The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,456 posts.
There are many ways we can talk about the deeper roots of the crisis of our time, setting out from many different vantage points; as Charles Fort pointed out, one measures a circle, beginning anywh…
Mitchell J. Feigenbaum , a mathematical physicist whose groundbreaking work on deterministic chaos influenced fields ranging from cardiology to cartography, died in New York City on June 30 at the age of 74. Feigenbaum was the Toyota Professor and director of the Center for Studies in Physics and Biology at…
On a Sunday morning in 2006, Cecilia Wu was mugged after leaving church. The pain became unbearable. Discouraged with her treatment options, Wu opted to participate in a pilot study at an orthopedics lab for patients with a full-thickness rotator cuff tear. “It was better than surgery,” Wu said.
Botanist Lincoln Taiz and colleagues argue against the suggestion that plants have neurobiology or consciousness.
As the costs of generating cleaner energy continue to fall, there is growing potential to speed up the transition to a zero-carbon future.
Queueing theory is the scientific study of waiting in line. It can apply to familiar lines like those at the grocery store or bank but also to things like web s
Study of thousands of players shows a simple online game works like a 'vaccine', increasing skepticism of fake news by giving people a “weak dose” of the methods behind disinformation.
Why are election polls often inaccurate? Why is racism wrong? Why are your assumptions often mistaken? The answers to all these questions and to many others have a lot to do with the non-ergodicity…
The IBM Research blog is the home for stories told by the researchers, scientists, and engineers inventing What’s Next in science and technology.
Can’t stop checking your phone, even when you’re not expecting any important messages? Blame your brain. A new study by researchers at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business has found that information acts on the brain’s dopamine-producing reward system in the same way as money or food. “To the brain, information is…
Awesome plan! But, how frequently are suitable targets expected to inter the inner solar system that would also be able to be reached from Earth’s L2 point?
Global population grew rapidly over the past century, but this period of fast growth is coming to an end.
The first time Vayu Maini Rekdal manipulated microbes, he made a decent sourdough bread. At the time, young Maini Rekdal, and most people who head to the kitchen to whip up a salad dressing, pop popcorn, ferment vegetables, or caramelize onions, did not consider the crucial chemical reactions behind these concoctions.
Map of the cognitive science, historical from 1930 to 2020 with prehistory and future prediction. Including Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics, Neuroscience, Biology and more.
A map of over 18,000 asteroids in the Solar System.
The other day someone pointed me to this article by James Kaufman and Vlad Glǎveanu in a psychology journal which begins:
[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness] I. “Culture is the secret of humanity’s success” sounds like the most vapid possible thesis. The Secret Of Our Success by …
A number of people have asked me to weigh in on this story in Quanta Magazine (based on this paper [ PDF version ] and also reported in t...
What is the age profile of populations around the world? How did it change and what will the age structure of populations look like in the future?
When Mark Massie and I started Transatomic in April 2011, the future of nuclear power was uncertain. In the wake of Fukushima, all bets for a nuclear renaissance were off, and starting a venture-funded advanced nuclear technology startup seemed like an unusual path, to say the very least. At the time, there were only…
Lambdaclass's blog about distributed systems, machine learning, compilers, operating systems, security and cryptography.
Around 80% of the world’s population lives in cities, towns, and suburbs rather than rural settlements. How has this changed, and what does urbanization look like across the world today?
In a previous article , I already introduced manifolds and their, ahem, manifold ways. Among the many interesting comments I received about this article, some were dealing with a basic question, namely how to measure the properties of a manifold. In this article, I want to present a few concepts from Morse theory …
Stephen Wolfram shares his memories of Murray Gell-Mann, leader in particle physics and Nobel Prize winner. Observations from years together in Caltech’s physics department and a selection of Gell-Mann’s contributions to physics.
