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Image of our satellite-choked night skies
To create this composite image, photographer Brendan Larsen captured almost 600 photographs over a two-hour period and then manually stitched them together. Thi
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,452 posts.
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Insects don't swarm at LED lights
Remember when you used to encounter swarms of insects around outdoor electric lights? Their well known attraction to outdoor lights is used by entomologists and moth lovers to conduct insect surveys. All you need is a light and a white sheet to see who’s flying at night.
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Verification Is Not Knowledge: Science needs more than answers
Science needs more than answers
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Distinct cellular and genetic differences in colorectal cancer in young patients
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers, along with Mass General Brigham researchers from the Gene Lay Institute of Immunology and Inflammation, and the Broad Institute, have uncovered biological clues to why colorectal cancer can behave more aggressively in younger people. Published today in Nature Medicine, the…
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Giant canyon on Mars is still tectonically active
Scientists at Columbia University and Imperial College London have found that the largest canyon system in the solar system is still active and shaping Mars today, billions of years after it first formed.
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SLAC researchers find proof of altermagnetism, a new magnetic phase
The team is the first to directly observe a unique property in an altermagnetic candidate material, key evidence of a new phase of magnetism.
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Mathematics has changed. Let's act like it
[This is a guest post by Frank Calegari. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Why we should not be sad The release by OpenAI on Octobe…
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Mystery of 60-Second Fluctuations in Power Grids Solved
Why do our grids show a brief spike in electricity demand every minute? A team led by Dirk Witthaut from Forschungszentrum Jülich has now demonstrated that this is due to regular power checks carried out by large-scale battery storage systems. These findings could help to make our electricity supply more robust, as…
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Early progress on accelerating drug development with Claude
Over the past several months, we’ve partnered with six organizations to accelerate curing disease. We’ve also started drug discovery efforts of our own, including programs for rare childhood forms of muscular dystrophy. In this post, we provide an update on our progress.
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Simple circuits can create complex behaviors
How simple circuits can create complex behaviors
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Three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics
OpenAI shares model results on the Kakeya conjecture, Exponential Time Hypothesis, and quantum chromodynamics—and how researchers can verify and build on them.
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How to grow a cacao tree at home (2024)
Growing chocolate at home might sound like a wild idea, right? Chocolate originates from cacao trees, which demand a tropical climate, specific growing conditions, and several years to reach maturity in order to flower and fruit to produce cacao pods. However, our CocoTerra founder, Nate Saal, took on the challenge…
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A 10-year-old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs for skin cancer diagnosis
I am a dermatologist. I tested the ability of GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 to diagnosis skin cancer and found that they were less accurate than I expected. I compared to a 10-year old CNN and to my surprise found that this was superior.
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Neural chip decodes interactions between brain regions
EPFL researchers have developed an implantable neural chip that tracks communication across brain regions, identifying cognitive and emotional states in real time.
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How is music possible
If you take a scene from a horror movie and add funny music, the killer suddenly looks hilarious. Isn’t it strange that that happens?
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New plastic pollution discovered: 'Plasticorals' coral rubble fused with plastic
‘Plasticorals’, coral rubble fused with plastic, are long-lasting reminders of human activity and highlight a potential threat to critical marine environments.
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Using thousands of AI agents to uncover new leads in biological data
See how OpenAI, PerturbAI, and Scripps Research used distributed AI agents to uncover promising research leads in data from millions of brain cells.
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Whatever Happened to Fire Escapes
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] The idea is simple: If there’s a fire in a tall building that blocks the main stairwell, people need an alternative way to evacuate, preferably one that is somewhat protected or at least far away from where the fire is happening
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The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable
UNEP's Emissions Gap Report 2026 warns that exceeding 1.5°C is inevitable and calls for urgent emissions cuts to limit warming and reverse the trend.
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Claude designed protein binders against scorpion neurotoxins
We asked an internal research Claude model to design minibinders (small proteins that attach tightly to a target) against scorpion neurotoxins.
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CERN and Mistral sign a statement of intent to establish a strategic partnership
CERN and Mistral sign a statement of intent to advance AI for science and strengthen Europe’s scientific and technological capabilities
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Will it be a golden age or a dark age for mathematics (and science)?
[This is a guest post by Francesco Maggi. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Large language models (LLMs) and the research systems b…
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GLP-1 may slow biological aging
A new study provides the first clinical evidence that popular semaglutide drugs, like Ozempic or Wegovy, could slow down processes associated with biological aging.
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Making chicken transparent using Dorito dust
Modifying the optical properties of biological tissues with tartrazine
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Designing more efficient quantum circuits with Claude
Working largely on its own, Claude designed quantum circuits that improve on the best published versions, in some cases by an order of magnitude or more.
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The Economic Complexity of the Western Roman Empire
I am one of those people who think about the Roman Empire daily – possibly out of my worrying addiction to Crusader Kings III and similar games. I also spent some time working on estimating economic complexity , a neat measure that can be used to explain economic development trajectories. One fateful day, I was…
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Wireless magnetic millirobots that deliver medicine inside the beating heart
Hopkins engineers have created robots the size of a pencil tip intended to travel through the body to deliver medicine to infections inside a beating heart