Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,419 posts.
Being multilingual alters your experience of time (2018)
A new study shows that bilinguals do indeed think about time differently, depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events.
IBM Building First Universal Quantum Computers for Business and Science
Learn about IBM's performance and progress to become a more innovative and focused company.
Medication errors found in half of surgeries
The first study to measure the incidence of medication errors and adverse drug events during the perioperative period has found that some sort of mistake or adverse event occurred in every second operation and in 5 percent of observed drug administrations, according to information gathered from 275 operations at…
Elite scientists are more likely to have a hobby in the arts and crafts
Highly-accomplished scientists are more likely to have an artsy hobby than the average scientist. And Nobel prize winners are even more likely.
Physicists generate the first snapshots of fermion pairs
MIT physicists captured the first images that directly show the pairing of fermions. The snapshots of particles pairing up in a cloud of atoms can provide clues to how electrons pair up in a superconducting material.
American Astronomical Society (AAS) journals transition to open access
The American Astronomical Society (AAS) is an international non-governmental organization with a mission to enhance and share humanity’s scientific understanding of the universe as a diverse and inclusive astronomical community.
2010 Physics Nobel Prize (Graphene)
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2010 was awarded jointly to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene"
The Science of Word Recognition
Reviews the history of why psychologists moved from a word shape model of word recognition to a letter recognition model.
Happiness and Life Satisfaction (2017)
Self-reported life satisfaction differs widely between people and between countries. What explains these differences?
James Randi: This Cruel Farce Has To Stop
James Randi Educational Foundation
If the Earth Stood Still
Learn how Earth's geography and the shape of the globe would transform if its rotation stopped. ArcGIS was used to perform complex raster analysis and volumetric computations, generating maps that visualize the results.
Why aeroplane wings aren't dimpled like golf balls
Before explaining the purpose of dimples, we first need to understand the aerodynamic properties of a sphere. Let us start by looking at a smooth sphere without any dimples, like a ping-pong ball. If we lived in an ideal world without any friction, the air flowing around a smooth sphere would behave like that shown in…
Flickr reverse engineers the shapes of continents, countries, cities, and neighborhoods.
Almost ninety million, as I write this, and the numbers keep growing especially as nearly every new smart phone released to market has not only a camera but also the ability to capture location information with it.
Link between health spending and life expectancy: US is an outlier (2017)
Americans have a lower life expectancy than people in other rich countries despite paying much more for healthcare. What factors may explain this?
At peak, Spain gets 53% of its energy from wind
Ok, not all the time, but last weekend at 5:50am on Sunday morning (8th Nov) Spain set a new record, hitting 53.7% of its energy requirements being supplied by wind energy. As you can see from the graph above, the amount of electricity being supplied by wind, the light green portion of the graph, doesn’t […]
The Fourth Quadrant: a Map of the Limits of Statistics (by Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge; statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the "logic of science"; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can't be a modern intellectual and not think…
Researchers Create Gold Aluminum, Black Platinum, Blue Silver
For both new and returning visitors, the University’s News Center is a digital hub for the latest news stories showcasing the research, accomplishments, expertise, and perspectives of the Rochester community. In addition, the News Center features University announcements and updates from newsrooms and publications…