Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,038 posts.
I'm always in the market for surprising facts. One of my favorites is that the color blue is always out of focus for the human eye. It's hard to believe since it appears that we see blue clearly, but it's astonishing when shown an example. Here', I'll explain why we're unable to focus on blue, and show examples of…
Warning: Math, Handwaving I spent a lot of time doodling in middle school instead of whatever middle schoolers are supposed to do. Somewhere between the Cool S’s and Penrose triangles I found a neat way to fill up graph paper by combining and copying squares.
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
https://www.looduskalender.ee/n/en - check these as well (not so exotic, but still a lot of fun)
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.
Can optical illusions take you outside the human color gamut?
File this under highly speculative. I’m sure there is better research on this topic than this writing This past week, for no obvious reason,...
Rocket engines use a multitude of cooling concepts to keep them from melting themselves. Learn more about engine cooling in this article.
A mysterious new model currently in testing on Google’s AI Studio is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition but it is also showing signs of spontaneous, abstract, symbolic reasoning.
An Intuitive and Visual Guide to Maxwell's Equations
The risk that cryptographically-relevant quantum computers materialize within the next few years is now high enough to be dispositive, unfortunately.
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A Reddit poster finds an ancient jaw in his parents' new travertine. It may be more common than most people imagine.
Springer was very generous with free access to their material for some months, but this period has unfortunately passed. You can no longer access the following books for free, but you can still support them by purchasing the ones you find useful. 🙏😇
Though wind and solar continue to carve out larger and larger shares of world energy supply, the modern world still runs on petroleum, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov was one of the giants of 20th-century mathematics. I’ve always found it amazing that the same man was responsible both for establishing the foundations of …
This week, I was thrilled to read about the first well-documented case of explicit academic fraud in the artificial intelligence community. I hope that this is the beginning of a trend, and that other researchers will be inspired by their example and follow up by engaging in even more blatant...
Peter Denton, Stephen Parke, Xining Zhang, and I have just uploaded to the arXiv the short unpublished note “Eigenvectors from eigenvalues”. This note gives two proofs of a general eige…
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, the number 42 is the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”. But he didn’t say wha…
Stevan Harnad’s “Subversive Proposal” came of age last year. I’m now teaching students younger than Stevan’s proposal, and yet, very little has actually changed in these 21 years. On the contrary, one may even make the case that while efforts […] <a class="more-link"…
In 2012, I signed the Cost of Knowledge pledge, and stopped reviewing for, and publishing in, all Elsevier journals. In the four years since, I’ve adhered closely to this policy; with a coupl…
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] This is the Puente Hills Landfill outside of Los Angeles, California. The first truckload of trash was dumped here in 1957, and the trucks just kept coming. For more than five decades, if you threw something away in LA County, t
I got my first telescope in 2017, in time for the Great American Eclipse. I started paying attention to the concept of light pollution, including finding detailed maps of what places had high or lo…
Snowflake macro photography: how to take closeup images of real snow crystals with simple optical add-on for compact camera? In this article, you'll find detailed description of shooting and photo processing techniques, scheme of optical add-on, snowflake pictures gallery, tips and tricks, useful links. Author: Alexey…
I’m delighted to be investing more in Helion. Helion is by far the most promising approach to fusion I’ve seen. David and Chris are two of the most impressive founders and builders (in the sense...
