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Mechanical Watch
Interactive article explaining how a mechanical watch works.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 182 posts.
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Sound
Interactive article explaining how sound works.
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GPS
Interactive article explaining how GPS works.
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Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier
The Wirecutter’s review of the IKEA air purifier is a mishmash of scientific errors, shoddy testing, and self-contradictory logic.
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I should have loved biology
In biology class, biology wasn't presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing.
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We're going to need a lot of solar panels
The team at Terraform Industries is now 11 people working towards a near term future where atmospheric CO2, much of it centuries of unpriced industrial waste, becomes the preferred default source o…
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Lab Leak 2.0?
“If a $1000 PhD side project could kill millions of people, we must end viral [gain-of-function research], or it may end us.”
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What if regular exercise is the best cognitive exercise?
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,...
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Engine cooling – why rocket engines don’t melt
Rocket engines use a multitude of cooling concepts to keep them from melting themselves. Learn more about engine cooling in this article.
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Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
Aristocratic tutoring I: Explaining the decline of genius
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I stopped working on black hole information loss
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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You need to know what right-half-plane zeros are
Why some systems -- as a consequence of their intrinsic dynamics -- require a control action that first pushes them the wrong way and makes things worse before it gets better.
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Another scientific body has debunked bitemark analysis
Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, the criminal legal system is incapable of admitting its mistakes
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How many radioactive bananas would you need to power a house?
I heard that bananas are radioactive. If they are radioactive, then they radiate energy. How many bananas would you need to power a house?
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Consider working on genomics
Genomics needs more talented software engineers—here's why you should consider joining the field.
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Why are D-sharp and E-flat considered to be two different notes?
Why do the black keys on the piano each have two different names? If the posts on r/musictheory are any indication, this is a persistent point of confusion, especially when music theory teachers ge…
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Book Review: “Viral” by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley
Happy New Year, everyone! It was exactly two years ago that it first became publicly knowable—though most of us wouldn’t know for at least two more months—just how freakishly horr…
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I’m not convinced by the new lab leak debunking
It’s still an open question
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You're Not Losing Fat Because You're Eating Too Damn Much (2016)
The environmental and cognitive factors at play that have people eating more without realising.
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Thoughts on the potato diet
Nine observations about what happens when you eat only potatoes
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Planes are still decades away from displacing most bird jobs
Note: Parts of this essay were written by GPT-3, so it might contain untrue facts. Introduction Many of my friends are extremely excited by planes, rockets, and helicopters. They keep showing me videos of planes flying at enormous speed, rockets taking off from the ground while creating fiery infernos around them, and…
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The Color of Infinite Temperature
This is the color of something infinitely hot. Of course you’d instantly be fried by gamma rays of arbitrarily high frequency, but this would be its spectrum in the visible range. This…
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What happens when a reservoir goes dry
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] In June of 2022, the level in Lake Mead, the largest water reservoir in the United States formed by the Hoover Dam, reached yet another all-time low of 175 feet or 53 meters below full, a level that hasn’t been seen since the la
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Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off
The ultimate Trip To The Seaside Where Everything Went Wrong.
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Turning scrap copper into beautiful crystals
To grow copper acetate crystals, first prepare a saturated solution by reacting 10 g of scrap copper with 400 mL of white vinegar.
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Shor, I’ll do it (2007)
I’ve been talking a lot recently about how quantum algorithms don’t work. But last week JR Minkel, an editor at Scientific American, asked me to write a brief essay about how quantum al…
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Why isn't there a replication crisis in math?
The replication crisis is a major problem in medicine and social science; we know that a huge fraction of the published literature is outright wrong. But in math we don't seem to have a similar crisis, despite reasonably frequent minor errors in published papers. Why not, and what can this tell us about the fields…
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A high-dimensional sphere spilling out of a high-dimensional cube
Make a square, split each side into two halves, producing four cells. Put a circle into each cell such that it fills it completely. There is a small gap right in the middle of the square. Put a circle there again such that it touches the other four circles. The central circle is obviously inside the square, right?…