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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,457 posts.
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The Relationship Between Profanity and Honesty (2017)
There are two conflicting perspectives regarding the relationship between profanity and dishonesty. These two forms of norm-violating behavior share common causes, and are often considered to be positively related. On the other hand, however, profanity is often used to express one’s genuine feelings, and could…
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Unexpected link between pure mathematics and genetics
An interdisciplinary team of mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and medical scientists have uncovered an unexpected link between pure mathematics and genetics.
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Air Pollution Linked to Increased Mental Health Outpatient Visits
More pollution in the air could be linked to higher rates of mental health service utilization, researchers at the Yale School of Public Health found in a new
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Mindblowing dissertations
We don’t generally see PhD dissertations as an exciting genre to read, and that is wholly our loss. As the…
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Physicists discover a “family” of robust, superconducting graphene structures
MIT physicsts identified new multilayered configurations of graphene that can be twisted and stacked to elicit robust superconductivity at low temperatures. The study establishes these configurations as the first known “family” of multilayer magic-angle superconductors.
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Engineers put Leonardo da Vinci’s bridge design to the test
MIT engineers have analyzed a bridge design proposed by Leonardo da Vinci, and found that it would indeed have stood solidly, had it ever been built.
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A Random Walk in 10 Dimensions (2021)
The geometry of random walks in high dimensions provides the power behind deep learning and may be the secret to intelligence.
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Naturally Occurring Quasicrystals
I love quasicrystals—like crystals, but with patterns that never repeat, like Penrose tiles. But they’ve very rare in nature. They’re created only by the most exotic and violent e…
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Measuring the doppler shift of WWVB during a flight
We advertise 100 kHz as the lower edge of HackRF Pro ’s operating frequency range, but that isn’t a hard limit. While working on the design, I realized that it should work fairly well to pick up longwave time signals such as WWVB , broadcast at 60 kHz from Colorado, USA.
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Study: Most Dog Breeds Highly Inbred
UC Davis study shows most dogs are highly inbred, which affects health.
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Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight
If you've been reading popular science websites or magazines lately, then you may have heard the news: we don't understand how airplanes work. For example:…
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Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist (2012)
[ An updated treatment of some of this material appears in Chapter 2 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook, also mirrors a 2022 article in Nature Physics . . ]
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Don't Become a Scientist (1999)
Don't Become a Scientist!
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Three Planets in Habitable Zone of Nearby Star
A team of astronomers has combined new observations of Gliese 667C with existing data from HARPS at ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope in Chile, to reveal a system with at least six planets. A record-breaking three of these planets are super-Earths lying in the zone around the star where liquid water could exist, making them…
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A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life
RAND researchers present a strategy for the United States to prevent the creation of mirror life by anyone, anywhere.
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Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'
Chronicling the design of the spacecraft and systems depicted in the book, Delta-v, by Daniel Suarez:
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How thick is a three-sided coin?
Matt Parker, employing the enviably pithy prose typical of a content creator forged on the unforgiving fires of social media, asked the simple question back in 2018: > How thick is a three-sided coin? Translated into mathematician-ese, this means > What aspect ratio of a flipped coin leads to the chance of landing on…
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Ancient Egyptian Stone-Drilling (1983)
<p>More than most technical procedures in the ancient world, drilling of hard stone such as quartz and granite has evoked […]</p>
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The Art of Fugue – Contrapunctus I (2021)
JS Bach’s last set of works, collectively titled The Art of Fugue, was published shortly after his death. It was not a big hit. Dense counterpoint was deeply unfashionable at that time, as We…
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A brief history of oral peptides
Semaglutide is a peptide. Your stomach’s entire job is to destroy peptides.
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The Molecular Basis of Long Covid Brain Fog
Researchers use a specialized brain imaging technique to identify a potential biomarker and therapeutic target of Long COVID