Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,457 posts.
(On this page in Dutch I post daily bits of realistic but hopeful Corona news. Here is a somehat rough translation of an article on our immune system I posted there, because I think it might also be useful for people that don’t speak Dutch). Wednesday, April 1st COVID-19 can only live thanks to us. Viruses cannot…
A document from 1947 points towards an interesting Los Alamos policy: banning all spheres, innocuous or not, from technical areas.
If you've got a sharp eye and a knack for details, you might have noticed the sun coming from an unrealistic angle in most shaded relief maps: the north. In this article we explain why.
The other day I was amused to find a quote from Einstein , in 1936, about how hard it would be to quantize gravity: “like an attempt to breathe in empty space.” Eight decades later, I think we can still agree that it’s hard.
Greenland shark swimming under an ice flow in the Canadian arctic WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Drawing with the Fourier Series
John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh This page at http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies
Warp drives are staples of science fiction, and in principle could propel spaceships faster than the speed of light. However, there are many problems with constructing them in practice, such as the requirement for an exotic type of matter with negative energy. Nevertheless, physicists have been exploring the…
Something central, very central, is missing in historical accounts of scientific and technological discovery. The discourse and controversies focus on the role of luck as opposed to teleological programs (from telos, "aim"), that is, ones that rely on pre-set direction from formal science. This is a faux-debate: luck…
New technique efficiently converts human stem cells into insulin-producing cells
I. The Body Keeps The Score is a book about post-traumatic stress disorder. The author, Bessel van der Kolk, helped discover the condition and lobby for its inclusion in the DSM, and the brief fora…
This paper finds evidence that opioid availability decreases labor force participation while a large labor market shock does not influence the share of opioid abusers. We first identify the effect of availability on participation using the geographic variation in opioid prescription rates. We use a combination of the…
"How two ugly parents (mathematically) can make a beautiful baby"
Paper packaging offers a number of advantages over its plastic counterparts: It has a high recycling rate, lower CO₂ emissions, and lower disposal costs. However, it cannot yet be sealed without adhesives or layers of plastic—a disadvantage for manufacturing and recycling processes. In the PAPURE project, four…
How heavy can an element be? Ancient stars were capable of producing elements heavier than any element on the periodic table found naturally on Earth.
I have updated this article with new data, better code, and friendlier data visualization. You can read the new version here . Th...
AI can predict certain forms of esophageal and stomach cancer Michigan Medicine study says.
Base changing and other calculations
2011 was an important year in the history of psychology, especially social psychology. First, it became apparent that one social psychologist had faked results for dozens of publications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel). Second, a highly respected journal published an article with the incredible claim…
Regular readers who care about such things — I think there are about three of you — will recall that I have long had a thing about just how unsound many of the claims for the presence of power law distributions in real data are, especially those made by theoretical physicists, who, with some honorable exceptions…
Last month, a few days before NASA’s New Horizons probe made its historic flyby of Pluto, I posted a GIF of it doing so to Reddit .
Please click or tap in the gray square below. It will fill with a jolly tableau of colored disks—first big blue ones, then somewhat smaller purple ones, and eventually lots of tiny red dots.
In the ongoing effort to decarbonize U.S. energy production, one energy source often attracts great controversy.
