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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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More green spaces linked to slower biological aging
More green spaces were associated with slower biological aging, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. People who lived near more green spaces were biologically 2.5 years younger, on average, than those who live near less greenness.
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How Potatoes Evolved
Crisps and mash owe their existence to a series of precise events that took place nine million years ago.
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Blood Pumping Mechanism of the Hoof (2020)
Blood is pumped from the heart through arteries to the hoof and is assisted in its return through a “pumping mechanism” in the hoof. This mechanism is necessary due to the position of the hoof in relation to the heart. There are no muscles in the lower leg or hoof to aid in the return of venous blood to the heart…
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What is the roundest country?
We can define roundness in many ways. For example, as you may know, the circle is the shape that given a fixed perimeter maximizes the area. This definition has many problems. One of the problems is that countries generally have chaotic perimeters (also known as borders), so they tend to be much longer than they seem…
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Why cities keep growing, corporations and people die, and life gets faster
This is in complete contrast to companies. The Google boys in the back garage so to speak with ideas of the search engine, were no doubt promoting all kinds of crazy ideas and maybe having even crazy people around them.
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Announcing the New PubMed
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is replacing the current version of the PubMed database with a newly re-designed version. The new version is now live and can be found at You can still acces…
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Food Order Has Significant Impact on Glucose and Insulin Levels (2015)
Eating protein and vegetables before carbohydrates leads to lower post-meal glucose and insulin levels in obese patients with type 2 diabetes.
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Comb jellies proven to be the sibling group to all other animals
New research proves comb jellies are a unique lineage or “sibling group” whose ancestors diverged before the common ancestor of all other animals.
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Random Points on a Sphere
John D. Cook, Greg Egan, Dan Piponi and I had a fun mathematical adventure on Twitter. It started when John Cook wrote a program to compute the probability distribution of distances $latex |xy R…
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How to put 170 atoms in an atom
You might already know that atoms are mostly empty space. Physical size behaves a bit weirdly at the atomic scale, but essentially the radius of an atom’s nucleus is tens of thousands of times smal…
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Physicists produce neutrino images of Milky Way galaxy
Physics researchers from Drexel University at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory led the production of the unique neutrino-based image of the Milky Way Galaxy using particles of matter instead of the usual electromagnetic energy.
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Google offers researchers 1 billion computing core-hours
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
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Genetics and Eugenics in Frank Herbert's DUNE
Observations on Frank Herbert’s 𝐷𝑢𝑛𝑒 series—the notes are probably overstated, the Butlerian Jihad was 𝑛𝑜𝑡 a robot uprising seeking to exterminate humanity, and precognition/prescience in the Dune universe appears to work backwards allowing for retro-causality and stable time-loops as exemplified by Leto II’s Golden…
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Mishap during experiment led quantum researchers to crack a 58-year-old puzzle
A mishap during an experiment led UNSW quantum computing researchers to crack a mystery that had stood since 1961.
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Andrew Wiles on the struggle and beauty of mathematics
Roger Highfield explores the beauty of mathematics at a recent event at the Science Museum
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An Introduction to Lagrange Multipliers
Lagrange multipliers are used in multivariable calculus to find maxima and minima of a function subject to constraints (like "find the highest elevation along the given path" or "minimize the cost of materials for a box enclosing a given volume"). It's a useful technique, but all too often it is poorly taught and…
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EVA 23: Exploring the frontier
Luca Parmitano's blog
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Chemical flavorings found in e-cigarettes linked to lung disease
A Harvard study links chemicals used in flavored electronic cigarettes to cases of severe respiratory disease.
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Fossil CO2 emissions decrease by 0.4% in 2026
Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels are projected to decrease by 0.4% in 2026 – driven by expansion of solar and wind power and the Iran conflict – according to new research by the Global
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A 50-year quest: My personal journey with the second law of thermodynamics
Follow Stephen Wolfram's evolution of research on the 2nd Law from early interest as a 12-year-old to his current findings in the Wolfram Physics Project. View a large collection of images of early and published works.
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Why are most climate models in Fortran?
An examination of the software that powers modern Climate simulations.
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Dopamine Fasting: A Maladaptive Fad (2020)
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in the body’s system for reward and pleasure. A recent trend has people avoiding stimulating activities in the belief that doing so allows the body to rese...
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The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences (2016)
[Content Warning: Trying to understand the contents of this essay may be mind-warping. Proceed with caution. Featured image credit: Paul Nylander] Friends, right here and now, one quantum away, the…
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Why it takes so long to get data back from New Horizons
As I write this post, New Horizons is nearing the end of a weeklong optical navigation campaign. The last optical navigation images in the weeklong series…
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Where to hate daylight saving time and where to love it
Update: a newer version of this little project helps you make your complaints about daylight saving time—whether they’re for or against it—with clearer messages about whether keeping DST, abolishing it, or making it permanent would be best for your daylight preferences. Give it a whirl over at Observable.
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Time Travel (2006)
Last time we talked about free will, superintelligent predictors, and Dr. Evil planning to destroy the earth from his moon base. Today I'd like to talk about a more down-to-earth topic: time travel. The first point I have to make is one that Carl Sagan made: we're all time travelers—at the rate of one second per…