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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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Ants: Who looks after the injured in a colony?
Carpenter ants amputate the injured legs of fellow ants to minimise the risk of infection. A new study involving a Würzburg researcher shows that this task is primarily carried out by ants switching from indoor to outdoor duties.
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Why you get ideas in the shower
[This is an excerpt from the Dance of the Possible: the mostly honest, completely irreverent guide to creativity] When you are known as a writer about creativity, people send you interesting things…
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Romeo and Julia, Where Romeo Is Basic Statistics
Hello there. This is an open access book entitled: “Romeo and Julia, where Romeo is Basic Statistics”. So I guess it’s gonna be about a programming language named Julia and its usage for basic statistics.
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Crows’ ability to discriminate between languages
That crows can recognize humans faces (and other physical attributes) has been a staple of our experiences with them for thousands of years. It’s part of what has allowed them to take s…
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World's first white laser
Researchers at ASU have proven that semiconductor lasers are capable of emitting over the full visible color spectrum, which is necessary to produce a white laser.
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ML is useful for many things, but not for predicting scientific replicability
How the veneer of AI is used to legitimize awful ideas
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Jacob Collier’s four magical chords
Jacob Collier is the internet’s favorite musical virtuoso. Here’s his mostly acapella arrangement of a Christmas carol called “In The Bleak Midwinter.” The most remarkable p…
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Mike Levin on using bioelectricity to study how cells form (2019)
By Lindsay Brownell At first glance, the lab of Wyss Associate Faculty member Mike Levin looks like any standard biology lab: graduate students in white lab coats pipette liquids into tubes at benches surrounded by centrifuges, freezers, racks of graduated cylinders hanging over sinks, and shelves of petri dishes…
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Ice Spikes: Strange things you can find in your freezer
Temperature is certainly a factor when growing ice spikes, and we have done experiments that show that spikes are more likely to form when the temperature is just below freezing (see the graphs below). I'm not entirely sure why this is so, but I suspect that the ice tube freezes shut before the tube gets very long if…
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Foraging humans, mammals and birds who live in the same place behave similarly
Foraging humans find food, reproduce, share parenting, and even organise their social groups in similar ways as surrounding mammal and bird species, depending on where they live in the world, new research has found.
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The Apollo 11 Moon Landing: Spacecraft Design Then and Now
To mark the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, we revisit a first-hand account of designing the Lunar Module digital autopilot, and compare the approach used then with the way it could be done today.
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Sun's path June to December (Photo)
Last June I placed some photographic film into a tin cannister with a small hole punched into its side. The tin cannister was then attached to a clothes pole in my backgarden and left.
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Potato diet community trial
In French, the word for potato is pomme de terre. This literally translates to apple of the earth. By this logic, potatoes are the lowest-hanging fruit of all. More seriously: We keep getting more …
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World Population Growth
Explore global and national data on population growth, demography, and how they are changing.
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Why is there no semantic ontology of sentiment in academic citations?
About a million years ago, I was discussing the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) ontology with its early proponents. It allowed you to define a machine-readable semantic relationship like "Alice is married to Bill" and "Bill is Carol's child" and "Carol works for David". That sort of thing. At the time, all the FOAF…
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How do traffic signals work? (2019)
If you live in a major city, I can take a pretty good guess at one of your most common frustrations: traffic. In city driving, the journey is rarely better than the destination. In most cases, we just want to get where we’re going. Traffic is not just frustrating, but it has consequences to the envi
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No, negative masses have not revolutionized cosmology
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science