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Is soy a key driver of deforestation?
The world loses 5 million hectares of forest each year. What activities are driving this?
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 likelihood of unilateral solar geoengineering
People are starting to take geoengineering seriously.
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Previous Covid-19 may cut risk of reinfection 84%
People who had COVID-19 had an 84% lower risk of becoming reinfected and a 93% lower risk of symptomatic infection during 7 months of follow-up, according to findings from a large, multicenter study published late last week in The Lancet .
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Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman
KAHNEMAN: Could you elaborate on these possibilities? I mean, what's the distinction between predicting and setting up a range of possibilities?
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Toward a Better Music Theory (2013)
Update: a version of this post appeared on Slate.com. I seem to have touched a nerve with my rant about the conventional teaching of music theory and how poorly it serves practicing musicians. I th…
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Pink noise reduces REM sleep and may harm sleep quality
Potential sleep solutions like “pink noise” & other ambient noises worsened sleep quality, while earplugs protected sleep, in a study on the effects of aircraft noise on sleep.
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Deteriorating mitochondria linked to major depression in older adults
'One problem feeds into another, and make what began as a small issue into a much larger one'
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Earth's blobs are remnants of an ancient planetary collision
In the 1980s, geophysicists made a startling discovery: Two continent-sized blobs of unusual material were found deep near the center of the Earth, one beneath the African continent and one beneath the Pacific Ocean.Each blob is twice the size of the moon, and research over the last decade has shown that they are…
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Pharmacokinetics: Drug development's broken stair
There’s a blog post that floats around the Internet about the metaphor of the broken stair.
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The new Gödel Prize winner tastes great and is less filling
David Zuckerman The 2025 Gödel Prize has been awarded to Eshan Chattopadhyay and David Zuckerman for their paper Explicit two-source extrac...
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Enemy within: gut bacteria drive autoimmune disease
Bacteria in the small intestines can travel to other organs and trigger an autoimmune response, though vaccines or antibiotics can suppress this reaction.
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Losing the Nobel Prize
There’s a fascinating new book just now appearing in book stores, Losing the Nobel Prize, by astronomer Brian Keating. An excerpt from the book is available at Nautilus, with the title How My…
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Why Retired Aircraft are Stored in the Desert
By Mark W. Danielson Why are all these airliners in the desert? In a word, they’re being preserved. Aircraft bone yards are a testament to t...
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Recovering Iran’s NOUR 01 ‘Military Satellite’
Iran’s new military satellite, NOUR 01, most interesting fact may not be that it resembles a college engineering experiment but rather that it may have a connection to a Mexican military payl…
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Mars will have a lot of wicker furniture
So we've landed on Mars, now we need somewhere to sit. It's pretty expensive to ship furniture from earth, so time to start building some chairs.
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Who Expected That? Extreme close-ups create a Klein Bottle.
Suppose you go around taking extremely close-up black-and-white pictures of randomly chosen natural and unnatural objects (rocks, trees, streams, buildings, etc.). What do they look like? Well, eac…
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Under-Investigated Fields
Nominations for fields that are not being researched as much as they should be
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Top mathematical achievements of the last 5ish years, maybe
I have recently been going through my book Maths 1001 making updates for a forthcoming foreign edition (of which more in future). So I have been looking over mathematical developments since approxi…
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Hubble captures vivid auroras in Jupiter’s atmosphere
Astronomers are using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study auroras — stunning light shows in a planet’s atmosphere — on the poles of the largest planet in the Solar System, Jupiter. This observation programme is supported by measurements made by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, currently on its way to Jupiter.
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Feynman Lectures on the Strong Interactions
Available at the arXiv this evening is something quite fascinating. Jim Cline has posted course notes from Feynman’s last course, given in 1987-88 on QCD. There are also some audio files of a…
3807
The Ballad of TIGIT
2.8k words, 12 minute reading time
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Bumblebees Sleeping in Flowers (2012)
Above you can see photos of Garden bumblebee (Bombus hortorum) male falling asleep on a spike of lavander flower. I took the photograph in the evening, just as sunset was over and the temperature w…