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The True Shape of Io's Steeple Mountain
Popular images of the Jovian moon Io’s famed Steeple Mountain turn out to be misinformed. How the Inquisitive team figured that out, and what Steeple Mountain really looks like!
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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UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low
Sometimes I pride myself on my taking an intellectual strategy of tackling neglected important questions.
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How bad are satellite megaconstellations for astronomy?
Over the last number of years, our planet has become encircled by Starlink, OneWeb, and other “megaconstellation” satellites.
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The case against plant consciousness
Botanist Lincoln Taiz and colleagues argue against the suggestion that plants have neurobiology or consciousness.
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Mild Covid-19 induces lasting antibody protection
People who have had mild illness develop antibody-producing cells that can last lifetime
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Passive radiative cooling ceramic with high solar reflectivity
A significant breakthrough in developing a passive radiative cooling (PRC) material has been announced by researchers at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) . The findings have just been published in the prestigious scientific journal Science titled “ Hierarchically structured passive radiative cooling ceramic with…
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The Point of the Banach Tarski Theorem (2015)
One of my favourite Limited Audience Jokes (although technically it's actually a riddle) goes:
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Study reveals mammoth as key food source for ancient Americans
Scientists have uncovered the first direct evidence that ancient Americans relied primarily on mammoth and other large animals for food. Their research sheds new light on both the rapid expansion of humans throughout the Americas and the extinction of large ice age mammals.
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Model built by researchers suggests coronavirus outbreak began in November
The coronavirus epidemic started one month earlier than is commonly reported and has yet to be brought under control, a new disease-transmission model created by University of Toronto researchers suggests. Using open access data that are updated daily, the model replicates epidemiological scenarios and allows…
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The Breeder's Equation
R is the response to selection, S is the selection differential, and h 2 is the narrow-sense heritability. This is the workhorse equation for quantitative genetics. The selective differential S, is the difference between the population average and the average of the parental population (some subset of the total…
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How far behind a plane is its noise?
If you’re ever near a relatively low flying airplane, you may have noticed that it sounds like it’s in a different spot in the sky than where it actually is. You can hear the loud engines, and your ears tell you it should be in one place, but your eyes tell you it’s clearly well ahead of its noise. It’s a funny visual…
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The Future of Space Launch Is Near
Until recently, the future of space launch looked pretty much like its past. For over 50 years, humanity has blasted thousands of spacecraft and satellites into space. Every launch vehicle that carried them aloft has ended up littering the planet with the broken, twisted remains of expended rocket stages. The scenario…
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How Correlated Are You?
This post is an offshoot from Chapter 1 of Probably Overthinking It, which is available for pre-order now! Suppose you measure the arm and leg lengths of 4082 people. You would expect those measurements to be correlated, and you would be right. In the ANSUR-II dataset, among male members of the armed forces, this…
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All-natural geoengineering with Frank Herbert's Dune
Can We Terraform the Earth Using Life Itself?
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Endemic Pathogens Are Making You Crazy and Then Killing You
In February 2022, Jim Keller organized a scientific anarchism event in Woodside, California. Scientific anarchism, a term borrowed from the controversial philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, concerns the way science is performed in the laboratory and the way that ideas are generated, refuted, and incorporated into…
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CRISPR Gene Editing
CRISPR is a recently discovered genomic tool that could potentially revolutionize genetic modification and editing, including gene silencing, editing, activating, and other crucial functions. It has made a big splash in the synthetic biology community, and mentions of CRISPR have started cropping up elsewhere in the…
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Analyzing my DNA
I recently bought 23andme [http://23andme.com], a service which requires you to send off a DNA sample, and in return performs a series of interesting tests concerning your health and ancestry. I bought the test as a birthday present to myself, somewhat because I was interested in the results,
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Perfect colors, captured with one ultra-thin lens
No need for color correction—Harvard physicists’ flat optics, using nanotechnology, gets it right the first time
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I wrote a short story about von Neumann probes
"They would have eaten our whole house and probably the whole cul-de-sac if we didn't find those jelly beans."
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The Tarnished Moon
Remote sensing observations reveal the presence of ferric iron in the form of the mineral hematite at high latitudes on the Moon, possibly the product of reaction of ferrous iron on the Moon with oxygen from the Earth�s upper atmosphere.
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Synthetic Cartilage (2020)
The thin, slippery layer of cartilage between the bones in the knee is magical stuff: strong enough to withstand a person’s weight, but soft and supple enough to cushion the joint against impact, over decades of repeat use. That combination of soft-yet-strong has been hard to reproduce in the lab. But now, Duke…
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How to Recognize Woodpeckers by Their Drumming Sounds
Woodpecker drumming may not be as immediately distinctive as birdsong—but by carefully listening to speed, duration, and rhythm you can still tell many species apart. Here are some tips.
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Linguistics Using Category Theory (2018)
Note: These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards . They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in…