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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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Flying the Unflyable Plane: The near crash of Air Astana flight 1388
A deeper analysis of the events which caused a Kazakh airliner to go out of control over Portugal in November 2018.
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How MTV's “16 and Pregnant” May Have Reduced Teen Pregnancy
Apparently MTV broadcasts a show called "16 and Pregnant," in which each show tracks a pregnant teen-ager through the final months of pregna...
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The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
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Days of Awe: The clinical trial drug that might save my husband's life
"G’mar Chatimah Tovah” – May you be inscribed into the Book of Life
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The Geometry of Color Perception
The previous pages have explained three very different methods for defining a color: (1) the measurement of the color stimulus as a spectral emittance or reflectance curve in colorimetry ; (2) the proportional responses to the stimulus by the L , M and S cones, represented as a chromaticity diagram ; and (3) the…
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Scientists document two separate reservoirs of latent HIV in patients
This research, led by UNC School of Medicine scientists Laura Kincer, Sarah Joseph,and Ron Swanstrom with international collaborators, shows that in addition to HIV’s ability to lay dormant in the blood/lymphoid system, the virus may also lay dormant in the central nervous system, delineating another challenge in…
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$5 whale listening hydrophone making workshop
Whale songs were first noticed by accident, when analysts tracking Russian submarines at the height of the cold war heard cetacean interference instead. An engineer sent some recordings to Roger Payne, a biologist friend of his, who did something that proved pivotal: he played the hours-long recordings on his hi-fi at…
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An aerospace engineer explains fireworks
A quick look at the ballistics and stability of aerial fireworks.
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The Gravo-Thermal Catastrophe
In 1962, V. A. Antonov did some remarkable simulations showing that in Newtonian mechanics, gravitating systems can violate the usual rules of thermodynamics. Instead of reaching equilibrium they c…
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Apollo 11 and Other Screw-Ups
(A paper presented to the 27th annual Guidance and Control Conference of the American Astronautical Society (AAS), in Breckenridge, Colorado on February 6, 2004, and designated AAS 04-064. This version includes additional illustrations and comments, and several minor corrections.)
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Open-Sourcing Our Reactor Design, and the Future of Transatomic
When Mark Massie and I started Transatomic in April 2011, the future of nuclear power was uncertain. In the wake of Fukushima, all bets for a nuclear renaissance were off, and starting a venture-funded advanced nuclear technology startup seemed like an unusual path, to say the very least. At the time, there were only…
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Predicting Properties of Molecules with Machine Learning
Posted by George Dahl, Research Scientist, Google Brain TeamRecently there have been many exciting applications of machine learning (ML) to chemist...
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Do trees communicate? Networks, networks
I was unfamiliar with how mycorrhizal networks connect the roots of trees, facilitating the sharing of resources. Dr. Suzanne Simard writes: Graduate student Kevin Beiler has uncovered the extent a…
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How we gave colors names
“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter in…
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The origins of the steam engine (2023)
An essay with interactive animated diagrams
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Rotating molecules enable near 100% efficient OLEDs
Scientists have discovered a group of materials which could pave the way for a new generation of high-efficiency lighting, solving a quandary which has inhibited the performance of display technology for decades. The development of energy saving concepts in display and lighting applications is a major focus of…
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Closed access means people die
Jenny Molloy and I have been representing the Open Knowledge Foundation at the Open Science Summit and we presented the Open Research Reports (ORR) project. The slides we used are at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6280676/orr.pptx . I expect that at some stage we’ll be on the video record (last year’s was very useful and…
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Can optical illusions fool AI too?
Deep neural networks (DNN) have made the news recently for their application as a predictive software used to create convincing fake videos of politicians and celebrities. You may not be aware, however, that you have most likely already used the same technology in a much less controversial form: the translation app on…
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Yellowstone National Park’s Sound and Video Libraries
Yellowstone National Park maintains a collection of sounds and videos taken in the park that are in the public domain and free for anyone to use. The collection
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The Importance of Acoustics in Food Storage
Deep in the archives of San Francisco-based Aquarius Records, buried between several days’ worth of “laptop glitchery” and “brutal industro-crunch,” lies this gem: Insect Noise in Stored Foodstuffs , (INRA, 2000, CD, 19:98).
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Edward C. Stone, 1936-2024
Caltech mourns the loss of Edward C. Stone, leader of humanity’s first foray into interstellar space.
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Rendezvous with Rama
Some musings on the novel "Rendezvous with Rama".
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