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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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Squawk bots: Can generative AI lead us to understanding animals?
The Earth Species Project is using large language models to develop tools to decipher animal communication.
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Any type of hormonal contraceptive may increase risk of breast cancer
An analysis of data by researchers at Oxford Population Health’s Cancer Epidemiology Unit has shown that use of progestogen-only hormonal contraceptives is associated with a 20-30% higher risk of breast cancer. The results are published in PLOS Medicine.
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What Is Dimensional Analysis?
Mathematics is famously concerned with numbers . However, most of the physical quantities that we encounter in everyday experience cannot be expressed as numbers alone.
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SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
UC Berkeley’s SETI@home, one of the most popular crowd-sourced research projects ever, turned up some 12 billion signals of interest. A lengthy analysis found 100 worth another look.
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Empathy and perspective taking: How social skills are built
Being able to feel empathy and to take in the other person's perspective – these are two abilities through which we understand what is going on in the other person's mind. Although both terms are in constant circulation, it is still unclear what exactly they describe and constitute. Scientists at the Max Planck…
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MIT and newly formed company launch effort to build compact tokamak pilot plant
Development of fusion power, a carbon-free, combustion-free source of energy, is now on a faster track toward realization, thanks to a collaboration between MIT and a new private company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems. CFS will join with MIT to carry out rapid, staged research leading to a new generation of fusion…
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Lunar Terminator Paradox
There's an optical illusion known by names like the "lunar terminator paradox". This has much discussion and descriptions online, but none made sense in my head, so I wrote this program to figure out what was going on. The paradox:
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Link between quantum physics and game theory found
A deep link between two seemingly unconnected areas of modern science - quantum physics and game theory - is described by researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Geneva in a paper published in Nature Communications.
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Split Brain Psychology
The strange interactions of Selfhood and Multiplicity
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Spiders eat astronomical numbers of insects
With a portfolio of over 2,700 journals and 220,000 books, Springer is a global leader in academic and scientific publishing.
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How to grow monosodium glutamate (MSG) crystals
Dissolve MSG in water to form a saturated solution. Wait for small MSG crystals to form. Then, tie it to a string to let it grow bigger.
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In Colorado, self-harm is leading cause of death in new mothers
Read the latest news stories from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Discover breakthroughs, events, and campus updates.
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Vitamin D supplements cut heart attack risk by 52%. Why?
A new randomized control trial tested personalized vitamin D supplementation based on blood test results.
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Earth is a ‘dwarf planet’ because it has not cleared its orbit
It turns out that Earth is not a planet. Asteroid 2016 H03, first spotted on April 27, 2016, by the Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid survey telescope…
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The rise and impending fall of the dental cavity
Another of history's great killers is on the chopping block
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Noether's Theorem in a Nutshell (2020)
Noether's theorem is an amazing result which lets physicists get conserved quantities from symmetries of the laws of nature. Time translation symmetry gives conservation of energy; space translation symmetry gives conservation of momentum; rotation symmetry gives conservation of angular momentum, and so on.
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Artificial photosynthesis can produce food without sunshine
Scientists are developing artificial photosynthesis to help make food production more energy-efficient here on Earth, and one day possibly on Mars
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Putin’s nuclear torpedo and Project Pluto
There was some wanking among the US foreign policy wonkosphere about the nuclear torpedo “accidentally” mentioned in a Russian news video. The device described in the leak is a megat…
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Discovering which parts of the brain are engaged when coding
Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) found that the Multiple Demand and Language brain systems encode specific code properties and uniquely align with machine-learned representations of code.
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Time to Abolish "Statistical Significance"?
The idea of "statistical significance" has been a basic concept in introductory statistics courses for decades. If you spend any time lookin...
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I used Benford’s law to analyze Covid-19 in 113 countries (2020)
Spoiler alert: I found some intriguing patterns…
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UNSW researchers set record in solar energy efficiency
Solar engineers from UNSW's Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics have set a new world-record in solar energy efficiency, achieving an electricity conversion rate of over 40%.
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Ontology of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics
Is mental illness a thing? What kind of thing is it?
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A young Venus had water for 2B years, habitable for longer than Mars
Venus hosts brutal conditions today, but the planet may have once been more hospitable to life.
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Researchers identify new type of superconductor
The history of superconducting materials has been a tale of two types: s-wave and d-wave. Now, Cornell researchers have discovered a possible third type: g-wave.