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World's oldest periodic table chart found in St. Andrews
A periodic table chart discovered at the University of St Andrews is thought to be the oldest in the world.
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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PyTorch for Scientific Computing: Quantum Mechanics Example Part 2
This is the second post on using Pytorch for Scientific computing. I'm doing an example from Quantum Mechanics. In this post we go through the formulas that need to coded and write them up in PyTorch and give everything a test.
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Neuroscientists roll out first comprehensive atlas of brain cells
Researchers funded by the federal BRAIN Initiative have mapped all the cell types — more than a hundred — in the motor cortex of the brain
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“The Great Plate Count Anomaly” that is no more
by Gemma Reguera — For over a century, microbiologists have been using growth media solidified with agar to culture microbes from environmental samples. Individual cells are easily separated on th…
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An intutive counterexample to the axiom of choice
Time for some hard-core geeking-out. This comment on HN by /u/jiggawatts struck me as a brilliant idea: it's an intuitive counter-example t...
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Nuclear power is too safe
If you don't pursue safety in a way that is cost effective, you are killing people.[David Okrent]
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Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience
Transit time of 6,600 years; that long ago, around 4,600 BCE, the state of human civilization was devoid of technology. Hard to imagine what would happen back home on Earth during a journey of that length.
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Physically Demanding Work Tied to Male Fertility
Occupational factors associated with higher sperm concentrations and serum testosterone
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Confronting the Credibility Gap for Crewed Exploration of Mars
Confronting the Credibility Gap for Crewed Exploration of Mars (Notes from talk on September 22, 2016, at the Mars Society Conference. ...
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Carl Sagan, nuking the moon, and not nuking the moon
Most of us go about our lives comforted by the thought “I would never drop a nuclear weapon on the moon.” The truth is that given a lot of power, a nuclear weapon, and a lot of extremely specific c…
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If the number of children is not growing, why is the population still increasing
50 years ago, the total fertility rate was five. This figure has more than halved. Yet the global population is still rising — why?
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High Altitude Living – 8,000 ft and above (2021)
Living at high altitude reduces risk of dying from heart disease: Low oxygen may spur genes to create blood vessels. Summary: Researchers have found that people living at higher altitudes have a lower chance of dying from heart disease and live longer. Jeanne and I live at 8,400 feet (2.560 meters)
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Richard Dawkins' response to “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?"
Essentialism—what I’ve called "the tyranny of the discontinuous mind"—stems from Plato, with his characteristically Greek geometer’s view of things. For Plato, a circle, or a right triangle, were ideal forms, definable mathematically but never realised in practice. A circle drawn in the sand was an imperfect…
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IBM Quantum System Two
IBM kicked off the IBM Quantum Summit 2022, announcing new breakthrough advancements in quantum hardware and software and outlining its pioneering vision for quantum-centric supercomputing.
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The examples in the textbooks are not representative of real world problems
Bill Harris points to this cartoon from Randall Munroe. I think he (Munroe) is really on to something here. Not about Bayes’s theorem but about the sorts of examples that are in textbooks.
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Neurons might contain something within them
Neurons might contain something incredible within them.
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Knowledge and memory
The what is connected to the when.
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Generating true random numbers from bananas
It was a dreary afternoon in Milan last year when, procrastinating on studying, I was struck by a flash of genius. “What would happen if I made a banana-powered random number generator?“. I immediately went to tell my roommate, who was also an electronic engineer.He looked me in the face and burst out laughing. At ……
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Study identifies main culprit behind lithium metal battery failure
UC San Diego researchers have discovered the root cause of why lithium metal batteries fail, challenging a long-held belief in the field. The study presents new ways to boost battery performance and brings research a step closer to incorporating lithium anodes into rechargeable batteries.
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How the brain navigates cities
An MIT study suggests our brains are not optimized to calculate the shortest possible route when navigating on foot. Instead, pedestrians use vector-based navigation, choosing “pointiest” paths that point most directly toward their destination, even if the routes are longer.
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Breakthrough Announced in Dark Matter Detection Technology
This week, the Axion Dark Matter Experiment (ADMX) announced that it has achieved the necessary sensitivity to “hear” the telltale signs of dark matter axions.
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Juice rerouted to Venus in first lunar-Earth flyby
ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) has successfully completed a world-first lunar-Earth flyby, using the gravity of Earth to send it Venus-bound, on a shortcut to Jupiter through the inner Solar System.
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MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science
When a political movement believes that ignorance is strength
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‘Negative Mass’ Created at Washington State University
PULLMAN, Wash. – Washington State University physicists have created a fluid with negative mass, which is exactly what it sounds like. Push it, and unlike every physical object in the world we know, it doesn’t accelerate in the direction it was pushed. It accelerates backwards.
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Battery-free self-powered sensor harvests magnetic energy
MIT researchers designed a self-powering, battery-free, energy-harvesting sensor. Using the framework they developed, they produced a temperature sensor that can harvest and store the energy from the magnetic field that exists in the open air around a wire.
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If you put your hand in the Large Hadron Collider...
Several physicists weigh in on what would happen if you were to place your hand in the proton stream of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. There’s not a definit