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How to start a rocket engine
This article answeres the questions of how to start a rocket engine and takes you on a deep dive into spark plugs, torch ignitors and more.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 440 posts.
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The story of titanium
The earth contains a lot of titanium - it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust.
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Scientists may have found mechanism behind cognitive decline in aging
Scientists have discovered what they believe to be the central mechanism behind cognitive decline associated with normal aging.
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UCLA computer grad constructs “crown jewel of cryptography”
Aayush Jain’s dissertation, “Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Studied Assumptions,” established the feasibility of mathematically rigorous software obfuscation from well-studied hardness conjectures. The central goal of software obfuscation is to transform source code to make it unintelligible without…
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Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water
A new solar desalination system takes in saltwater and heats it with natural sunlight. The system flushes out accumulated salt, so replacement parts aren’t needed often, meaning the system could potentially produce drinking water that is cheaper than tap water.
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“Pigeon Neck” Illusion (2014)
An interactive demonstration of the “Pigeon Neck” Illusion
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GPT-4 and professional benchmarks: the wrong answer to the wrong question
OpenAI may have tested on the training data. Besides, human benchmarks are meaningless for bots.
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π in Other Universes
How the value of π depends on the definition of distance.
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Impacts of lack of sleep
Sleep is important. People vastly underestimate the extent to which not sleeping is harmful, viewing it as a valid trade off for productivity and overlooking all of the longterm negative effects.
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Researchers treat depression by reversing brain signals traveling the wrong way
A new study led by Stanford Medicine researchers is the first to reveal how magnetic stimulation treats severe depression: by correcting the abnormal flow of brain signals.
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Seaflooding
The Surprising Solution to Mitigate Climate Change, Create More Life, and Grow the Economy
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How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)
Learn to improve the brightness and clarity of images in your mind's eye. Image Streaming is an easy technique to learn. Is it a cure for aphantasia?
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3Blue1Brown Calculus Blog Series
Mathematics with a distinct visual perspective. Linear algebra, calculus, neural networks, topology, and more.
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Reduced cancer mortality with daily Vitamin D intake
Vitamin D intake could reduce cancer mortality in the population by twelve percent - provided the vitamin is taken daily. This was the result of an evaluation of 14 studies of the highest quality conducted at the German Cancer Research Center with a total of almost 105,000 participants.
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Blue Origin manufactured solar cell prototype from lunar regolith simulants
Since 2021, Blue Origin has been making solar cells and transmission wire from regolith simulants.
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Solar
I spent some time (in Fall 2023) reading about solar deployment. Some facts that struck me:
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Hypersonic missiles are misunderstood
By Tory Bruno
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Early-life stress can disrupt maturation of brain’s reward circuits
UC Irvine discovery offers new therapeutic target for treating mental illness
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Running Speeds
Recently a shoe store in France ran a promotion called “Rob It to Get It”, which invited customers to try to steal something by grabbing it and running out of the store. But there was a catch — the “security guard” was a professional sprinter, Méba Mickael Zeze. As you would expect, he is fast, but you might not…
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Metformin shown to prevent long Covid
A 14-day course of metformin, a common drug used to manage type 2 diabetes, prevents long COVID, according to a new study in The Lancet Infectious Diseases .
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Understanding large language models: A cross-section of the relevant literature
A Cross-Section of the Most Relevant Literature To Get Up to Speed
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There’s no such thing as a tree phylogenetically (2021)
Dendronization – Evolving into a tree-like morphology. (In the style of “carcinization”.) From ‘dendro’, the ancient Greek root for tree.
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Scientists create contained ball of turbulence in a tank
Scientists create contained ball of turbulence in a tank that could help answer longstanding questions
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Scientists discover links between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiota
New research has identified links between gut bacteria, inflammation and brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease.