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The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated
Some skepticism of vitamin D skepticism
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 356 posts.
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Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair
Researchers analyzed samples of Utahns' hair going back a century to document a 100-fold decrease in lead concentrations.
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How to sequence your own DNA at home
I have now sequenced my own genome 5 times with an Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION. This means collecting them from a swab, prepping them for sequencing, running them through a sequencer, then doing analysis over them.
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Helium is hard to replace
The war in Iran, and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has unfortunately made us all familiar with details of the petroleum supply chain that we could formerly happily ignore.
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AI is dramatically accelerating AI research
If acceleration compounds, the naive extrapolation implies superintelligence within a year
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Loss of cell identity drives human aging: Two new papers
That’s What Biological (Epigenetic) Aging Clocks Are Measuring
67
Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
A new paper in Psychological Science (.htm) reports a failure to replicate Study 2 of Ariely and Wertenbroch’s influential article entitled, “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Contr…
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Universal vaccine against respiratory infections and allergens
Stanford Medicine researchers and their colleagues invented a new vaccine that protects mice from respiratory viruses, bacteria and allergens — the closest yet to a universal vaccine.
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CERN and Mistral sign a statement of intent to establish a strategic partnership
CERN and Mistral sign a statement of intent to advance AI for science and strengthen Europe’s scientific and technological capabilities
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It's all a blur
Designing a slightly sneaky blur filter and then poking holes in it.
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Two days of oatmeal reduce cholesterol level
The fact that oats have a beneficial effect on the metabolism is nothing new. German medic Carl von Noorden treated patients with diabetes with the cereal at the beginning of the 20th century – with remarkable success. “Today, effective medications are available to treat patients with diabetes,” explains…
73
Making chicken transparent using Dorito dust
Modifying the optical properties of biological tissues with tartrazine
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Frog-derived gut bacterium eradicates tumors in mice
A single intravenous dose of Ewingella americana achieved complete tumor elimination in 100% of treated animals, with no detectable toxicity—outperforming chemotherapy and immunotherapy.
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Global review confirms mRNA vaccines are safe, effective and full of promise
Comprehensive review brings together global evidence to strengthen public trust and counter misinformation as mRNA vaccines expand to prevent and treat more diseases.
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First in-utero stem cell therapy for fetal spina bifida repair is safe: study
A UC Davis Health research team has safely performed the world’s first spina bifida treatment combining fetal surgery with stem cells, according to results from Phase 1 of an ongoing clinical trial. These results have been published today in The Lancet.
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Craig Venter has died
La Jolla, California—April 29, 2026—The J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) announced that J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., the Institute’s founder,...
79
Navier-Stokes Announcement
The Millennium Prize Problems were unveiled by the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) at a meeting in Paris in 2000 to celebrate “The Universality of Mathematical Thought”. These problems encapsulate some of the most difficult challenges that mathematicians were grappling with at the turn of the millennium. CMI’s…
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Does creatine make you smarter?
And why does the brain use creatine anyway?
81
Bird brains (2023)
A kea parrot in New Zealand learned to drag traffic cones onto a highway so cars would stop and humans would feed it. That sent me down a rabbit hole on how we actually measure bird intelligence.
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Hospitals and universities repurposing drugs at lower cost
Universities and hospitals are repurposing existing drugs through late-stage trials with funded costs up to 90% lower than those taking place in the pharmaceutical industry.
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ACM Is Now Open Access
As of January 1, 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library are now open access. This change reflects the long-standing and growing call across the global computing community for research to be more accessible, discoverable, and reusable.
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A digestion of the Jacobian conjecture counterexample
The notorious Jacobian conjecture can be formulated concretely over the complex numbers as follows. Conjecture 1 (Jacobian Conjecture) Let $latex {F:{\bf C}^n \rightarrow {\bf C}^n}&fg=000000$ …
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Early progress on accelerating drug development with Claude
Over the past several months, we’ve partnered with six organizations to accelerate curing disease. We’ve also started drug discovery efforts of our own, including programs for rare childhood forms of muscular dystrophy. In this post, we provide an update on our progress.
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Ultrasound imaging of the brain
The most detailed vascular image of a living human brain we've seen, captured with ultrasound through the skull — and the pipeline behind it.
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3.4M Solar Panels
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)
Het Tulp Fonds dat in 2025 door OCW en NWO in het leven werd geroepen, biedt internationale toponderzoekers de kans om hun onderzoek in Nederland voort te zetten: enerzijds omdat wereldwijd de academische vrijheid onder druk staat, anderzijds omdat hun kennis en expertise een enorme impuls geeft aan de innovatiekracht…
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CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3
Today, the Large Hadron Collider ( LHC ), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, comes to the end of an extraordinary chapter in its scientific journey. Following its final physics run , the accelerator has been switched off to begin CERN’s Long Shutdown 3 (LS3), a major programme of maintenance…
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Six Math Essentials
Just a brief announcement that I have been working with Quanta Books to publish a short book in popular mathematics entitled “Six Math Essentials”, which will cover six of the fundament…