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What happens when Betelgeuse explodes?
It’s one of the nearest red supergiants to us, and a supernova is only a matter of time. What are we in for when it happens?
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 147 posts.
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Links between coffee and health
Research at Harvard and elsewhere has repeatedly tied coffee consumption to health benefits.
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To save on weight, a detour to the moon is the best route to Mars
A new MIT study suggests that a human mission to Mars may lighten its launch load considerably by refueling on the moon.
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Ocean acidification may cause dramatic changes to phytoplankton
A new study finds that increased ocean acidification will dramatically affect global populations of phytoplankton: Some species will die out, while others will flourish, which will affect marine food webs.
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What Did Bohr Do at Los Alamos?
Along with almost getting hit by a car, he made important contributions to the atomic bomb's design.
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Chemical flavorings found in e-cigarettes linked to lung disease
A Harvard study links chemicals used in flavored electronic cigarettes to cases of severe respiratory disease.
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Why it takes so long to get data back from New Horizons
As I write this post, New Horizons is nearing the end of a weeklong optical navigation campaign. The last optical navigation images in the weeklong series…
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Where to hate daylight saving time and where to love it
Update: a newer version of this little project helps you make your complaints about daylight saving time—whether they’re for or against it—with clearer messages about whether keeping DST, abolishing it, or making it permanent would be best for your daylight preferences. Give it a whirl over at Observable.
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Neurons Gone Wild
To reject gods and spirits is easy: just bully them away in the name of science.
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Why I decided not to enter the $100k global warming time-series challenge
Interesting applied project for your students , or as a warning for decisions under uncertainty / statistical significance. Real money on the line so the length of time and number of entries required to get a winner may be an interesting dataset after this is all done.
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World's first white laser
Researchers at ASU have proven that semiconductor lasers are capable of emitting over the full visible color spectrum, which is necessary to produce a white laser.
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Start Using Landsat on AWS
My colleague Jed Sundwall wrote the guest post below to show you how one of the newest AWS Public Data Sets is being put to use. — Jeff; You can now access over 85,000 Landsat 8 scenes through our newest Public Data Set: Landsat on AWS. The scenes are all available in the landsat-pds bucket […]
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Introducing Amino: Desktop Bioengineering for Everyone
Archived MIT Admissions blog post 'Introducing Amino: Desktop Bioengineering for Everyone,' published October 13, 2015. Preserved for historical context; not maintained as current admissions policy.
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Ebola whole virus vaccine shown effective, safe in primates
An Ebola whole virus vaccine, constructed using a novel experimental platform, has been shown to effectively protect monkeys exposed to the often fatal virus.
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Why the Greenwich meridian moved
Walk about 100 meters east of the Observatory's meridian line. Slow down to a crawl as your GPS approaches 0 degrees, 0 minutes, 0 seconds longitude. There's no sign and no line on the ground.
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GitWikXiv: Toward a successor to the academic paper
[Other posts in this series: 2,3,4.] I had the chance to have dinner tonight with Paul Ginsparg of arXiv fame, and he graciously gave me some feedback on a very speculative idea that I’ve been kicking around: augmenting — or even replacing — the current academic article model with collaborative d
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Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman
KAHNEMAN: Could you elaborate on these possibilities? I mean, what's the distinction between predicting and setting up a range of possibilities?
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Top mathematical achievements of the last 5ish years, maybe
I have recently been going through my book Maths 1001 making updates for a forthcoming foreign edition (of which more in future). So I have been looking over mathematical developments since approxi…
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The Discovery of Statistical Regression
We explore the hotly contested history of the crowning jewel of statistics.
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The pace of major breakthroughs has declined
One of the prevailing narratives of our time is that we are innovating our way into the future at break-neck speed. It’s just dizzying how quickly the world around us is changing. Technology is this juggernaut that gets ever bigger, ever faster, and all we need to do is hold on for the wild ride into the infinitely…
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Bell inequality violation finally done right
A few weeks ago, Hensen et al., of the Delft University of Technology and Barcelona, Spain, put out a paper reporting the first experiment that violates the Bell inequality in a way that closes off…
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CRISPR Gene Editing
CRISPR is a recently discovered genomic tool that could potentially revolutionize genetic modification and editing, including gene silencing, editing, activating, and other crucial functions. It has made a big splash in the synthetic biology community, and mentions of CRISPR have started cropping up elsewhere in the…
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Perfect colors, captured with one ultra-thin lens
No need for color correction—Harvard physicists’ flat optics, using nanotechnology, gets it right the first time
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