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The world has probably passed peak pollution
Millions die prematurely from local air pollution, but we can reduce this number significantly.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 384 posts.
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The rise of batteries in six charts
The unstoppable rise of batteries is leading to a domino effect that puts half of global fossil fuel demand at risk.
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Vesuvius Challenge: First letters found in new scroll
PHerc. 172 (Scroll 5) is here.
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Uncovered Euripides fragments are 'kind of a big deal'
CU Boulder Classics scholars identify previously unknown fragments of two lost tragedies by Greek tragedian Euripides.
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How do our brains adapt to control an extra body part?
Members of the public have little trouble in learning very quickly how to use a third thumb – a controllable, prosthetic extra thumb – to pick up and manipulate objects.
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Einstein went to his office just so he could walk home with Gödel
Albert Einstein used to say that he went to his office at the Institute for Advanced Study “just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt Gödel.” The two would meet at Einstein’s home each day between 10 and 11 and undertake the half-hour walk to the institute. At 1 or 2 in the afternoon they’d walk back…
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Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago
Each of us individually is the accumulated product of thousands of generations that have come before us in an unbroken line. Our culture and technology today are also the result of thousands of years of accumulated and remixed cultural knowledge.
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Fungus breaks down ocean plastic
A fungus living in the sea can break down the plastic polyethylene, provided it has first been exposed to UV radiation from sunlight. Researchers from, among others, NIOZ published their results in the scientific journal Science of the Total Environment. They expect that many more plastic degrading fungi are living in…
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Chai-1: Decoding the molecular interactions of life
Building frontier artificial intelligence to predict and reprogram the interactions between biochemical molecules.
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What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
If you overheard the phrase "1 in a million chance" in someone else's casual conversation, what might they be talking about?
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Caltech Develops First Noninvasive Method to Continually Measure Blood Pressure
Device uses sound waves to gather blood pressure data from blood vessels, monitoring the response with ultrasound.
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Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap
CT scans of Heinz's new recyclable ketchup cap reveal the channel geometry that replaced a silicone valve and why the redesign took eight years.
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How to Train Yourself to Go to Sleep Earlier
Whether you want to get more sleep, wake up earlier, or change your nighttime routine, learn science-backed tips for to going to sleep earlier.
107
The Third Atomic Bomb
After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US Army Air Force had plans to drop a third bomb on August 19, 1945—with more to come if necessary. Fat Man bomb casing at the USAF Museum
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Heat pumps, more than you wanted to know (2023)
Over the last few months, Baker and I have been digging in deep on Heat Pumps . I'm putting my explorations here on pause but wanted to write up everything we've learned over the last few months.
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Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before it collapsed
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] On January 28, 2022, about an hour before dawn, the four-lane Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, collapsed without warning. Five vehicles, including an articulating bus, fell with the bridge, and another car drove o
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Why does FM sound better than AM?
Frequency modulation (FM) is more robust to noise than amplitude modulation (AM) because static itself is primarily a form of amplitude modulation.
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Butterflies accumulate static electricity to attract pollen without contact
Butterflies and moths collect so much static electricity whilst in flight, that pollen grains from flowers can be pulled by static electricity across air gaps of several millimetres or centimetres.
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Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The story of EgyptAir flight 804
In 2016, an EgyptAir A320 spiraled into the Mediterranean, killing 66 people. Was it an act of sabotage, or something even scarier?
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A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology
A guide to the operating principles, techniques and technology in lidar systems for self driving cars.
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Is the frequency domain a real place?
Dissing Fourier, exploring the Hadamard-Walch transform, and making square-wave spectrograms.
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Is Clear Air Turbulence becoming more common?
In recent years there has been a noticeable uptick in publicized incidents of turbulence affecting commercial aircraft. These events, sometimes unexpected and severe, have led to passenger injuries, emergency landings, and a recent rare fatality. Turbulence can be caused by a variety of factors, from the mixing of air…
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First pictures from Euclid satellite reveal billions of orphan stars
The first scientific pictures from the Euclid satellite mission have revealed more than 1,500 billion orphan stars scattered throughout the Perseus cluster of galaxies.
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Researchers find Alzheimer's-like brain changes in long Covid patients
New research from the University of Kentucky’s Sanders-Brown Center on Aging shows compelling evidence that the cognitive impairments observed in long COVID patients share striking similarities with those seen in Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.
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Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Today’s rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide increase is 10 times faster than at any other point in the past 50,000 years, researchers have found through a detailed chemical analysis of ancient Antarctic ice. The findings, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide…
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Will we ever get fusion power?
“Every one of the stars in the sky uses fusion to generate enormous amounts of energy. Why shouldn’t we?”