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Confirmed: The Last Great Prediction Of The Big Bang
A leftover glow unlike any other — of neutrinos — has finally been seen.
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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Scott Aaronson on Google’s new quantum-computing paper
MIT professor Scott Aaronson discusses new Google experiments that suggest the D-Wave computer exploits quantum phenomena.
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A Short Course in Thinking About Thinking (2007)
A SHORT COURSE IN THINKING ABOUT THINKING Edge Master Class '07 DANIEL KAHNEMAN Auberge du Soleil, Rutherford, CA, July 20-22, 2007 AN EDGE SPECIAL PROJECT
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Physical Intuition, Not Mathematics (2011)
“What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”
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How MTV's “16 and Pregnant” May Have Reduced Teen Pregnancy
Apparently MTV broadcasts a show called "16 and Pregnant," in which each show tracks a pregnant teen-ager through the final months of pregna...
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Study: Teen Cannabis Users Have Poor Long-Term Memory in Adulthood
A new study shows that teenagers who had previously been heavy users of marijuana performed worse on long-term memory tests than those who never used cannabis, and they had abnormally shaped hippocampuses.
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Bayes’ Theorem – What is it and what is it good for?
Bayes’ Theorem tells us how to rationally assess the probability of a certain statement of interest being true, given some evidence. Insofar as science consists in creating hypotheses, collecting e…
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How transistors really work (1995)
Most technician textbooks do a very poor job of explaining the details of transistors' internal workings. First they assume that the Base current is somehow controlling the Collector current, then they try to explain how one current can affect another. These explanations invariably fail because Bipolar transistors…
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Research links creativity and inability to filter irrelevant sensory information
Research links creativity with inability to filter irrelevant sensory information
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Medication errors found in half of surgeries
The first study to measure the incidence of medication errors and adverse drug events during the perioperative period has found that some sort of mistake or adverse event occurred in every second operation and in 5 percent of observed drug administrations, according to information gathered from 275 operations at…
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Elite scientists are more likely to have a hobby in the arts and crafts
Highly-accomplished scientists are more likely to have an artsy hobby than the average scientist. And Nobel prize winners are even more likely.
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Physics in Metal Music
Metal bands aren't afraid to tackle serious topics in their lyrics. Here, we look at metal songs that deal with concepts in theoretical physics and cosmology.
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Energy Is Not Conserved (2010)
I’ve been meaning to link to this post at the arXiv blog , which is a great source of quirky and interesting new papers. In this case they are pointing to a speculative but interesting paper by Martin Perl and Holger Mueller, which suggests an experimental search for gradients in dark energy by way of atom…
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Are You Living In a Computer Simulation? (2003)
The original paper that introduced the simulation argument
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Chernobyl: the true scale of the accident
A total of up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded.
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Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science
Attention conservation notice : Once, I was one of the authors of a paper on cellular automata . Lawyers for Wolfram Research Inc. threatened to sue me, my co-authors and our employer, because one of our citations referred to a certain mathematical proof, and they claimed the existence of this proof was a trade secret…
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California, Water You Doing?
[Epistemic status: Low confidence. I have found numbers and stared at them until they made sense to me, but I have no education in this area. Tell me if I’m wrong.] I. There has recently been…
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From 1,000,000 to Graham's Number
Graham's number is so big, we need a whole new set of tools to even discuss it.
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Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers
I. It takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist. This is not always a good thing. You may have read about one or another of the “cardiologist caught falsifying test results and perf…
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Formal Theory of Creativity and Fun and Intrinsic Motivation Explains Science, Art, Music, Humor (Juergen Schmidhuber). Artificial Scientists, Artificial Artists, Developmental Robotics, Curiosity, Attention, Surprise, Novelty, Discovery, Open-Ended Learning, Formal Theory of Beauty, Creating Novel…
Formal Theory of Creativity & Fun & Intrinsic Motivation (1990-2010) by Jürgen Schmidhuber
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Cleaner Cars from Cradle to Grave
Over their lifetime, battery electric vehicles produce far less global warming pollution than their gasoline counterparts—and they’re getting cleaner.