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BusyBeaver(6) Is Quite Large
For overdetermined reasons, I’ve lately found the world an increasingly terrifying and depressing place. It’s gotten harder and harder to concentrate on research, or even popular scienc…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 422 posts.
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The tiniest yet real telescope I've built
76/300 Pocket Dobson: a tiny yet real telescope that comes with you everywhere
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Marble: A Multimodal World Model
Marble, our frontier multimodal world model, is available to everyone starting today
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U.S. already has the critical minerals it needs, according to new analysis
A new Science study reveals the U.S. already mines the critical minerals it needs for energy and defense, but they are currently being discarded as mine waste.
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Everything is correlated (2014–23)
Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as ‘null hypothesis testing’.
127
Air Traffic Control
Air traffic control has been in the news lately, on account of my country's declining ability to do it. Well, that's a long-term trend, resulting from decades of under-investment, severe capture by our increasingly incompetent defense-industrial complex, no small degree of management incompetence in the FAA, and…
128
Oliver Heaviside and the theory of transmission lines (2021)
(This is an adapted version of an article I wrote for the Dutch amateur radio magazine Electron , November 2021.)
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Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff
Cliff-edged fitness functions and the evolution of schizophrenia
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Understanding Solar Energy
The biggest energy story of the last fifteen years is the rise of solar photovoltaics, also known as solar PV or simply solar panels.
131
The Einstein AI Model
I shared a controversial take the other day at an event and I decided to write it down in a longer format: I’m afraid AI won't give us a compressed 21st century.
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Analysis indicates that the universe’s expansion is not accelerating
The universe's expansion may actually have started to slow rather than accelerating at an ever-increasing rate as previously thought, a new study suggests. "Remarkab...
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Astronomers 'image' a mysterious dark object in the distant Universe
Scientists detect the lowest mass dark object currently measured
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Eye prosthesis is the first to restore sight lost to macular degeneration
In a Stanford Medicine-led clinical trial of a wireless retinal prosthesis, people with advanced macular degeneration regained enough vision to read books and subway signs.
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Satellogic's Open Satellite Feed
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
137
World's darkest and clearest skies at risk from industrial megaproject
On December 24th, AES Andes, a subsidiary of the US power company AES Corporation, submitted a project for a massive industrial complex for environmental impact assessment. This complex threatens the pristine skies above ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the darkest and clearest of any astronomical…
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How to sequence your DNA for <$2k
a cheap and bloody experiment
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I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia using machine learning
The Fall of Civilizations podcast put out a 6¾-hour episode on the history of the Mongol Empire, which I eagerly listened to. After finishing the episode I wondered about contemporary Mongolian society, I wanted to learn what the lands that the Mongol Empire exploded from are like in our current day. There are many…
141
Dead Stars Don’t Radiate
Three guys claim that any heavy chunk of matter emits Hawking radiation, even if it’s not a black hole: • Michael F. Wondrak, Walter D. van Suijlekom and Heino Falcke, Gravitational pair…
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CDC officials’ resignation emails
The end of an era.
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Google's year in review: areas with research breakthroughs in 2025
This year saw new AI models, transformative products and new breakthroughs in science and robotics.
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Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01
[You can follow me on social media: @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social and see my publications etc., at https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks ]
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New records on Wendelstein 7-X
Wendelstein 7-X—the leading fusion device of the stellarator type—achieved several new performance milestones during its latest run of experiments. Among them is a world record for triple product, the value that measures how close a fusion device is to generating net energy across the plasma.
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GLP-1 drugs linked to lower death rates in colon cancer patients
In an analysis of more than 6,800 colon cancer patients across all University of California Health sites, researchers found that those taking glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) medications were less than half as likely to die within five years compared to those who weren’t on the drugs (15.5% vs. 37.1%
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How does the US use water?
Water infrastructure often gets less attention and focus than other types of infrastructure.
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Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in words of four letters or less (1999)
So, have a seat. Put your feet up. This may take some time. Can I get you some tea? Earl Grey? You got it.
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Bending Spacetime in the Basement (1997)
Bending Spacetime in the Basement
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Global sales of combustion engine cars have peaked
To decarbonize road transport, the world must move away from petrol and diesel cars towards electric vehicles and other forms of low-carbon transport.