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The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science
Much of climate research is focused on implausible scenarios of the future, but implementing a course correction will be difficult
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,455 posts.
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How to tell a raven from a crow (2012)
These black birds may belong to the same family and look similar in some ways, but several distinctive traits help set them apart.
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Zeptoseconds: New world record in short time measurement
Whether it is new and groundbreaking research results, university topics or events – in our press releases you can find everything you need to know about the happenings at Goethe University. To subscribe, just send an email to presse@uni-frankfurt.de .
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AI Can Detect Illnesses in Human Breath
Researchers from Loughborough University, Western General Hospital, the University of Edinburgh, and the Edinburgh Cancer Centre in the United Kingdom, recently developed a deep learning-based method…
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Cheating on a string theory exam
You and your friend have watches which are synchronized to the second, and the proctors are used to him often finishing exams quickly and won't be suspicious if he leaves early. What is the largest value N such that you can guarantee that you answer at least N out of the 23 questions correctly?
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Exploring the Supply Chain of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 Vaccines
Sections of this post were co-authored by Cornelia Scheitz. Noah Leidinger created a German translation. Piotr Kwapin created a Polish translation. Last updated on February 7, 2021. Bert Hubert’s excellent and widely shared article about Reverse Engineering the source code of the Pfizer-BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine is…
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Feynman’s Maze-Running Story
Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor cues’.
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How phone batteries measure the weather
Our reports examine national and regional trends in mobile and broadband network experience, and develop in-depth insights into trends impacting consumer network experience.
1600
Quantum mechanics as a generalization of probability (2007)
There are two ways to teach quantum mechanics. The first way -- which for most physicists today is still the only way -- follows the historical order in which the ideas were discovered. So, you start with classical mechanics and electrodynamics, solving lots of grueling differential equations at every step. Then you…
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How a razor blade can be damaged as it cuts human hair (2020)
A new study by MIT engineers shows how shaving can damage blades. Human hair, 50 times softer than steel, can chip away a razor’s edge, the engineers found.
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Elon Musk and the Hyperloop
For a while now there have been tantalizing hints that Elon Musk is at it again. His usual way of approaching a problem is to look at an industry, find some fatal flaw in it, fix that flaw and then leave everybody else in the dust, wondering why they didn’t do what he did. He’s one of the most interesting people on…
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We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube
the existential crisis we all share imagine this: you've just spent $640 billion training the chonkiest language model known to humanity (lol) and decide...
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We're not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon
[This post received first place in the 2024 Blog Extravaganza at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History. Many thanks, Adam!] I first had this thought in 2019, and I started this draft in ear…
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American Chemical Society bans university after "spider-trap" is clicked
The society (closed access) journal ‘Copeia’ also has these spider trap links in it’s HTML, e.g. on this contents page: http://www.asihcopeiaonline.org/toc/cope/2013/4
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World-first experimental cancer treatment paves way for clinical trial
An experimental treatment for an aggressive and lethal brain cancer has been published in Nature Medicine, paving the way for a clinical trial by researchers at The Brain Cancer Centre.
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Music and Geometry: Intervals and Scales
An article about music and geometry, in particular about musical intervals and scales and their geometric equivalent ...
1611
The flood that filled the Mediterranean Sea - in one year
"Zanclean Megaflood? What's that, a glam-rock band?"
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My biology paper in Science
Think I’m pranking you, right? You can see the paper right here (“Synthetic recombinase-based state machines in living cells,” by Nathaniel Roquet, Ava P. Soleimany, Alyssa C. Fer…
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What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond Ours
Stephen Wolfram explores how the number of neural connections affects capabilities like language and abstraction. How far we could go accounting for neural nets and LLMS, the fundamental nature of computation, neuroscience and the operation of brains.
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Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity
In this post I explain why today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their training.
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I simulated California housing and learned about simulators
Back in the early 2000s, XML was all the rage. An unusual evolution from HTML, which itself was an evolution (devolution?) from SGML, XML w...
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Probiotics can support the effect of antidepressants
Intestinal flora plays an important role in health – including mental health. Researchers from the University of Basel and the University Psychiatric Clinics Basel (UPK) have shown that probiotics can support the effect of antidepressants and help to alleviate depression.
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Researchers find ‘significant rates’ of sinking ground in Houston suburbs
Professor of Geology Shuhab Khan and his team analyzed thousands of water and oil wells in the Houston metro area and uncovered significant rates of subsidence in Houston's fast-growing suburbs that has not been reported before.
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Starving cancer by cutting off its favorite foods
Scientists have discovered molecules that inhibit tumor growth by starving cancer cells of their favorite foods: the sugar glucose and the amino acid, glutamine.
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