Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,456 posts.
Abstract It has been a common practice in social psychology to publish only significant results. As a result, success rates in the published literature do not provide empirical evidence for the existence of a phenomenon. A recent meta-analysis suggested that ego-depletion is a much weaker effect than the published…
Note: This post departs from the general format used on this blog. That's because the post is not about a specific analysis I've done bu...
Open AI models used for a wide range of scientific applications, including accelerating the design of therapeutic molecules.
The key to curing male pattern baldness - a condition that affects up to 50 per cent of men worldwide - could lie in a sugar that naturally occurs in the human body, according to scientists at the University of Sheffield.
Editor’s Note 4/4/21: A few weeks after this article was published, a mysterious prion disease was identified in New Brunswick, Canada. I do not have to say that viruses have dominated every level of public conversation for the past year. Ancient and odd but relatively easy to talk about,
We're discussing a paper that demands attention...
PV modules are cheap enough today that the simple fixed East-West arrays are cheaper and faster to install than the industry’s darling, the single-axis tracked array. Xavier Dedenbach, Terraform Po…
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
American Chemical Society: Chemistry for Life.
The planet next door may be rough, but it has a lot of atmosphere
Lyme disease is caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, which relies on the antioxidant manganese to protect it from its host’s immune system. Both removing or adding too much manganese weakens the bacteria. Disrupting this balance could lead to new treatments for Lyme disease.<br />
The University of Granada participates in research linking a bacterium of the Roseburia genus with improved physical condition. This finding could lead to a probiotic for human consumption that helps maintain strength and fitness during aging. The study has been published in the prestigious scientific journal Gut
In a world-first experimental result, scientists at the University of Sydney have used a quantum computer to coax an atom to behave the same way as a photo-chemical process that underpins the speed of human vision and solar energy harvesting - only at speeds 100 billion times slower than in nature.
It was a dark day when Islam met the loudspeaker. All travelers to the Middle East discover that this normally self-assured religion gets insecure in the small hours of night and feels it has to rehearse its foundational beliefs, in public, at 190 dB.
Experimenting with JPEG compressing text.
Why are election polls often inaccurate? Why is racism wrong? Why are your assumptions often mistaken? The answers to all these questions and to many others have a lot to do with the non-ergodicity…
Large language models are valuable research assistants, especially when they refuse to follow instructions.
Several Egyptian gods are depicted with animal heads. Horus has a falcon head, Anubis has a jackal head, Thoth has an ibis head (except when he’s a baboon), and Set has…uhh, what is that, exactly? …
Case Western Reserve researchers observe waves ‘leap’ across cut in brain tissue; ‘ephaptic coupling’ said to be producing self-propagating wa...
By Dave Petley
MIT researchers developed a desalination system that is more efficient and less expensive than previous methods. In addition to providing fresh water, the process could be used to treat contaminated wastewater or generate steam for sterilizing medical instruments, all without requiring a power source other than…
Launched in December 2013, ESA’s Gaia spacecraft is on a mission to map the locations and motions of more than a billion stars in the Milky Way with extreme precision.But it’s not easy being a satellite: space is a dangerous place. In recent months, hyper-velocity space dust and the strongest solar storm in 20 years…
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014 was divided, one half awarded to John O'Keefe, the other half jointly to May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain"
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
A major technological advance in DNA writing enables researchers to construct and create in the language of biology
