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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,457 posts.
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30cm worm fossil more than half a billion years old discovered in Greenland
Fossils of a new group of animal predators have been located in the Early Cambrian Sirius Passet fossil locality in North Greenland. These large worms may be some of the earliest carnivorous animals to have colonised the water column more than 518 million years ago, revealing a past dynasty of predators that…
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Requiem for a Solar Plant
"...requiring reconductoring of 1.71 miles at a cost of $795,150...limiting output to 3MW..."
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If a Meta AI model can read a brain-wide signal, why wouldn't the brain?
In 2023, Meta researchers were able to decode images in thoughts from the brain's magnetic fields. What if that's how the brain coordinates it's own global state?
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“The Martian” + Starship
“The Martian” by Andy Weir, and its film adaptation directed by Ridley Scott, remain some of my all time favorite science fiction works. Way back in the day I wrote a technical commenta…
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TeXmacs 1.99.14 released. Take a look at this research paper exported to HTML
Assuming a widely-believed hypothesis concerning the least prime in an arithmetic progression, we show that two -bit integers can be multiplied in time on a Turing machine with a finite number of tapes; we also show that polynomials of degree less than over a finite field with elements can be multiplied in time …
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Telescope Sees Star Dance Around Supermassive Black Hole, Proves Einstein Right
Observations made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have revealed for the first time that a star orbiting the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way moves just as predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Its orbit is shaped like a rosette and not like an ellipse as predicted by…
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Getting hit by lightning is good for some tropical trees
Getting zapped with millions of volts of electricity may not sound like a healthy activity, but for some trees, it is, according to a new study. Published in New Phytologist, the study finds that some tropical tree species are not only able to tolerate lightning strikes, but benefit from them. The trees may have even…
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Grand mosaic of the Milky Way is now larger than ever
This blog is all about astrophotography and it works mainly as an imaging diary. J-P Metsavainio is a Finnish astrophotographer,
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More Bounce to the Ounce
A love letter to the rocket that everyone is too chicken to build
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Ultracold, superdense atoms become invisible
MIT physicists have confirmed that as atoms are chilled and squeezed to extremes, their ability to scatter light is suppressed, making them less visible. The findings show the Pauli exclusion principle, or Pauli blocking, applies not just to electrons but also to atoms.
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How the Great Green Wall is holding back the Sahara desert
The Great Green Wall being built in Africa to halt the southern progress of the Sahara Desert is a favorite public works project of mine — it’s massive, ambitio
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Neural chip decodes interactions between brain regions
EPFL researchers have developed an implantable neural chip that tracks communication across brain regions, identifying cognitive and emotional states in real time.
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Packing the world for longest lines of sight
I have a side project to find the longest line of sight on the planet 1 using a novel Total Viewshed algorithm . At a resolution of 3 arc-seconds (~92m x 92m), the planet contains around 4.5 billion elevation samples 2 . Now obviously we don’t need to calculate the visibility between literally every single one of…
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High Precision Mapping from Scratch
The fun of owning rural property is that knowing where your land actually starts and ends is a guess usually. Sure, you have a parcel description, and maybe even an online service with “official” GIS boundaries (for us here in New Brunswick, this is GeoNB ). However, since it’s in the middle of the forest, the odds of…
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The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Rules for Critical Thinking
Necessary cognitive fortification against propaganda, pseudoscience, and general falsehood.
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Facts about smell (2014)
The home of typing by Alice Bartlett 👩🏻💻
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Dolosse – a South African invention used over the world
All along the South African coast you find dolosse wherever coastal management is necessary to prevent tides and rough seas from eroding breakwaters, harbour walls, coastal construction. In Port El…
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Ceres' Deepening Mysteries
Even as we discover more about Ceres, some mysteries only deepen. Mission Director Marc Rayman gives an update on Dawn as it moves ever closer to its next…
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Publish and Perish at Imperial College London: The Death of Stefan Grimm
Jump to follow-up This week’s Times Higher Education carried a report of the death, at age 51, of Professor Stefan Grimm: Imperial College London to ‘review procedures’ after death of academi…
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Rosetta catches dusty organics
Follow ESA's mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
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T cells block nerve cell regeneration with age, but can be reversed – mice study
New research in mice shows T cells prevent damaged nerve cells from regenerating due to a reversible, ageing-related mechanism.
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Stellarium 0.19
The major changes of this version: 5 new sky cultures Refactoring the code: many improvements and fixes Added many DSO textures Many improvements for Scripti...
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Ancient bees found in Blenheim palace estate
We were priviliged and excited to have the opportunity for a behind-the-scenes tour of wild bee colonies at Blenheim Palace led by Filipe Salbany, an internationally experienced bee expert who emit…
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