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How Audio Fingerprinting Works
An intuitive explanation of how audio fingerprinting works helping users in identifying music from short snippets
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Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 240 posts.
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Bring back hydrogen lifting gas
According to one estimate, there are around 25 blimps worldwide. What will it take to bring back these majestic beasts of the sky?
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The human ear detects half a millisecond delay in sound
Researchers discover how accurately the human ear can detect time delay in sounds in different frequencies.
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AlphaFold 2 is here: what’s behind the structure prediction miracle
Nature has now released that AlphaFold 2 paper , after eight long months of waiting. The main text reports more or less what we have known for nearly a year, with some added tidbits, although it is accompanied by a painstaking description of the architecture in the supplementary information . Perhaps more importantly…
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The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 was awarded "for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems" with one half jointly to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann "for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming" and the other half…
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Suppressing a gene by using its antibody can lead to tooth growth: animal study
Tooth loss is a widespread problem in adults and results in poor quality of life. Currently, solutions to this problem include artificial teeth and implants. But these aren’t as good as “real teeth,” and they don’t markedly improve quality of life. Now, scientists from Japan have made a discovery that can make…
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Why does it take so long to get to Mercury?
Earth is on average ten times closer to Mercury than Jupiter, but missions to both planets can take a similar amount of time to reach their science orbits. Why is that?
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Study Reveals Immune Driver of Brain Aging
Scientists have identified a key factor in mental aging and shown that it might be prevented or reversed by fixing a glitch in the immune system's front-line soldiers.
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Cornell researchers see atoms at record resolution
Cornell researchers have topped their own record for atomic resolution with an electron microscope pixel array detector that incorporates sophisticated 3D reconstruction algorithms.
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Drinking strong coffee before exercising increases fat-burning, new study finds
Scientists from the University of Granada also found that, if the exercise is performed in the afternoon, the effects of the caffeine are more marked than in the morning Scientists from the Department of Physiology of the University of Granada (UGR) have shown that caffeine (about 3 mg/kg, the equivalent of a strong…
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Rocket Lab Unveils Plans for New 8-Ton Class Reusable Rocket
Rocket Lab Unveils Plans for New 8-Ton Class Reusable Rocket for Mega-Constellation Deployment
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Referees’ home-bias in football disappears without audience: study
We analyzed referees’ performances in 1283 games from the top four Eu
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What DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 really achieved (2020)
Disclaimer: this post is an opinion piece based on the experience and opinions derived from attending the CASP14 conference as a doctoral student researching protein modelling. When provided, quotes have been extracted from my notes of the event, and while I hope to have captured them as accurately as possible, I…
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Where does the plastic in oceans come from?
Which countries and rivers emit the most plastic to the ocean? What does this mean for solutions to tackle plastic pollution?
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Three reasons fungi are not plants
Fungi are more closely related to us than they are to plants. Yet, fungi have been grouped with plants historically, with an impact felt even today.
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Physicists observationally confirm Hawking’s black hole theorem for first time
Physicists at MIT and elsewhere have used gravitational waves to observationally confirm Hawking’s black hole theorem for the first time.
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Webb flies Ariane 5: watch the launch live on 25 December
Update 22 December (22.00 CET): launch confirmed for 25 DecemberUpdate 21 December (22.30 CET): new target launch dateESA and NASA will be broadcasting live as the James Webb Space Telescope is launched to space on ESA’s Ariane 5 from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana at 12:20 GMT / 13:20 CET on Saturday 25 December.
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First detection of light from behind a black hole
Fulfilling a prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, researchers report the first-ever recordings of X-ray emissions from the far side of a black hole.
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Arctic Ocean started getting warmer decades earlier than we thought
The Arctic Ocean has been getting warmer since the beginning of the 20th century – decades earlier than records suggest – due to warmer water flowing into the delicate polar ecosystem from the Atlantic Ocean.
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Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021 was awarded jointly to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian "for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch"
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Over 140k virus species in the human gut, half of which are new to science
Researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) explored and catalogued the biodiversity of the viral species found in 28,060 public human gut metagenomes and 2,898 bacterial isolate genomes cultured from the human gut
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Ph.D student demonstrates a single, working laser on silicon
Engineering physics PhD student Khadijeh Miarabbas Kiani has fabricated a laser on silicon using a simple, cost-effective method - something that has been a longstanding challenge in the field of silicon photonics. [...]Read More...
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Philippine ethnic group has most Denisovan DNA
The Philippine ethnic group Ayta Magbukon has the highest proportion of genes from our extinct relatives, the Denisovans, a new study led by Uppsala University shows. Their Denisovan share far exceeds that of ethnic groups in Papua New Guinea, who previously held the record. The study is published in the scientific…
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Antiviral Molnupiravir Reduces Risk of Hospitalization/Death by ~50 Percent
At the Interim Analysis, 7.3 Percent of Patients Who Received Molnupiravir Were Hospitalized Through Day 29, Compared With 14.1 Percent of Placebo-Treated Patients Who were Hospitalized or Died Merck Plans to Seek Emergency Use Authorization in the U.S. as Soon as Possible and to Submit Applications to Regulatory…
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The software that flies SpaceX rockets and starships
Spaceflight, from the beginning, has depended on computers – both on the ground and in the spacecraft. SpaceX has carried it to a new level. We recently spoke with Steven Gerding, Dragon’s software development lead, about the special challenges software development has for SpaceX's many missions.
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Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA
The International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook 2020 report has found that, in most major countries, solar power is now cheaper than coal and gas.
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The Achilles Heel of the Coronavirus
SARS-CoV-2 is critically dependent on a special mechanism for the production of its proteins. A collaborative team led by a research group at ETH Zurich obtained molecular insights into this process and demonstrated that it can be inhibited by chemical compounds, thereby significantly reducing viral replication in…