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Science & Space

The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 17 posts.

2009
7

Why aeroplane wings aren't dimpled like golf balls

Before explaining the purpose of dimples, we first need to understand the aerodynamic properties of a sphere. Let us start by looking at a smooth sphere without any dimples, like a ping-pong ball. If we lived in an ideal world without any friction, the air flowing around a smooth sphere would behave like that shown in…

8

At peak, Spain gets 53% of its energy from wind

Ok, not all the time, but last weekend at 5:50am on Sunday morning (8th Nov) Spain set a new record, hitting 53.7% of its energy requirements being supplied by wind energy. As you can see from the graph above, the amount of electricity being supplied by wind, the light green portion of the graph, doesn’t […]