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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 210 posts.
Proteins are essential to life, supporting practically all its functions. They are large complex molecules, made up of chains of amino acids, and what a protein does largely depends on its unique 3D structure. Figuring out what shapes proteins fold into is known as the “protein-folding problem”, and has stood as a…
A study provides evidence that the drug azlocillin eliminates the bacteria that cause Lyme disease at the onset of infection in lab mice and cultures.
Two of the experimental coronavirus drugs, chloroquine, and hydroxychloroquine are a breeze to synthesize. But remdesivir, possibly the most promising candidate, is anything but. It's a royal pain. Here's why.
Young children will pass up rewards they know they can collect to explore other options, a new study suggests. Researchers found that when adults and 4- to 5-year-old children played a game where certain choices earned them rewards, both adults and children quickly learned what choices would give them the biggest…
Over 80 percent of 200 COVID-19 patients in a hospital in Spain have vitamin D deficiency, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.
The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) has taken the first ever image of a young, Sun-like star accompanied by two giant exoplanets. Images of systems with multiple exoplanets are extremely rare, and — until now — astronomers had never directly observed more than one planet orbiting a…
How do people across the world spend their time? How do daily activities differ across countries, and how do these differences matter for people’s lives? Explore data and research on time use.
The University of Oxford, in collaboration with AstraZeneca plc, today announces interim trial data from its Phase III trials that show its candidate vaccine, ChAdOx1 nCoV-2019, is effective at preventing COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) and offers a high level of protection.
Images of the samples from Ryugu
An international team of astronomers, led by Professor Jane Greaves of Cardiff University, today announced the discovery of a rare molecule – phosphine – in the ...
After a sharp uptick in 2018, we estimate that US greenhouse gas emissions fell by 2.1% last year based on preliminary energy and economic data. This decline was due almost entirely to a drop in coal consumption.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, viruses are getting a lot of attention; here's an inside look into the most abundant life form on Earth.
While the drug is known to increase focus, alertness and motor skills, its effect on creative thinking had not been studied previously.
Stanford Medicine researchers used high doses of magnetic stimulation, delivered on an accelerated timeline and targeted to individual neurocircuitry, to treat patients with severe depression.
The news in brief: 1) Brain changes associated with aging become visible much earlier than would be expected, in the late 40's. 2) This is hypothesized to result from neurons’ loss of energy; if so, researchers may have found a way to prevent or reverse these effects. 3) This can be done with diet, by
Pollution from tyre wear can be 1,000 times worse than what comes out of a car’s exhaust, Emissions Analytics has found.
Fish market favourites such as orange roughy, common octopus and pink conch are among the species of fish and invertebrates in rapid decline around the world, according to new research.
I was struck the other day by the following: The cooking instructions on my Bob’s tri-colored quinoa package said to combine 2 cups of water with 1 cup of dried quinoa, which would ultimately create 4 cups of cooked quinoa. See image above. My first reaction was to believe …
MIT neuroscientists have found reading computer code does not rely on the regions of the brain involved in language processing. Instead, it activates the “multiple demand network,” which is also recruited for complex cognitive tasks such as solving math problems or crossword puzzles.
The PCR diagnostic platform Vivalytic enables COVID-19 rapid tests — a blessing for Clemens Weller and his mother, who suffers from dementia. Learn more!
Rootclaim helps people understand complex issues by combining the power of crowdsourced information with the mathematical validity of statistics.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 was divided, one half awarded to Roger Penrose "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity", the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our…
These tiny insects kill more than 1,000,000 people every year
Radio signals from deep space: Astronomers including researchers at MIT have detected the first periodic fast radio burst from 500 million light years away.
