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Mechanical Watch
Interactive article explaining how a mechanical watch works.
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,037 posts.
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Sound
Interactive article explaining how sound works.
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Bicycle
Interactive article explaining the physics of a bicycle.
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GPS
Interactive article explaining how GPS works.
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Gears
Interactive article explaining how mechanical gears work.
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Airfoil
Interactive article explaining the physics of an airfoil and what makes airplanes fly
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What an unprocessed photo looks like
The image isn't even black-and-white , it's gray-and-gray: While the sensor's ADC can theoretically output values from 0 to 16382, the data doesn't cover that whole range.
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Internal Combustion Engine
Interactive article explaining how an internal combustion engine works.
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Cameras and Lenses
Interactive article explaining how cameras and lenses work.
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Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier
The Wirecutter’s review of the IKEA air purifier is a mishmash of scientific errors, shoddy testing, and self-contradictory logic.
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Why is Chile so long?
Chile is so long, it's curved. How long is it? Why not longer? Why is no other country as thin? How does that make Chileans incomprehensible?
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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
src= alt="Always has been astronaut meme" / "Wait, the singularity is just humans freaking out?" "Always has been." Everyone in San Francisco is talking about t
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How to grow sodium chloride crystals at home
After trying for 3 years, I found a way to grow transparent, high quality sodium chloride crystals at home. Here's my procedure.
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I should have loved biology
In biology class, biology wasn't presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing.
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My $500M Mars rover mistake
Some mistakes feel worse than death.
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The cognitive costs of air pollution
Air pollution is a very big deal. Its adverse effects on numerous health outcomes and general mortality are widely documented . However, our understanding of its cognitive costs is more recent and those costs are almost certainly still significantly under-emphasized. For example, cognitive effects are not mentioned in…
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What Gödel Discovered
In 1931, a 25-year-old Kurt Gödel wrote a proof that turned mathematics upside down. The implication was so astounding, and his proof so elegant that it was...kind of funny. I wanted to share his discovery with you. Fair warning though, I’m not a mathematician; I’m a programmer. This means my understanding is…
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Going Critical
Learn how things spread with playable simulations
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Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants
An accessible deep dive into the science (⏱️ 30 min read)
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Conterintuitive facts in mathematics, CS, and physics
It is possible to compute over encrypted data without access to the secret key: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
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Artemis II is not safe to fly
On Wednesday, NASA will attempt to send four astronauts around the moon on a mission called Artemis II. This will be second flight of NASA’s SLS rocket, and the first time the 20-year-old Orion capsule flies with people on board.
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Curves and Surfaces
Interactive article explaining how curves and surfaces are modeled.
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CDC: Unpublished manuscripts mentioning certain topics must be pulled or revised
Any unpublished manuscript mentioning certain topics, including gender and "LGBT," must be pulled or revised.
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The bottleneck might be the air in the room
You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions. Then, somewhere in the second hour, the room quietly gets worse at making them. Not the people. The room.
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I found two identical packs of Skittles among 468 packs
This article was discussed on Hacker News, and was cited in The Mathematical Gazette. Introduction This is a follow-up to a post from earlier this year discussing the likelihood of encountering two…