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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
Over the past week the station has been dedicated to an S-band scan looking for new targets and refreshing the frequency list, triggered by the recent launch of the mysterious ZUMA mission. This t…
The team at Terraform Industries is now 11 people working towards a near term future where atmospheric CO2, much of it centuries of unpriced industrial waste, becomes the preferred default source o…
This blog post focusses on Chapter 4 about Implicit Priming in Kahneman's book "Thinking" Fast and Slow." A review of the book and other chapters can be found here: https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-perspective-on-thinking-fast-and-slow/ Daniel Kahneman's response to this blog…
randomized and blinded, N=1
It's slow, expensive, the engineering is mostly port-a-potty chemistry, and the best-case outcome is that thirty years from now we’ll get to watch someone remotely operate a soil scoop from Mars instead of Pasadena
The internet’s default answer to “why is the sky blue?” is “Rayleigh scattering”. And that’s not wrong, but it’s also not very useful.
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It has been brought to my attention that I have never actually written this story down before, merely told it in person to many students for valuable lessons and also for laughs over cocktails. It is a litany of bad ideas from several people that all came together at once to reach out and zap … Continue reading "How I…
If you aren’t used to staring at math, Poisson’s equation looks a little intimidating:
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] In February of 2017, one of the largest spillways in the world, the one at Oroville Dam in northern California, was severely damaged during releases from heavy rain. You might remember this. I made a video about it, and then ano
I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis . It is an autoimmune disorder where your body’s normally helpful antibodies start acting strangely . This leads to inflammation in the brain. This blog briefly discusses some of my experience and prognosis.
This extraordinary view of the LMC might be the world's longest exposure image in amateur astronomy. 1060 hours were needed to capture this highly-resolved image (204 Megapixels) of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Scott Chacon is CEO of the online language learning company Chatterbug.
The story starts in Crosscord, the crossword Discord server. Over 5,000 users strong, the server has emerged as a central hub for the online crossword community, a buzzing, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes delightful town square where total noobs, veteran constructors, and champion solvers alike come together to talk…
Tons of words have been written about the Trump Administrations war on Science in Universities. But few people have asked what, exactly, is science? How does it work? Who are the scientists? What d…
Introduction A Note on Apollo I. The Rocket II. The Capsule III. The Orbit IV. Gateway V. The Lander VI. Refueling VII. Conclusion Notes
Interactive article explaining how ships float and maintain their stability.
Notice. Since this seems to be such a common question I think I should describe my background. I have a PhD in molecular microbiology and I was once a tenured academic (professor). I now work in the biotech sector. I have published a number of peer reviewed papers in virology. If you really want to know more about me…
In a post entitled, “How Institutional Failures Undermine Trust in Science: The Case of a Landmark Study on Sustainability and Stock Returns,” Andy King (my collaborator on the project on scheduled post-publication review ) tells a disturbing story of the failure of the scholarly publication process :
Intriguing title, no? These are the first eleven words of Neal Stephenson's novel Seveneves, which set up the remaining 600 pages as an extended treatise on the future of humanity as it copes with certain annihilation. I thoroughly recommend it, as long as you can deal with hundreds of pages of orbital mechanics. In…
I remember seeing once the following photo from Flickr, and having my brain melt slightly from trying to figure out what went wrong: The issue was the propeller was rotating as the camera detector 'read out', i.e. there was some motion during the exposure of the camera. This is an interesting thing to think about…
New British train station design identified as cellular automata rule 30. Generating rule-based patterns. And a website that lets you try it yourself.
Interactive article about Earth and Sun.
My dad emigrated from Colombia to North America when he was 18 looking looking for a better life. For my brother and I that meant a lot of standing outside in the cold. My dad’s preferred method of improving his lot was improving lots, and my brother and I were “voluntarily” recruited to help working on the buildings…
Why the air you breathe matters, and what to do about it.
30 Maps to Rethink the World
I happened to look at a slide deck from Sandia National Laboratories from 2007 that someone had posted on Reddit late last night (you know, as one does,...
This blog is all about astrophotography and it works mainly as an imaging diary. J-P Metsavainio is a Finnish astrophotographer,
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] This is the Carlsbad Desalination Plant outside of San Diego, California. It produces roughly ten percent of the area’s fresh water, around 50 million gallons or 23,000 cubic meters per day. Unlike most treatment plants that cle
