31
The Illustrated AlphaFold
A visual walkthrough of the AlphaFold3 architecture, with more details and diagrams than you were probably looking for.
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 179 posts.
32
Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?
How Machine-Readable Clinical Guidelines Can Help Standardize Cancer Care
33
A Revolution in Biology?
how developmental biology might contain the secrets to life, intelligence, and immortality
34
Batteries: How cheap can they get?
How dirt cheap batteries will completely transform our electricity grid, paving the way for solar and wind and replacing grid reinforcements with grid buffers.
35
36
37
Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle
AI, science, education, & ethics
38
20 Years of "Not Even Wrong"
The first entry on this blog was 20 years ago yesterday, first substantive one was 20 years ago tomorrow (first one that drew attacks on me as an incompetent was two days later). Back when I starte…
39
Yes, we did discover the Higgs
Ben Recht got my attention with a tweet about his blog post "The Higgs discovery did not take place.” I’m generally a fan of Ben’s writing, but I think he’s off base on a number of issues, and I’ll explain why. [Updated Oct 23rd, 2024] Ben's …
40
The world has probably passed peak pollution
Millions die prematurely from local air pollution, but we can reduce this number significantly.
41
42
Einstein went to his office just so he could walk home with Gödel
Albert Einstein used to say that he went to his office at the Institute for Advanced Study “just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt Gödel.” The two would meet at Einstein’s home each day between 10 and 11 and undertake the half-hour walk to the institute. At 1 or 2 in the afternoon they’d walk back…
43
What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
If you overheard the phrase "1 in a million chance" in someone else's casual conversation, what might they be talking about?
44
The Third Atomic Bomb
After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US Army Air Force had plans to drop a third bomb on August 19, 1945—with more to come if necessary. Fat Man bomb casing at the USAF Museum
45
Heat pumps, more than you wanted to know (2023)
Over the last few months, Baker and I have been digging in deep on Heat Pumps . I'm putting my explorations here on pause but wanted to write up everything we've learned over the last few months.
46
Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before it collapsed
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] On January 28, 2022, about an hour before dawn, the four-lane Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, collapsed without warning. Five vehicles, including an articulating bus, fell with the bridge, and another car drove o
47
Why does FM sound better than AM?
Frequency modulation (FM) is more robust to noise than amplitude modulation (AM) because static itself is primarily a form of amplitude modulation.
48
Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The story of EgyptAir flight 804
In 2016, an EgyptAir A320 spiraled into the Mediterranean, killing 66 people. Was it an act of sabotage, or something even scarier?
49
A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology
A guide to the operating principles, techniques and technology in lidar systems for self driving cars.
50
Is the frequency domain a real place?
Dissing Fourier, exploring the Hadamard-Walch transform, and making square-wave spectrograms.
51
Will we ever get fusion power?
“Every one of the stars in the sky uses fusion to generate enormous amounts of energy. Why shouldn’t we?”
52
The zombie misconception of theoretical computer science
In Michael Sipser’s Introduction to the Theory of Computation textbook, he has one Platonically perfect homework exercise, so perfect that I can reconstruct it from memory despite not having …
53
We Can Terraform the American West
Why is there almost nothing on the left hand side of the USA? Water scarcity! We’re missing 300 million Americans. We’re missing 30 global cities west of 100 degrees longitude. We shoul…
54
55
56
Hurried Thoughts: You're Wrong About Tidal-Locking
Space Engine ...
57
Satellites Spotting Aircraft
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
58
Physics for Mathematicians – Introduction
A blog about math by Nic Ford
59
Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra
EDIT: Be warned that this post is angry. If you’re easily offended when someone goes on a rant, then leave now because I’m very unforgiving in several places below. The tone of my writing is unusually harsh, but the people whose work I’m talking about deserve it, and here’s why. Even though I had been working with…
60
Cargo Airships Are Happening
I got something wrong; introducing Airship Industries