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Making chicken transparent using Dorito dust
Modifying the optical properties of biological tissues with tartrazine
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 159 posts.
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Frog-derived gut bacterium eradicates tumors in mice
A single intravenous dose of Ewingella americana achieved complete tumor elimination in 100% of treated animals, with no detectable toxicity—outperforming chemotherapy and immunotherapy.
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Does creatine make you smarter?
And why does the brain use creatine anyway?
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Bird brains (2023)
A kea parrot in New Zealand learned to drag traffic cones onto a highway so cars would stop and humans would feed it. That sent me down a rabbit hole on how we actually measure bird intelligence.
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A digestion of the Jacobian conjecture counterexample
The notorious Jacobian conjecture can be formulated concretely over the complex numbers as follows. Conjecture 1 (Jacobian Conjecture) Let $latex {F:{\bf C}^n \rightarrow {\bf C}^n}&fg=000000$ …
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3.4M Solar Panels
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Six Math Essentials
Just a brief announcement that I have been working with Quanta Books to publish a short book in popular mathematics entitled “Six Math Essentials”, which will cover six of the fundament…
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Everything is logarithms
Some connections between things, which I have not seen elsewhere. Maybe they mean something?
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Insects don't swarm at LED lights
Remember when you used to encounter swarms of insects around outdoor electric lights? Their well known attraction to outdoor lights is used by entomologists and moth lovers to conduct insect surveys. All you need is a light and a white sheet to see who’s flying at night.
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The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
New : You can now watch a recording of my talk on my YouTube channel ! Or you can just click "play" below, I suppose.
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What's Earth's dominant species by mass?
You might have heard that all the ants in the world weigh as much combined as all the humans. That isn’t true. We outweigh ants 5 to 1.1 Termites might have us beat, though.2 Either way, it’s not r…
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L'Affaire Siloxane
How antiperspirant fumes nearly got NASA to evacuate the space station
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The Strongest El Niño Ever
With all the July runs in, dynamical models give a ~90% chance of a record-setting event
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The paper computer
Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes: I could write down a date that would…
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Some Unusual Trees
One of my favorite pastimes is exploring old bookstores.
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The bee that everyone wants to save
My neighbour has 50 hives, the road has 30 more. That's 4 million honeybees, and not one of them is the bee that actually needs saving.
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Simple circuits can create complex behaviors
How simple circuits can create complex behaviors
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I found ultra-pure quantum crystals in an abandoned mine in the Atacama desert
A Two Part Post on the Immense Promise and Ecological Tragedy of Natural Herbertsmithite Crystals
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I'm scared about biological computing
I’ve been in the AI space since ChatGPT first dropped. I’ve toyed around with a lot of Language Models, built random side projects, built a couple from scratch and I’ve spent hours looking at the math behind it all.
51
Aluminum foil (2021)
It’s typically 10 μm thick and 400 mm wide, giving it an aspect ratio of 40000 in that dimension, and rolls are commonly some ten meters in length, for an aspect ratio of 1 000 000; heavy-duty versions can reach 30 μm or more. Despite their thinness, foils of 25 μm or more are impermeable to oxygen, water, and light…
52
So you want to build a tunnel
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] It seems like homemade tunnels are kind of having a moment. Just about everywhere I look, it feels like someone is carving new spaces from the ground and documenting the process online. Colin Furze might be the quintessential ex
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Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools
For those of you who haven’t seen, there were actually two “bombshell” QC announcements this week. One, from Caltech, including friend-of-the-blog John Preskill, showed how to do quantum faul…
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What is the size of Yemen? (2024)
Uncovering a century-old misinformation
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Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)
Short answer: because math. Longer answer: because prime numbers don’t divide into each other evenly. To understand what follows, you need to know some facts about the physics of vibrating st…
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How does GPS work?
An interactive exploration of how GPS works: from the speed of light and trilateration to the cheap clock problem and Einstein's relativity corrections.
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Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet
Why controlling total luminance is a better bet
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The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem introduces an impressive result from OpenAI, who used an unreleased model to produce a resolution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of …
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Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?
A battery technology that’s getting a lot of attention is solid-state batteries, lithium-ion batteries that replace the liquid electrolyte with a solid material.
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Does that use a lot of energy?
This tool was designed to get a sense of the differences in energy consumption between different products. It's often difficult to understand whether activities matter a lot or very little for our overall energy consumption.