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Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
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Deriving the piano keyboard from biological principles using clustering
Once upon a time we were creatures in the wilderness and we evolved the ability to hear sounds. Now here's an interesting thing, if you hear a sound of frequency f and others of frequency 2f, 3f, etc then there's a good chance these sounds come from the same object, due to the physical principle of resonance . And so…
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Let's talk space toilets
You should have gone before you left Earth
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Interview on ”Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way”
Lambdaclass's blog about distributed systems, machine learning, compilers, operating systems, security and cryptography.
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Icy Moons Are Ocean Worlds
The best ice fishing in the Solar System is worth finding
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UK chemist on Elsevier's ban on textmining
This is the first post of probably several in my concern about textmining. You do NOT have to be a scientist to understand the point with total clarity. This topic is one of the most important I have written about this year. We are at a critical point where unless we take action our scholarly rights will be further…
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How strong would a magnetic field have to be to kill you?
There’s a great joke in Futurama, the cartoon comedy show, about a horror movie for robots. In the movie, a planet of robots is terrorized by a giant “non-metallic being” (a mons…
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Dana-Farberications at Harvard University
“Imagine what mistakes might be found in the raw data if anyone was allowed to look!” – Sholto David
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How people die vs. media coverage of death
Data collection and analysis by Hasan Al-Jamaly, Maximillian Siemers, Owen Shen, and Nicole Stone.
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How to build a brain – An introduction to neurophysiology for engineers
How does the brain work? While neuroscience provides insights on small-scale processes and overall behavior, we don’t know much for sure about the learning and processing algorithms in between. In this blog post, I will give an introduction to what we know. Let’s take an engineering perspective and play evolution: How…
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We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Is Probability Real?
Today, I want to address an issue with statements involving chance. To demonstrate, let’s first consider a statement that doesn’t involve chance:
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Feynman on Fermat's Last Theorem
I write about Startups, coding and Physics
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Temperature chart for the last 11,000 years
For the first time, researchers have put together all the climate data they have (from ice cores, coral, sediment drilling) into one chart that shows the “globa
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How To Deconstruct Almost Anything (1993)
This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind…
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Tritone Substitutions
A ‘tritone substitution’ is a popular trick for making your music sound more sophisticated. I’ll show you a couple of videos with lots of examples. But since I’m mathematici…
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NFL players: height and weight over time
An animated look at just how much bigger NFL players have gotten over time.
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The only skin care that works? science video response (2020)
Recently ASAP Science released a video called "The ONLY face cream that works! – according to science". A lot of people asked me to do a response, so here it is on YouTube (keep scrolling for the text…
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Getting a paper accepted
Page 1 Accepts, the Rest Avoids Rejection
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Cancer Progress: Much More Than You Wanted To Know (2018)
Official statistics say we are winning the War on Cancer. Cancer incidence rates, mortality rates, and five-year-survival rates have generally been moving in the right direction over the past few d…
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Guide to attending a space launch in person
Learn what it's like to attend a launch, which launches you can attend, how much it costs and other launch questions
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World map of the difference between solar and clock time
A better map of the difference between solar and standard time, and some trivia
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10 Years of Pomological Watercolors
A decade ago today I published a blog post calling for the US government to release its paintings of fruits. The Pomological Watercolor Collection, as I had recently come to know, is a beautiful and remarkable corpus of over 7,000 pictures of fruits and other biological specimens, made between the 1880s and 1940s…
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How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] In February 2021, a winter storm that swept through Texas caused one of the most severe power crises in American history. The cold weather created shockingly high electricity demands as people tried to keep their homes warm. But
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The contrarian physics podcast subculture
This is the story of how a circle of popular science communicators, who built their brands on championing free inquiry, worked to suppress scientific critique. Of how Eric Weinstein, the man who co…
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Is "colorectal cancer" rising in "young people"?
(Yes, but.)
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Dark Matter: The Situation Has Changed
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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The Latest On Intelligence
You may remember The Bell Curve. The book was published in 1994 by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, and it argued that IQ is largely determined by genetics and little by the environment. It...
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“Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry
(First, Some Background)