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Who exactly needs to get approval from an institutional review board (IRB)?
IRB you kidding me?
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
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The Big Data Brain Drain: Why Science is in Trouble
Update, August 2014: see Hacking Academia , my most recent reflection on this subject.
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Could dark matter not exist?
Is it possible that our problems indicate a flaw in the theory of gravity?
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The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science
Much of climate research is focused on implausible scenarios of the future, but implementing a course correction will be difficult
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Cheating on a string theory exam
You and your friend have watches which are synchronized to the second, and the proctors are used to him often finishing exams quickly and won't be suspicious if he leaves early. What is the largest value N such that you can guarantee that you answer at least N out of the 23 questions correctly?
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Exploring the Supply Chain of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 Vaccines
Sections of this post were co-authored by Cornelia Scheitz. Noah Leidinger created a German translation. Piotr Kwapin created a Polish translation. Last updated on February 7, 2021. Bert Hubert’s excellent and widely shared article about Reverse Engineering the source code of the Pfizer-BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine is…
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Feynman’s Maze-Running Story
Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor cues’.
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Quantum mechanics as a generalization of probability (2007)
There are two ways to teach quantum mechanics. The first way -- which for most physicists today is still the only way -- follows the historical order in which the ideas were discovered. So, you start with classical mechanics and electrodynamics, solving lots of grueling differential equations at every step. Then you…
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Elon Musk and the Hyperloop
For a while now there have been tantalizing hints that Elon Musk is at it again. His usual way of approaching a problem is to look at an industry, find some fatal flaw in it, fix that flaw and then leave everybody else in the dust, wondering why they didn’t do what he did. He’s one of the most interesting people on…
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We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube
the existential crisis we all share imagine this: you've just spent $640 billion training the chonkiest language model known to humanity (lol) and decide...
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We're not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon
[This post received first place in the 2024 Blog Extravaganza at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History. Many thanks, Adam!] I first had this thought in 2019, and I started this draft in ear…
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American Chemical Society bans university after "spider-trap" is clicked
The society (closed access) journal ‘Copeia’ also has these spider trap links in it’s HTML, e.g. on this contents page: http://www.asihcopeiaonline.org/toc/cope/2013/4
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Music and Geometry: Intervals and Scales
An article about music and geometry, in particular about musical intervals and scales and their geometric equivalent ...
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The flood that filled the Mediterranean Sea - in one year
"Zanclean Megaflood? What's that, a glam-rock band?"
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My biology paper in Science
Think I’m pranking you, right? You can see the paper right here (“Synthetic recombinase-based state machines in living cells,” by Nathaniel Roquet, Ava P. Soleimany, Alyssa C. Fer…
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What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond Ours
Stephen Wolfram explores how the number of neural connections affects capabilities like language and abstraction. How far we could go accounting for neural nets and LLMS, the fundamental nature of computation, neuroscience and the operation of brains.
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Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity
In this post I explain why today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their training.
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I simulated California housing and learned about simulators
Back in the early 2000s, XML was all the rage. An unusual evolution from HTML, which itself was an evolution (devolution?) from SGML, XML w...
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What it’s like to dissect a cadaver
Alok Singh's Blog
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Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II
As I noted in Part I, the general idea of using heat and steam for mechanical work had a long and continuous history back to ancient times. But when we talk of the breakthrough “steam engine” in the eighteenth-century sense, we don’t mean a machine that exploits steam’s expansive, or pushing force. We actually mean a…
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What Is Spacetime, Really?
On the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Stephen Wolfram discusses the nature of space and time, and fundamental theory of physics.
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Passing planes and other whoosh sounds
A blog about signals, programming, music, and other stuff.
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SpaceX's Texas Rocket Is Going to Cause a Lot More Damage Than Anyone Thinks
On Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a license for SpaceX to launch the first orbital test of Starship, the largest rocket in human history, as soon as this Monday, April 17th.
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Wind energy used to mine cryptocurrency to fund climate research
Wind energy used to mine cryptocurrency to fund climate research Oliver 2017