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Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 169 posts.
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There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
1 post published by Georgia Ray on May 2, 2021
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The Dangers of Low Head Dams (2019)
Dams serve a wide variety of purposes from hydropower to flood control to storage of water for municipal and industrials uses. But when a dam’s useful purpose fades away, the structure itself still remains. Dams come in all shapes and sizes, but contrary to what you might think, the most dangerous d
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The Hypnotic World of Degenerate Spirals
Doga Tekin's website.
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When did computer science theory get so hard?
I posted on When did Math get so hard? a commenter pointed out that one can also ask When did Computer Science Theory Get so Hard? For t...
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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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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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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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Dark Matter: The Situation Has Changed
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science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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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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Noted study in psychology fails to replicate, crumbles with evidence of fraud
About 80 people pointed me to this post by Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, and Leif Nelson about a 2012 article, “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end.” Apparently some of the data in that paper were faked; see for example here:
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What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars?
Starlink is a point of departure to consider the costs of the unrelenting drive toward artificial illumination, a technological development most of us now take for granted.
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Steven Weinberg has died
I heard this morning the news that Steven Weinberg passed away yesterday at the age of 88. He was arguably the dominant figure in theoretical particle physics during its period of great success fr…
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Why does an A note sound different across instruments?
If you pull up a tuner app on your phone and play an A note on a piano, the tuner will say ~440 hz. Do the same thing on a violin's A note and you'll also get 440 hz.
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New Evidence Against the Standard Model of Cosmology
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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So you want to build a carbon capture company
Would you like to win one hundred million bucks from Elon Musk? Carbon capture (CC) is all the rage these days, with dozens of companies springing up to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and help stab…
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Science upside for Starship
This blog is a direct follow up of Starship Is Still Not Understood, and is part of the series on popular misconceptions in space journalism. Now available in audio form. I think it is relatively s…
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A lesser known mechanism for alcohol tolerance
People who drink a lot of alcohol have a high alcohol tolerance. By this, I mean two things:
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Advice for young scientists and curious people in general
In Advice to a Young Scientist, Nobel Prize-winning biologist Peter Medawar shares practical advice for people planning to embark on a career in the sciences—and curious people in general. Here, we summarize some of Medawar’s key insights.
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How to sequence your genome at home
In this post I'll describe how to sequence a human genome at home, something that's only recently become possible.
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How inevitable is the concept of numbers?
Stephen Wolfram considers if numbers are actually required, the use of symbolics and the potential for the growing role of computational irreducibility.
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Humble tokamak physicist owns generations of cosmological wankers
It’s not often I get excited about papers from the physics community. The field I used to love has turned into a dreary ghetto of noodle-theory wankers, experimental particle physics bureaucr…
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Powering the Lunar Base
NASA’s selection of SpaceX’s Starship within the Human Lander System (HLS) program was both surprising and exciting for space nerds all over. Previously I have written about how Starshi…
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What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t (2010)
If you regularly read cognitive science or psychology blogs (or even just the lowly New York Times!), you’ve probably heard of something called the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger e…
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A Visualization of Galactic Settlement
Oh good, Star Wars got it right. The Core will indeed be a nexus of galactic civilization.