61
Oliver Heaviside and the theory of transmission lines (2021)
(This is an adapted version of an article I wrote for the Dutch amateur radio magazine Electron , November 2021.)
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 202 posts.
62
Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff
Cliff-edged fitness functions and the evolution of schizophrenia
63
Understanding Solar Energy
The biggest energy story of the last fifteen years is the rise of solar photovoltaics, also known as solar PV or simply solar panels.
64
The Einstein AI Model
I shared a controversial take the other day at an event and I decided to write it down in a longer format: I’m afraid AI won't give us a compressed 21st century.
65
Satellogic's Open Satellite Feed
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
66
How to sequence your DNA for <$2k
a cheap and bloody experiment
67
I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia using machine learning
The Fall of Civilizations podcast put out a 6¾-hour episode on the history of the Mongol Empire, which I eagerly listened to. After finishing the episode I wondered about contemporary Mongolian society, I wanted to learn what the lands that the Mongol Empire exploded from are like in our current day. There are many…
68
Dead Stars Don’t Radiate
Three guys claim that any heavy chunk of matter emits Hawking radiation, even if it’s not a black hole: • Michael F. Wondrak, Walter D. van Suijlekom and Heino Falcke, Gravitational pair…
69
CDC officials’ resignation emails
The end of an era.
70
Predictions Scorecard, 2025 January 01
[You can follow me on social media: @rodneyabrooks.bsky.social and see my publications etc., at https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks ]
71
How does the US use water?
Water infrastructure often gets less attention and focus than other types of infrastructure.
72
Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in words of four letters or less (1999)
So, have a seat. Put your feet up. This may take some time. Can I get you some tea? Earl Grey? You got it.
73
Bending Spacetime in the Basement (1997)
Bending Spacetime in the Basement
74
Administering immunotherapy in the morning seems to matter. Why?
3k words, 14 minutes reading time
75
It's hard to build an oscillator
Especially if you want it to work.
76
Why you can't color calibrate deep space photos
Color is the most disputed part of astrophotography: Every image looks different and the internet is full of arguments over what colors are correct or natural.
77
Does X cause Y? An in-depth evidence review (2021)
This summarizes the frustratingly ambiguous state of the evidence for pretty much any "Does X cause Y?" question you might have.
78
CubeSats are fascinating learning tools for space
These are CubeSats. Satellites that are going to space—or at least, the ones I have here are prototypes. But these have one thing in common: they're all powered by either a Raspberry Pi, or a microcontroller. There are already Pis in space, like on Mark Rober's SatGus, on GASPACS, and the Astro Pis on the Space…
79
When Abandoned Mines Collapse
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] In December of 2024, a huge sinkhole opened up on I-80 near Wharton, New Jersey, creating massive traffic delays as crews worked to figure out what happened and get it fixed. Since then, it happened again in February 2025 and th
80
American solar farms
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
81
Getting a paper accepted
Page 1 Accepts, the Rest Avoids Rejection
82
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…
83
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…
84
Lead is still bad for your brain
Wait, wasn't this solved by the Romans? Anyway, my grandma ate lead paint and she was totally fine.
85
100 Years to Solve an Integral (2020)
The integral of sec(x) is well known to any beginners calculus student. Yet this integral was once a major outstanding maths problem. It was first introduced...
86
87
Who exactly needs to get approval from an institutional review board (IRB)?
IRB you kidding me?
88
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...
89
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.
90
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.