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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, has assembled a team of nine top European scientists for the research effort to build a computer model of a human brain. The Human Brain Project is in discussion with the EU for a £1billion (US$1.61 billion) grant.
Super short version: if you ride along with a low enough frequency soundwave at the speed of sound, you can trade reduced incoming particle velocity for increased incoming particle density; the dra…
Recently, a friend recommended BioGaia Prodentis to me. It is a DTC oral probiotic you can buy online that is supposedly good for oral health. I thought it would be interesting to do some sequencing to see what, if anything, it did to my oral microbiome.
Last week saw various reports about a rare stolen copy of a Columbus letter that had turned up in the Library of Congress and has now been restored to its Italian owners; a comparatively happy end …
What are "signal reflections", really? And do they matter in circuit design?
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.
I guess we should also include a Planet Nine mission (once confirmed) among the possibilities opened up by this technology. In fact, since that planet seems to be near aphelion (otherwise we should have found it), it should also be beyond the gravitational focus of the Sun and thus any mission there could double as a…
I. Allan Crossman calls parapsychology the control group for science. That is, in let’s say a drug testing experiment, you give some people the drug and they recover. That doesn’t tell …
Update: Sorry, but a commenter points out that this may just be an artifact of counting based on when most recently modified, not on original submission date. Numbers using original, not most recen…
You may be familiar with the term “hockey stick curve,” used describe a trend that has been flat/stable for a very long time, but shoots up at the end of the series in dramatic fashion, resembling the shape of a hockey stick. Hockey can be a violent sport, and it’s easy to get hurt by even one well-aimed swing…
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
I recently became aware of this article where a Google exec says - he’s serious - that ‘Nest owners should probably warn their guests that their conversations are being recorded’. That’s assuming the owners themselves are even aware of what these devices are doing, and the likely truth is that they do not. Like needy…
How Bell Labs supported itself between moonshots
In this post I'll describe how to sequence a human genome at home, something that's only recently become possible.
Somewhere below the Antarctic circle, I catch Tatiana, the waitress from the port side dining room, in a moment of leisure.
In the past few months, I’ve twice injured the same ankle while playing with my kids. This, perhaps combined with covid, led me to several indisputable realizations: I am mortal.Despite my se…
is it safe to travel these days?
Here is a cheap way to obtain a set of standard weights, for measuring weights up to about 100 gram, to an accuracy of about 0.5 gram : Use the coins of the currency of your country. Thus one can make use of the fact that these coins are fabricated in mass production, and because of that have not only a constant shape…
In my first post on a possible solution to COVID-19 I hypothesised that there would be gene deletion mutants to be found in the SARS-CoV-2 viral strains out in the world and that we would find them if we looked.
Principles of how pulse oximetry works explained without using complicated physics.
The 2019 paper “Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor” asserted that Google’s Sycamore quantum computer, with 53 qubits and a depth of 20, performed a specific computat…
Stephen Wolfram considers if numbers are actually required, the use of symbolics and the potential for the growing role of computational irreducibility.
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
OR: The mystery of the televised salad
In about 10 years, Apple has multiplied by 19 the number of transistors in its mobile processors. It corresponds roughly to a steady rate of improvement of 34% per year on the number of transistors, or a doubling every 2.5 years. In real dollars, an iPhone has roughly a constant price: the price tag of … Continue…
If AM radio antennas were as long as a quarter wavelength of the carrier signal, you'd need an antenna as long as a football field.
This is what our night sky is going to look like in 3.9 billion years: Wow! So what’s going on here? Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers at
