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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
[ Metanote: This explanation arose out of a lunch-time discussion with a colleague who claimed a light saber could not exist since the light beam it emits could not just stop in mid-air after 75 cm. I thank this colleague for the challenge. ]
Self-experiment with sub-psychedelic doses of LSD; no benefit
How to stabilize digital supply voltages - and why most of the online advice on this topic is suspect.
A common analogy for explaining gradient descent goes like the following: a person is stuck in the mountains during heavy fog, and must navigate their way down. The natural way they will approac......
Traditionally, mathematics research projects are conducted by a small number (typically one to five) of expert mathematicians, each of which are familiar enough with all aspects of the project that…
Welcome to this post, in which we’ll be taking a trip through the wild and bumpy ride that has been Vitamin D & sunlight research over the past few decades, and what it might mean for COVID-19. As with my previous post, before any non-specialist attempts to write something on COVID-19, we should wonder: are any actual…
In 1962. There — that answers the clickbaity title right away.
Similar posts from ClimateSanity Taking Measure of Biofuel Limits 9/24/2009 Biofuels Leading to Disasters 12/28/2011 Hartmut Michel won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on photosynthesis. …
The science of psychedelics is everywhere – but we should treat it with serious scepticism
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…
Here's what we can do with today's computing power (using publicly available data and the processing power of my own personal computer; I'm not relying on access to corporate computing power):
The Romans were undoubtedly master engineers. They were experts at civil engineering, building roads, improving sanitation, inventing Roman concrete, and constructing aqueducts that adhere to tolerances impressive even by today’s standards. Perhaps the best evidence of their aptitude is the fact that many of those…
4k words, 19 minutes reading time
One day on my drive home, I saw three towers. One of them had a bunch of blinking white lights, another one had red lights that kind of faded in and out, and the third one, well, it wasn't doing anything. I'm lucky to have a radio engineer for a dad, so Dad: why do some towers blink?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
This is an elaboration of my submission for the letter detection prize as part of the Vesuvius Challenge in June. It gets technical and esoteric but the first few paragraphs are of general interest…
“Science would become something like a parlor game. There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashion would get grants”
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
Bối cảnh cá cược thể thao của Việt Nam đang chứng kiến sự tăng trưởng đáng kể, được thúc đẩy bởi sự phổ biến ngày càng tăng của trò chơi. Khi ngày càng
On June 30, 2025, Mark Brittenham and Susan Hermiller uploaded a preprint to the arXiv called “Unknotting number is not additive under connected sum” (and an updated version on Septembe…
This article explains how to make antibiotics at home in the event of a collapse situation
The Apollo 13 astronauts were stranded in space. Their survival depended on if they could make a carbon dioxide absorber inside the spacecraft.
Summer of Math Exposition 3 - How does a computer/calculator compute logarithms?
