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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
In 2016, Olympus Camera made some buzz in the photo world when they claimed that their new camera was capable of an impressive 6.5 stops of stabilization and that the limiting factor was in fact th…
I built a prawn trap from lawyer cane, sticks and vine. Then I caught some prawns and ate them. Prawn (and fish) traps are simple traps designed to catch aquatic life due to their shape. It consist…
Earlier this year, I published a post showing our results of the interferometric imaging of Cassiopeia A and Cygnus A at 4.9 GHz with the Allen Telescope Array . Near the end of July, I decided to perform more interferometric observations of Cygnus A at a higher frequency, in order to obtain better resolution. I chose…
A common misconception about wings is that they need to have the classic airfoil shape to work. In reality, just about any surface can create lift and function as a wing.
Methylene blue is touted as yet another universal boost-all, fix-all drug, the ultimate biohacking tool. Find out why that's not exactly true.
The plane crashed and nobody checked the bodies
I hope everyone had a good weekend. I went on a hike. It was great. Statistics One of my great school regrets, next to “taking three years of business...
For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, I have been investigating elliptical and ovoid shapes. The Wikipedia article for Moss’s egg has a link to a tutorial on Euclidean Eggs by Freyja Hreinsdóttir which (amongst other things) describes how to construct the “four point egg”. I think it is a nicer shape than Moss’s…
Simulating an entire cell using kinetic parameters of reactions in a well-stirred environment
That Earth-circling U.S. military X-37B robotic space drone is closing in on a new long-duration record.
An interactive data journalism piece exploring the rise of young-onset colorectal cancer, with population simulations, risk factors, and prevention information.
With the concern that “Moore’s Law is dead,” new interest has grown for unconventional forms of computing. This includes:
A Ligo research note on redundancy in natural protein fold space and what kind of data still carries signal.
OR: How to eat fewer asparagus beetles
TL;DR: How to reason about people who are smarter than you. A few proposals, interspersed with reinforcement learning and humorous fiction. Ending on a surprising connection to logical inductors.
The Greeks found the minimum possible distance to the Sun is a few million miles. Today we'll see how the speed of light can provide a maximum distance.
Whither Major Depression?
TL;DR I claim that modern science is synonymous with open source software. This post explains why, why it matters, and what you can (and should) do next. Why do you care about (open source) software? - Everyone I spend a lot of my time working on software. I have been asked why software matters more times than I can…
The Manhattan Project, the US program to build an atomic bomb during WWII, is one of the most famous and widely known major government projects: a survey in 1999 ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb as the top news story of the 20th century. Virtually everyone knows that the project built the bombs that were dropped…
INTRODUCTION There are some overlaps in the effects of serotonergic psychedelic drugs such as LSD, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms and also the state of mind that newborn infants and young children ar…
Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as ‘null hypothesis testing’.
A couple of followups on a recent episode of In Our Time.
6.2k words, 29 minutes reading time
