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California Megafires Are Solvable
The basics on how we got to now, why it matters for all Americans, and how we can fix it together.
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 169 posts.
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Engineer Who Won the Nobel Prize Twice in Physics
American scientist John Bardeen is famous for the invention of transistor and the theory of superconductivity. Who will win Nobel Prize in 2022?
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The physics anomaly no one talks about: What’s up with those neutrinos?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Imaging Cygnus a at 8.45 GHz with ATA
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…
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The Greedy Doctor Problem
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.
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Wav2vec Overview: Semi and Unsupervised Speech Recognition
A mid-depth cap with classic style for any occasion, this Nike Club Cap comes in smooth cotton twill that's been softly washed for casual, daily comfort. Soft and unstructured, the precurved bill makes for easy styling, and the adjustable back-strap lets you find the right fit. Nike Hat Size 6 1/2 6 5/8 6 3/4 6 7/8 7…
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Groundhog: Addressing the Threat That R Poses to Reproducible Research
R, the free and open source program for statistical computing, poses a substantial threat to the reproducibility of published research. This post explains the problem and introduces a solution. The…
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Evidence of fraud in an influential field experiment about dishonesty
This post is co-authored with a team of researchers who have chosen to remain anonymous. They uncovered most of the evidence reported in this post. These researchers are not connected in any way to…
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Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective
Texts on this and that.
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The agony and the ecstasy of deep brain stimulation surgery
What deep brain stimulation surgery feels like.
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The 8000th Busy Beaver number eludes ZF set theory (2016)
I’ve supervised a lot of great student projects in my nine years at MIT, but my inner nerdy teenager has never been as personally delighted by a project as it is right now. To…
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RNA Memory Hypothesis
There’s an old theory that memory is actually encoded in part in RNA. The argument is pretty simple: there’s no obvious way for all that sensory data to be captured in synapses as long …
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Prions
Editor’s Note 4/4/21: A few weeks after this article was published, a mysterious prion disease was identified in New Brunswick, Canada. I do not have to say that viruses have dominated every level of public conversation for the past year. Ancient and odd but relatively easy to talk about,
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Why can't we just give steroids to people with muscular dystrophy?
I like to start all my scientific inquiries off with really dumb questions. It makes life more fun. Here’s my latest: why can’t we just give steroids to people with muscular dystrophy?
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Computational algebraic geometry for high school students
Can high school students really learn algebraic geometry? And what could it teach us about mathematics education?
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Importance of muscle mass, strength and cardiorespiratory fitness for longevity
"If you have the aspiration of kicking ass when you're 85, you can't afford to be average when you're 50." —Peter Attia
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Expert help needed to decode rare piece of space history: Lunokhod data tapes
Blog di Paolo Attivissimo su Internet, social network, informatica e bufale
108
Tianwen-1 attitude in Mars orbit
It has been a while since the last time I wrote an update about Tianwen-1’s attitude . In that post I showed that Tianwen-1 had changed to a sun angle of 0 degrees with respect to the spacecraft’s X axis on 2020-10-22. Since then, nothing changed, even after the spacecraft arrived to Mars orbit on February 2021, so I…
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Jeanne Calment’s 122-year old longevity record may be fake (2018)
Did Jeanne’s daughter get away with stealing her mother’s identity?
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Omicron Update: Nov 27
There is a lot of anxiety.
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“The Martian” + Starship
“The Martian” by Andy Weir, and its film adaptation directed by Ridley Scott, remain some of my all time favorite science fiction works. Way back in the day I wrote a technical commenta…
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Grand mosaic of the Milky Way is now larger than ever
This blog is all about astrophotography and it works mainly as an imaging diary. J-P Metsavainio is a Finnish astrophotographer,
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Greens: why we eat the leaves that we do (2013)
Jeanne reveals which branches of the evolutionary tree of plants bear edible leaves and speculates about why that is. Most of the 300,000 + plant species have leaves, and the function of all of the…
117
A Chemical Hunger: Mysteries
The study of obesity is the study of mysteries.
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Alcohol, health, and the ruthless logic of the Asian flush
Why did the Asian flush evolve? What does this say about alcoholism? What does this have to do with Odysseus?
119
In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)
examines claims that the big five personality traits is more scientifically valid than the myers briggs personality indicator
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How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
In early spring 2020, I reported an article for The New York Times on which I put the tentative headline: “New Coronavirus Is ‘Clearly Not…