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An opinionated take on how to do important research that matters
An opinionated perspective on how to do important research that makes a difference (and sometimes win awards).
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 159 posts.
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The Economic Complexity of the Western Roman Empire
I am one of those people who think about the Roman Empire daily – possibly out of my worrying addiction to Crusader Kings III and similar games. I also spent some time working on estimating economic complexity , a neat measure that can be used to explain economic development trajectories. One fateful day, I was…
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Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging
An interactive data journalism piece exploring the rise of young-onset colorectal cancer, with population simulations, risk factors, and prevention information.
94
The Unreasonable Redundancy of Nature's Protein Folds
A Ligo research note on redundancy in natural protein fold space and what kind of data still carries signal.
95
Science Is Open Software
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…
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The Sloppification of Peptides
Nobody in the comments is real
97
A metallurgist's doubts about self-replicating probes
Thanks for this. These are the sorts of clearheaded questions that must be asked if discussions of advanced and/or extraterrestrial technologies are to move beyond pleasant speculation and “get real.”
98
Scientific datasets are riddled with copy-paste errors
Initial results from scanning through Excel files belonging to 600 published scientific papers.
99
Why Not Venus?
The planet next door may be rough, but it has a lot of atmosphere
100
The mystery animal on an ancient god's head
Several Egyptian gods are depicted with animal heads. Horus has a falcon head, Anubis has a jackal head, Thoth has an ibis head (except when he’s a baboon), and Set has…uhh, what is that, exactly? …
101
Neurons outside the brain
The three brains in our body
102
The Fall and Rise of Screwworm
Every spring, as sure as the seasons, and for generations unknown, screwworms began their annual march northward from their overwintering sanctuaries in Mexico and South Texas.
103
Wallace the 6 inch f/2.8 telescope, building it, and hiking with it
Hiking with Wallace, my 6" f/2.8 corrected dobsonian.
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Nicholas Polson has authored 258 academic papers in 2026 so far
Nicholas Polson has, by my count using his SSRN page, already written 258 working papers in 2026 alone. He’s already written (or at least published to SSRN), six papers today, August 26, 2026.
105
Will it be a golden age or a dark age for mathematics (and science)?
[This is a guest post by Francesco Maggi. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Large language models (LLMs) and the research systems b…
106
Google Street View in 2026
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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I'm going to cure my girlfriend's brain tumor
Launch of an experiment to use AI-Scientists to accelerate research of a "solved" disease.
108
Telescope Ranchers
Rockwood, Texas is home to a unique business, Starfront Observatories. Owner/operator Bray Falls hosts hundreds of other people’s telescopes in perfect conditio
109
The Entropy of a Markov Chain
A more explicit example
110
Wi-Wi is wireless time sync at 1 nanosecond
At NAB, I found a demo of Wi-Wi STAMP, a wireless time synchronization protocol that came out of Japan's NICT. Wi-Wi stands for Wireless 2Way interferometry, and it uses the 900 MHz band for picosecond-level time sync, and mm-level distance accuracy, in a tiny box, currently the size of a smartphone. The system is…
111
Image of our satellite-choked night skies
To create this composite image, photographer Brendan Larsen captured almost 600 photographs over a two-hour period and then manually stitched them together. Thi
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Saving Jet Fuel
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
113
Finding the best dog treat with statistics
I ran a pairwise-choice experiment on my Greyhound to rank his favorite treats, measure side bias, and accidentally turn bedtime snacks into a statistics problem.
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Notes from the SF peptide scene
Pulling together disparate thoughts from two weeks wandering around SF
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More Bounce to the Ounce
A love letter to the rocket that everyone is too chicken to build
116
Dolosse – a South African invention used over the world
All along the South African coast you find dolosse wherever coastal management is necessary to prevent tides and rough seas from eroding breakwaters, harbour walls, coastal construction. In Port El…
117
Can guitar frets perform multiplication?
I’m sure that some pictures are worth a thousand words, but others trigger a whole lot of puzzlement. Such was the case with the cover of a book I recently bought entitled Calculating with Tones: The Logarithmic Logic of Music:
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The Grid That Doubles the Strength of the Ground
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] The Port of Long Beach in Southern California is the second-busiest container seaport in the United States, a major gateway for goods flowing to and from the west coast. Together with its next door neighbor, the Port of Los Ange
119
Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years
Almost everything alive on the surface of this planet runs, ultimately, on sunlight. Plants capture light and turn it into sugar. Animals eat the plants.
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Drone Physics
Equations governing dynamics and control of a multirotor UAV