1201
Three Meanings of E=mc²
It’s so much more than mass-energy equivalence; it’s the key to unlocking the quantum Universe.
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
1202
World's shortest explanation of Gödel's theorem
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
1203
1204
Explanation of 44.1 kHz CD sampling rate
The CD sampling rate has to be larger than about 40 kHz to fulfill the Nyquist criterion that requires sampling at twice the maximum analog frequency, which is about 20 kHz for audio. The sampling frequency is chosen somewhat higher than the Nyquist rate since practical filters neede to prevent aliasing have a finite…
1205
Unparalleled Misalignments
This is a list of Unparalleled Misalignments, pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other. I've maintained this list since 2018; attributions (when known) can be seen on hover.
1206
Why is nuclear fusion so hard?
Why does water fall out of an inverted cup? Before considering nuclear fusion, let's consider something much more familiar. If you turn a...
1207
We're wasting money by only supporting gzip for raw DNA files
Stylised graphics of money with DNA helix in the foreground.
1208
The PhD Metagame: Don't try to reform science – not yet
Don't try to reform science. Not yet. Not in your PhD. In grad school, you'll start complaining about the publishing...
1209
A look at the Mojo language for bioinformatics
A look at a Mojo benchmark for bioinformatics, and Mojo in general.
1210
Age of Invisible Disasters (2017)
1400 words, 5 minutes. The Tay Bridge disaster occurred during a violent storm on 28th December 1879 when the first Tay Rail Bridge collapsed while a train was passing over it from Wormit to Dundee, killing all 70 people aboard.
1211
Google Street View in 2026
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
1212
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.
1213
1214
Lab Notebooks (2020)
What wet-lab chemistry can teach software engineers
1215
The World's 2.75B Buildings
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
1216
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
1217
The ABC conjecture has still not been proved
Five years ago, Cathy O’Neil laid out a perfectly cogent case for why the (at that point recent) claims by Shinichi Mochizuki should not (yet) be regarded as constituting a proof of the ABC conjecture. I have nothing further to add on the sociological aspects of mathematics discussed in that post, but I just wanted to…
1218
Expert help needed to decode rare piece of space history: Lunokhod data tapes
Blog di Paolo Attivissimo su Internet, social network, informatica e bufale
1219
All the hominins made tools
A study of associations between stone tool evidence and fossil hominin remains shows that a wide range of species made stone artifacts.
1220
Why does anything exist?
Why does anything exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? Would it not have been easier for there to be nothing at all?
1221
Why Is Light So Fast?
The speed of light is much faster, and the energy in ordinary objects far greater, than what daily life accustoms us to. Why? Step 1: new perspectives
1222
Can life emerge around a white dwarf?
Yes the tidal forces would be a problem with the Roche limit and Hill Sphere. The planet might break apart in the life belt around a white dwarf star or crash into the white dwarf. The planet has to be too close to the white dwarf to be in the life belt.
1223
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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…
1225
Jeanne Calment’s 122-year old longevity record may be fake (2018)
Did Jeanne’s daughter get away with stealing her mother’s identity?
1226
Ctcctcggcgggcacgtag is unique to both SARS-CoV-2 and Moderna's 2015/2016 patents
Using BLAST is easy. I'm going to show you how easy and how to prove that SARS-Cov-2 is man-made
1227
Peer review is an honor-based system (2008)
It would take too long to expose all of the flaws of peer review, here are some: some work is just flat wrong because the reviewers cannot analyze all of the mathematical results, and because they cannot redo the experiments; numerous researchers cheat, sometimes in small ways ("2 out of 3 experiments agree with by ……
1228
1229
Influenza A (H1N1) – How many bits does it take to kill a human? (2009)
I read a fantastic article in Nature magazine (vol 459, pp931-939 (18 June 2009)) that summarizes not only the current state of novel H1N1 (aka Swine Flu) understanding, but also a compares H1N1 against other flu strains. In particular, it discusses in-depth how the pathogenic components — i.e., the stuff that kills…
1230
Rat Park Experiment: A New Theory of Addiction
We all learned this in DARE class. About the rats in a cage who can self-administer morphine who get addicted to the stuff, and then just hit that lever until they die. A seemingly keystone...