1261
Could the Earth be an evaporated gas giant planet?
Is Earth Potentially an Evaporated Gas Giant?
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
1262
Gödel's Theorem
A much-abused result in mathematical logic , supposed by many authors who don't understand it to support their own favored brand of rubbish, and even subjected to surprisingly rough handling by some who really should know better.
1263
Vitamin C is a bug that needs to be patched
So Maciej Cegłowski has updated his blog for the first time in four months. Upon encountering the novel task of "actually generating HTML", his gimcrack blogging software sprayed a couple random posts across his RSS feed, one of which was the venerable 2010 essay on scurvy in Antarctic exploration. Which, combined…
1264
My New Year’s Resolution – read a research paper every weekday
… and post a write-up on this blog. That sounds crazy of course – who has the time to read a paper every weekday? Let alone write it up! I’ve done it for each of the last two calendar y…
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1266
The biggest losers: Metabolic damage or constrained energy?
Did the Biggest Loser contestants really damage their metabolism or was something else going on?
1267
Nicotine (2016)
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
1268
What's wrong with social science and how to fix it
Replication, citations, power, incentives, and more.
1269
Can we make a black hole? And if we could, what could we do with it?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
1270
People took some potassium and lost some weight
In November 2021, we finished our series A Chemical Hunger, where we argue that the obesity epidemic is the result of environmental contaminants, and that one of those contaminants might be lithium…
1271
Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III
You’re reading Age of Invention, my newsletter on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation.
1272
Interstellar Mission to a Black Hole
If DM could form a BH at the center of a planet, wouldn’t that then collapse the planet into that BH, consuming it? Wouldn’t the same apply to stars, extinguishing them?
1273
The Reliability of Optical Disks
How long will burned CDs / DVDs / BluRays last?
1274
Hyperloop lets you travel on a resonant acoustic wave?
Elon Musk is a fascinating guy, and his Hyperloop concept equally so. Now that the details have started trickling out, almost in the form...
1275
Well, Actually – Physics Answers
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
1276
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.
1277
The Paris Pneumatic Clock Network (2018)
Douglas Self, clock, Pneumatic
1278
Photovoltaic growth: reality versus projections of the IEA
This is a guest blog by Auke Hoekstra, senior adviser electric mobility at the Eindhoven University of Technology and developer of agent-based models for electric vehicles and renewable energy adop…
1279
Getting a scientific prize for open-source software
Note An important acknowledgement for a different view of doing science: open, collaborative, and more than a proof of concept. A few days ago, Loïc Estève, Alexandre Gramfort, Olivier Grisel,...
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1281
A Molecular Near Miss
I’m thrilled to report that I’m a co-author of the article “ An ultra-stable gold-coordinated protein cage displaying reversible assembly “, which was recently published in Nature . This work is the result of an exciting collaboration between biochemists, physicists, structural biologists, mathematicians, and others…
1282
You need 16 times the sample size to estimate an interaction than a main effect
In causal inference, it is often important to study varying treatment effects: for example, a treatment could be more effective for men than for women, or for healthy than for unhealthy patients. Suppose a study is designed to have 80% power to detect a main effect at a 95% confidence level. Further suppose that…
1283
Covid-19: The T Cell Story
When COVID-19 burst on to the scene, tests quickly showed that the everyone was susceptible - no pre-existing antibodies were found that bound to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This led to dire predictions that over 80% of the population might eventually fall ill. Now more than six months in, this has not happened, and it does…
1284
Notes from the SF peptide scene
Pulling together disparate thoughts from two weeks wandering around SF
1285
Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
It’s become fairly common knowledge that Yellowstone National Park, in addition to being incredibly beautiful, is sitting on top of an enormous supervolcano that catastrophically erupts every few hundred thousand years.
1286
Requiem for a Solar Plant
"...requiring reconductoring of 1.71 miles at a cost of $795,150...limiting output to 3MW..."
1287
If a Meta AI model can read a brain-wide signal, why wouldn't the brain?
In 2023, Meta researchers were able to decode images in thoughts from the brain's magnetic fields. What if that's how the brain coordinates it's own global state?
1288
“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…
1289
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,
1290
More Bounce to the Ounce
A love letter to the rocket that everyone is too chicken to build