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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
Once in a while I come across an animated debate on health benefits of sugar vs. high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). It is enzymatically produced mixture of glucose and fructose that approximately matches the chemical composition of sucrose, aka sugar. It is not this debate that is my concern; rather,…
A blog dedicated to helping Science Fiction authors create and discuss worlds where a realistic setting can still serve the fiction.
Learn how alien intelligence connects to human intelligence through science and technology using the Principle of Computational Equivalence, the ruliad, rulial space, tiny spacecraft and the Wolfram Language.
A useful theorem attributed to the probably first mathematician ever, Thales of Miletus (ca. 624 BC-ca. 546 BC) is one of most elementary and intuitive ever stated.
Edited 8/16 to correct attributions to Alon and Boppana and to Tardos, thanks to an anonymous commenter for the correction Yesterday, Norbert Blum posted a preprint with a claimed proof that $latex…
In our previous installment of this podcast, we learned from independent researcher Alexey Guzey that famed sleep researcher Matthew Walker seems to have committed research misconduct in his bestselling book, Why We Sleep. Walker is a University of California professor, Google researcher, and Ted talk star, and his…
Timpani-horn interactions:
Question: At what point during the history of science did we discover outer space was a vacuum? I’m pretty sure it was before we actually went there, but when did we know for certain? — MC, Algoma, WI
[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
I’ve just uploaded to the arXiv the paper “Decomposing a factorial into large factors”. This paper studies the quantity $latex {t(N)}&fg=000000$, defined as the largest quanti…
Important Update (March 10): On deeper reflection, I probably don’t need to spend emotional energy refuting people like Chomsky, who believe that Large Language Models are just a laughable fa…
"Science and The Way to Health" by Andress and Brown
Recently one of my colleagues was reading Alan Turing’s groundbreaking 1936 article “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” This is the article in…
The Royal Society is a venerable institution founded in 1660, whose original members included such eminent men as Christopher Wren, Robert H...
In Steven Pinker’s guest post from last week, there’s one bit to which I never replied. Steve wrote: After all, in many areas Einstein was no Einstein. You [Scott] above all could speak…
Behavioural economics, data science and artificial intelligence.
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.
The National Organic Program (NOP) is now allowing the cancer-causing herbicide, glyphosate, in “organic” hydroponic production.
Last week, I wrote about how urban trees—or the lack thereof—can reveal income inequality. After writing that article, I was curious, could I actually see
The past week was a momentous occasion for protein structure prediction, structural biology at large, and in due time, may prove to be so for the whole of life sciences. CASP14, the conference for …
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…
Equations governing dynamics and control of a multirotor UAV
Based on the description of the book in the World Scientific Press catalogue, I asked my university library to order a book entitled Automat...
Protein “language” is a lot like human language. Given the similarities, researchers have been building and training language models on protein sequence data, replicating the success seen in other domains, with profound implications. In this post, I will explore how transformer models have been applied to protein data…
Luke Horton asked in a comment on a recent post: Given the chance to examine a titanosaur cadaver with your hypothetical army of anatomists, what would you look for first? *FACEPALM* How we’v…
Bill Thurston, who made fundamental contributions to our understanding of low-dimensional manifolds and related structures, died on Tuesday, aged 65. Perhaps Thurston’s best known achievement…
I just finished Oliver Sacks’ excellent Everything in Its Place. In it, he mentioned as an aside that the Ginkgo biloba tree is hundreds of millions of years old, and its phenotype has been practically frozen since then – a living fossil.
The study of obesity is the study of mysteries.
