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Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 164 posts.
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Delta-V: Designing the Asteroid Mining Ship 'Konstantin'
Chronicling the design of the spacecraft and systems depicted in the book, Delta-v, by Daniel Suarez:
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Our Immune System
(On this page in Dutch I post daily bits of realistic but hopeful Corona news. Here is a somehat rough translation of an article on our immune system I posted there, because I think it might also be useful for people that don’t speak Dutch). Wednesday, April 1st COVID-19 can only live thanks to us. Viruses cannot…
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What Is Life? (2019)
What is life? This question keeps many people awake at night and has led to rafts of definitions, some involving features (procreation, metabolism and so forth), some involving chemistry, entropy or energy flux and some are of a more philosophical bent. A BBC article noted there are over 100 definitions of life and it…
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Alien Signals
Memories of long-ago Sunday nights on the road.
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Neurons that fire together, wire together, but how?
Neurons that fire together, wire together... Ok, but how? One of my little pet projects is a neurology book for psychologists, coaches and the like. What most people in these fields imagine about the brain is somewhere between perplexing, preposterous and potentially poisonous. (Seriously, I could tell you stories...)…
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Don’t stage off Starship
Part of my series on countering misconceptions in space journalism. The SpaceX Starship is a game changer for space exploration. It is intended to be far bigger, cheaper, versatile, and available t…
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Do We Need a Theory of Everything?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Power Bends Light (2019)
Some notes about acquiring power that I wish I'd understood years ago.
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Philip Anderson 1923-2020
I heard this morning about the death yesterday of Philip Anderson, at the age of 96. It’s not hard to make the case that Anderson was the most important condensed matter theorist of the twent…
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Supersonic Electric Flight
This post is inspired by the recent press release about the Rolls Royce Accel, an experimental electric aircraft being built to attempt the electric speed record. Close friends know I’ve been…
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Scottish Nitroglycerin and One Legged Stools (2014)
Main Menu - click above Man, thermometer, one legged stool & vat of nitro 1870 . Alfred Nobel chose Ardeer, in Ayreshire, as the ...
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Diffing Coronaviruses
Comparing the genome sequences of the Wuhan coronavirus and a bat coronavirus using `diff` and NCBI BLAST reveals an 89% similarity.
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DARPA’s 23 Challenge Questions
DARPA challenges The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has issued 23 mathematical challenges. DARPA says the solution of any one of these challenges would have the effect of “…
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What if the Trinity test had failed?
If the first nuclear weapons test had been a flop, would the world be better or worse off?
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Crows’ ability to discriminate between languages
That crows can recognize humans faces (and other physical attributes) has been a staple of our experiences with them for thousands of years. It’s part of what has allowed them to take s…
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The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia
The event that would eventually lead to Isaac Newton writing and publishing his magnum opus, the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), too…
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Entropy in the Universe
If you click on this picture, you’ll see a zoomable image of the Milky Way with 84 million stars: But stars contribute only a tiny fraction of the total entropy in the observable Universe. If…
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Relationship between psychedelics, the brain, well-being, and creativity
Remarkable relationship between psychedelics, the brain, well-being, and creativity
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What is Electricity? (1996)
What is electricity? This question is impossible to answer because the word " Electricity " has several contradictory meanings. These different meanings are incompatible, and the contradictions confuse everyone. If you don't understand electricity, you're not alone. Even teachers, engineers, and scientists have a hard…
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Recovering Iran’s NOUR 01 ‘Military Satellite’
Iran’s new military satellite, NOUR 01, most interesting fact may not be that it resembles a college engineering experiment but rather that it may have a connection to a Mexican military payl…
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Feynman Lectures on the Strong Interactions
Available at the arXiv this evening is something quite fascinating. Jim Cline has posted course notes from Feynman’s last course, given in 1987-88 on QCD. There are also some audio files of a…
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Patriarch of Pandemics
In the last article we covered some of the historical pandemics that rocked the world - smallpox, typhoid, and the bubonic plague. We ended on a hopeful note - many of the pandemics that plagued the world in the past have faded, and that modern pandemics have been far less fatal than historical o