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The Seal Failure in the SRB That Doomed Challenger (2021)
Update 7-15-2024 : This article suddenly saw a brief spike of enormous readership in July of 2024! It became the all-time most-viewed-ever...
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 179 posts.
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When will the eclipse happen? A multimillennium tale of computation
Wolfram tech and its dedicated website now easily predict eclipses. A look at advances in understanding and science from ancient eclipse data thousands of years old through current eclipse calculations.
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Can SpaceX land a rocket with 1/2 cm accuracy?
No. But they don’t need to. In preparation for the 5th test flight of Starship, SpaceX announced that they would try to catch the booster using “Mechazilla’s chopsticks.” Later du…
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A seventh-grader student found a beautiful proof to Thales' Theorem (2002)
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.
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A pro-science, pro-progress, techno-optimistic health textbook from 1929
"Science and The Way to Health" by Andress and Brown
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Turing's topological proof that every written alphabet is finite (2010)
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…
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Why I have resigned from the Royal Society
The Royal Society is a venerable institution founded in 1660, whose original members included such eminent men as Christopher Wren, Robert H...
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Humans 1, Chimps 0: Correcting the Record
Behavioural economics, data science and artificial intelligence.
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A review on protein language models
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…
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If I could dissect a sauropod
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…
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My Hour of Memoryless Lucidity
Yesterday, I had a coronectomy: the top halves of my bottom wisdom teeth were surgically removed. It was my first time being sedated, and I didn’t know what to expect. While I was unconscious…
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Quark Stars
Wow — evidence that very massive neutron stars may have cores made of deconfined quark matter! The idea of a ‘quark star’ is not new, but I didn’t know it was a serio…
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Derivative at a Discontinuity
Alok Singh's Blog
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Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript
(with thanks to René Zandbergen, Ray Clemens, Roger Easton, Claire Bowern, Bill Endres, and the curatorial and conservation staff at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library) I have some exc…
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Borges on Chaos Theory
About a weird, lovely short story
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An interactive guide to Fourier series (2022)
Drawing with the Fourier Series
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Those correction notices, in full
In light of our recent discussion of the unwillingness of authors of published papers to acknowledge their mistakes, I thought I’d post the four correction notices that I’ve felt the need to issue.
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Ten Noteworthy AI Research Papers of 2023
This year has felt distinctly different. I've been working in, on, and with machine learning and AI for over a decade, yet I can't recall a time when these fields were as popular and rapidly evolving as they have been this year. To conclude an eventful 2023 in machine learning and AI research, I'm excited to share 10…
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Legendre transform, better explained (2017)
The way that most physicists teach and talk about partial differential equations is horrible, and has surprisingly big costs for the typical understanding of the foundations of the field even among professionals. The chief victims are students of thermodynamics and analytical mechanics, and I've me
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A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest
[Edit May 2024: This concept was republished in Asterisk Magazine.] Just a couple of hours drive east of Los Angeles lies the Imperial Valley, home to Palm Springs, some of the most productive agri…
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Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
A wintertime climate change solution
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Scientists should use AI as a tool, not an oracle
How AI hype leads to flawed research that fuels more hype
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Origami-Inspired Phased Arrays Are Reshaping the Future of Antennas
Folding antennas into different shapes to create near infinite radiation patterns.
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Hacking physics from the back of a napkin (2020)
February 24, 2020. The computational power of a humble napkin is awesome. I discuss three napkin algorithms — dimensional analysis, Fermi estimates, and random walks — and use them to figure out why rain falls, the length of the E. coli genome, and the mass of a proton, among other things. These examples suggest a…