Topics /
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 159 posts.
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.
Every once in a while the internet gets talking about Geometric Algebra (henceforth GA) and how it’s a new theory of math that fixes everything that’s wrong with linear algebra and multivariable calculus. When I come across this stance I am compelled to respond with something like: “wait wait, it’s not true! GA is…
Why launch costs aren't the reason it costs a fortune to do things in space
The trick that makes GHC’s ApplicativeDo optimization faster is structurally identical to how biologists predict RNA folding.
Weight limits, speed limits, fuel consumption at scale, and why trucks do the things that annoy you on the motorway.
A statistical test of whether the Sumerian King List's antediluvian reigns line up with paleoclimate events better than chance.
Math as cultural institution.
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] Late in the night of Valentine’s Day 2014, air monitors at an underground nuclear waste repository outside Carlsbad, New Mexico, detected the release of radioactive elements, including americium and plutonium, into the environme
I love quasicrystals—like crystals, but with patterns that never repeat, like Penrose tiles. But they’ve very rare in nature. They’re created only by the most exotic and violent e…
Semaglutide is a peptide. Your stomach’s entire job is to destroy peptides.
A visual and intuitive intro to complex number system providing a historical overview of how it was developed and why it is useful.
(This is an adapted version of part of an article I wrote for the Dutch amateur radio magazine Electron , August 2016.)
3 innovators reimagining how we fly
[This is a guest post by Jeremy Avigad. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] “Mathematics underwent, in the nineteenth century, …
ex program, en farm
You face certain challenges
Lately, I’ve been really into 3D printing along with asking myself what we can do with this technology now that it’s become, well, a technology. (At least, in the “this is a thing that can now be used, is robust, and is generally accessible to many people” sense of technology.) The first thing to print on a 3D printer…
Walking between the receiver and TV station causes a slight disturbance to the signal, but it's nothing to write home about:
You might already know that atoms are mostly empty space. Physical size behaves a bit weirdly at the atomic scale, but essentially the radius of an atom’s nucleus is tens of thousands of times smal…
ratios will be ratios
If you live in a major city, I can take a pretty good guess at one of your most common frustrations: traffic. In city driving, the journey is rarely better than the destination. In most cases, we just want to get where we’re going. Traffic is not just frustrating, but it has consequences to the envi
TerraPower in Mega Deal with Meta for Eight 345 MW Natrium Advanced Nuclear Plants DOE Awards $2.7 Billion for Uranium Enrichment Oklo, Meta Plan 1.2 GW Nuclear Energy Development in Southern Ohio …
I was inspired by Tom Scott’s excellent video and links here where he talks about a particular type of “Inogon” light used to guide ships through channels or harbours. The patent …
David Gruber wants to know what sperm whales are saying. He thinks it might actually be possible.
$\newcommand\of{\subseteq}\newcommand\N{\mathbb{N}}\newcommand\R{\mathbb{R}}\def\<#1>{\left\langle#1\right\rangle}\newcommand\Z{\mathbb{Z}}\newcommand\Q{\mathbb{Q}}\newcommand\ltomega{{{<}…
A visual description of the CIE 1931 colour spaces.
Mathematical research traditionally involves a small number of professional mathematicians working closely on difficult problems. However, I have long believed that there is a complementary way to …
