Topics /
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
Most of the visual cortex studies I’ve read have been about mammalian vision. But mammals are not the only organisms with cortex, or at least tissue resembling cortex. This paper explores turtle visual cortex, in an area known as dCx. This dorsal region plays the role of the turtle primary vision center — as close as…
Cryptography tells us how to make a chain of trust rooted in special-purpose chips known as secure elements. But how do we come to trust our secure elements? I have been searching for solutions to this thorny supply chain problem . Ideally, one can directly inspect the construction of a chip, but any viable inspection…
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…
In a world without vegetable oil, we may be twenty pounds lighter, have half the amount of heart disease and cancer, live longer, think clearer, feel better, and be happier and less depressed.
A couple of months ago a new paper was released that examined the lead-crime hypothesis. Its conclusion is that there's little evidence for an association, and if there is one it's pretty small. I haven't commented on it, but not because of its negative conclusion. It's because the paper is a meta-analysis. I'm fairly…
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…
There are a bunch of things about this story that just don’t make a lot of sense to me.
2016 so far wins my lifetime award for most depressing and disturbing year ever (on the front of the larger world one reads about in the newspaper and elsewhere, personally things are fine, thanks)…
Memories of long-ago Sunday nights on the road.
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...)…
The mathematical field of information theory attempts to mathematically describe the concept of “information”. In the first two posts, we discussed the concepts of self-information and information entropy. In this post, we step through Shannon’s Source Coding Theorem to see how the information entropy of a probability…
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…
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
I’m a (50%) professor of mathematics and (50%) professor of molecular & cell biology at UC Berkeley. There have been plenty of days when I have spent the working hours with biologists and…
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
A 2017 cartoon from this post. After the embargo update (Oct 25): Now that I have some answers from the people involved let me make a quick update: 1) I still find the paper unconvincing, specific…
First of all, don’t panic. I’m going to try in this post to introduce you to quantum field theory, which is probably the deepest and most intimidating set of…
The sound made by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 was so loud it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and wa
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
Proposing technology for pure mathematics: curating concepts, constructs, theorems, & literature; precise symbolic language; automated computations...
Some notes about acquiring power that I wish I'd understood years ago.
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…
For those who haven’t seen it: Aubrey de Grey, better known to the world as a radical life extension researcher, on Sunday posted a preprint on the arXiv claiming to prove that the chromatic …
April 10, 2023. The backlash was immediate after I spoke at the 2016 Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism , which bills itself as a “celebration of science and critical thinking.” Although the conference had allotted me 10 minutes for questions, the stage manager, Jamy
No, but they’re probably good for you.
[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…
Out there in the wider world—OK, OK, among Luboš Motl, and a few others who comment on this blog—there appears to be a widespread opinion that P≠NP is just “a fashionable dogma of…
