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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
Continuous glucose monitoring has been a thing for a while. It's a probe that sits just inside your body and measures blood glucose levels frequently. Obviously this is most useful for type 1 diabetics, who need to regulate their blood glucose manually.
Who's teaching doctors how to think?
If the first nuclear weapons test had been a flop, would the world be better or worse off?
From Medieval sword-fighters to Broca’s brains, or why the hand may hold the key to the link between creativity and mental illness.
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
[This is an excerpt from the Dance of the Possible: the mostly honest, completely irreverent guide to creativity] When you are known as a writer about creativity, people send you interesting things…
Hello there. This is an open access book entitled: “Romeo and Julia, where Romeo is Basic Statistics”. So I guess it’s gonna be about a programming language named Julia and its usage for basic statistics.
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…
How the veneer of AI is used to legitimize awful ideas
Jacob Collier is the internet’s favorite musical virtuoso. Here’s his mostly acapella arrangement of a Christmas carol called “In The Bleak Midwinter.” The most remarkable p…
Temperature is certainly a factor when growing ice spikes, and we have done experiments that show that spikes are more likely to form when the temperature is just below freezing (see the graphs below). I'm not entirely sure why this is so, but I suspect that the ice tube freezes shut before the tube gets very long if…
Last June I placed some photographic film into a tin cannister with a small hole punched into its side. The tin cannister was then attached to a clothes pole in my backgarden and left.
In French, the word for potato is pomme de terre. This literally translates to apple of the earth. By this logic, potatoes are the lowest-hanging fruit of all. More seriously: We keep getting more …
About a million years ago, I was discussing the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) ontology with its early proponents. It allowed you to define a machine-readable semantic relationship like "Alice is married to Bill" and "Bill is Carol's child" and "Carol works for David". That sort of thing. At the time, all the FOAF…
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
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
Once upon a time, years ago, I was driving through a number of stop/go traffic waves on SR 520 at rush hour in Seattle. I decided to try something. On a day when I immediately started hitting the usual "waves" of stopped cars, I decided to drive smoothly. Rather than repeatedly rushing ahead with everyone else, only…
You use L a T e X instead of a WYSIWYG word processing program because they can’t cope with the high quality required for publication. But your nice professional looking documents can be ruined because you insert the wrong type of figures. Bitmap figures are easily pixelated because the actual size is not always known…
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…
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…
A closer look at op-amp feedback loops and the stability criteria for circuits that use them.
[I am not a neuroscientist and apologize in advance for any errors in this article. A recent study came out contradicting some of the claims mentioned here. See here for study, this comment for som…
Serendipity without physical proximity? Maybe, maybe not.
Bureaucratic and logistical roadblocks, not the science, stand in our way
In 1965, I. J. Good described for the first time the notion of “intelligence explosion”, as it relates to artificial intelligence (AI):
