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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 202 posts.
Moving electricity around the world has huge financial and environmental benefits. Unfortunately, current power transmission systems are both lossy and expensive to build. This post explores an alternative design for cables to make undersea power transmission substantially cheaper.
If DM could form a BH at the center of a planet, wouldn’t that then collapse the planet into that BH, consuming it? Wouldn’t the same apply to stars, extinguishing them?
"...requiring reconductoring of 1.71 miles at a cost of $795,150...limiting output to 3MW..."
In 2023, Meta researchers were able to decode images in thoughts from the brain's magnetic fields. What if that's how the brain coordinates it's own global state?
I have a side project to find the longest line of sight on the planet 1 using a novel Total Viewshed algorithm . At a resolution of 3 arc-seconds (~92m x 92m), the planet contains around 4.5 billion elevation samples 2 . Now obviously we don’t need to calculate the visibility between literally every single one of…
What's the meaning of "numbers" and "arithmetic operations"? We consult Georg Cantor's turtles and look at Giuseppe Peano's code.
I’ve just uploaded to the arXiv the paper “Decomposing a factorial into large factors”. This paper studies the quantity $latex {t(N)}&fg=000000$, defined as the largest quanti…
This article is about a new kind of simple computational rule ("LACE rules" running on LACE, the Link Automata Computing Engine platform) which, when applied locally on a grid of cells, demonstrates fascinating emergent "artificial life" behavior.
Contribution by Philip Ham: attractor.basic and Python implementation by Johan Bichel Lindegaard.
Some intuition about this topic can be developed without summoning the ghost of Pierre-Simon Laplace.
W. Jherek Swanger writes in his introduction to Camillo 7 Agrippa's "A Treatise on the Science of Arms, with a philosophical Dialogue (1553)" that:
John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh https://sites.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/jdnorton.html
Many electric cars will still have more than 80% of their initial capacity after 200,000 miles.
The lottery ticket hypothesis explains why massive neural networks succeed despite centuries of theory predicting they should fail
The geometry of random walks in high dimensions provides the power behind deep learning and may be the secret to intelligence.
Don't Become a Scientist!
JS Bach’s last set of works, collectively titled The Art of Fugue, was published shortly after his death. It was not a big hit. Dense counterpoint was deeply unfashionable at that time, as We…
Many publishers are getting nervous about infiltration by paper mills, who can torpedo a journal's reputation when they succeed in publis...
A dive into ERCOT data reveals how solar energy is driving down electricity costs for Texas
I have updated this article with new data, better code, and friendlier data visualization. You can read the new version here . Th...
If delivered today, the last of Huxley’s 7-part lecture series at MIT would probably be categorised under motivational talks or self-help strategies. It surv...
For a long time now fundamental theoretical physics has been suffering not just from a slowdown in progress, but from a sort of intellectual collapse (I wrote about this here a while back in the co…
One scientist did it twice
OR: the ideas your mother warned you about
No one does anything, the bar is lower than you think
I remember thinking at school when will I ever in my “real life” use maths. Well much to my utter surprise I’ve come to the stark realisation that there is a link between mathematics and crochet. …
Hamilton’s quaternion number system $latex {\mathbb{H}}&fg=000000$ is a non-commutative extension of the complex numbers, consisting of numbers of the form $latex {t + xi + yj + zk}&f…
A degree in mathematics might not save you from stacking boxes for a living.
