1981
Lab-made? CoV2 genealogy through the lens of gain-of-function research
Virologists have created dozens of chimeric coronaviruses in the lab over the past 20 years.
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
1982
Reconstruction of a Train Wreck: How Priming Research Went off the Rails
This blog post focusses on Chapter 4 about Implicit Priming in Kahneman's book "Thinking" Fast and Slow." A review of the book and other chapters can be found here: https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-perspective-on-thinking-fast-and-slow/ Daniel Kahneman's response to this blog…
1983
Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success
[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness] I. “Culture is the secret of humanity’s success” sounds like the most vapid possible thesis. The Secret Of Our Success by …
1984
Everybody Jump
What would happen if everyone on earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant?
1985
The Carbohydrate Hypothesis of Obesity: a Critical Examination
Introduction I'd like to begin by emphasizing that carbohydrate restriction has helped many people lose body fat and improve their metabol...
1986
A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking
My book, Sous Vide for the Home Cook , came out in 2010. You can order the second edition directly from the US publisher. My book has over 200 delicious recipes for beef, pork, lamb, game, chicken, turkey, duck, fish, shellfish, vegetables, fruits, legumes, ice cream bases, sauces, and yogurt. I first cover the basics…
1987
UK Now Reports Myocarditis stratified by Age & Sex After Vaccine Or Sars-cov-2
Nature Medicine paper revisited: And it is shocking
1988
Time-Nuts -- Precise Time and Frequency for Amateurs
Time-Nuts ™ is a mailing list for amateurs who are interested in precise Time & Frequency. Topics include stability of quartz oscillators, measurements of rubidium and cesium atomic clocks, using WWVB, Loran-C, and GPS for long-term comparisons.
1989
Hubble
If the Hubble telescope were aimed at the Earth, how detailed would the images be?
1990
FedEx Bandwidth
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
1991
A Mole of Moles
What would happen if you were to gather a mole (unit of measurement) of moles (the small furry critter) in one place?
1992
1993
Reconstruction of a Train Wreck: How Priming Research Went off the Rails
This blog post focusses on Chapter 4 about Implicit Priming in Kahneman's book "Thinking" Fast and Slow." A review of the book and other chapters can be found here: https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-perspective-on-thinking-fast-and-slow/ Daniel Kahneman's response to this blog…
1994
Rosser’s Theorem via Turing machines
(Thanks to Amit Sahai for spurring me to write this post!) The Background We all remember Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem from kindergarten. This is the thing that, given a formal syste…
1995
Book Review: Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind
I. Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciou…
1996
Book Review: The Hungry Brain
[Content note: food, dieting, obesity] I. The Hungry Brain gives off a bit of a Malcolm Gladwell vibe, with its cutesy name and pop-neuroscience style. But don’t be fooled. Stephan Guyenet is…
1997
Schizophrenia: No Smoking Gun
[Note: despite how some people are spinning this, tobacco is still really really bad and you should not smoke it] I. Schizophrenics smoke. A lot. Depending on the study, about 60-80% of schizophren…
1998
The rise and fall of peer review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
1999
An Intuitive (and Short) Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem
Bayes’ theorem was the subject of a detailed article. The essay is good, but over 15,000 words long — here’s the condensed version for Bayesian newcomers like…
2000
Why FTL implies time travel
In science fiction, it is pretty standard fare to introduce some form of faster-than-light communication or travel. After all, space is big, and you can't write your swashbuckling Hornblower-in-space novel if you have to wait for a generation ship to crawl painfully slowly between the nearest stars,
2001
Why has nuclear power been a flop?
Nuclear is expensive, but it should be cheap
2002
2003
Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science
Attention conservation notice : Once, I was one of the authors of a paper on cellular automata . Lawyers for Wolfram Research Inc. threatened to sue me, my co-authors and our employer, because one of our citations referred to a certain mathematical proof, and they claimed the existence of this proof was a trade secret…
2004
California, Water You Doing?
[Epistemic status: Low confidence. I have found numbers and stared at them until they made sense to me, but I have no education in this area. Tell me if I’m wrong.] I. There has recently been…
2005
From 1,000,000 to Graham's Number
Graham's number is so big, we need a whole new set of tools to even discuss it.
2006
Pump Up the Storage
If we adopt solar and wind as major components of our energy infrastructure as we are weaned from fossil fuels, we have to solve the energy storage problem in a big way. An earlier post demonstrated that we do not likely possess enough materials in the world to simply build giant lead-acid (or nickel-based or…
2007
SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
The claim that “SSRIs don’t work” or “SSRIs are mostly just placebo” is most commonly associated with Irving Kirsch, a man with the awesome job title of “Associa…
2008
Flood Death Valley
Since Death Valley is below sea level could we dig a hole to the ocean and fill it up with water?
2009
Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers
I. It takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist. This is not always a good thing. You may have read about one or another of the “cardiologist caught falsifying test results and perf…
2010
Orbital Speed
What if a spacecraft slowed down on re-entry to just a few miles per hour using rocket boosters like the Mars-sky-crane? Would it negate the need for a heat shield?