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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
I live in Seattle on a fairly wooded property. Every summer since we’ve moved here, we end up with swarms of fruit flies in the kitchen. They congregate around the compost bin and the fruit bowl (where there are always lots of bananas). We aren’t slobbish - I do the dishes and wipe down the counters every night, take…
I used AI in my plasma physics research and it didn’t go the way I expected.
A new paper in Psychological Science (.htm) reports a failure to replicate Study 2 of Ariely and Wertenbroch’s influential article entitled, “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Contr…
If you eschew hyperbole and hang in for the long haul, maintaining a discipline of understatement in the midst of a flashy neon world, you may be offered a modicum of credence when you make an extraordinary announcement.
The number of researchers and peer-review publications is growing exponentially. It has been estimated that the number of researchers in the world doubles every 16 years and the number of research outputs is increasing even faster. If you accept that published research papers are an accurate measure of our scientific…
Physicist: Black holes and space are both black, so there’s that. But while black holes tend to be very small, space is bonkers big and filled with just enough stuff to give astronomers thin…
Inspired by James McKee’s Trinity Hall prime, physics researcher Gilles Esposito-Farese (of the self-descriptive pangram) has worked out that this 2,258-digit prime number: 53084469288402965415857953902888840109250315594591772197851275320 59910735745658243457138160802170063601085186072703319516241231606…
A beginner's guide to longevity research
Stephen Wolfram takes a computational view of time, defining it abstractly, and the implications from computational irreducibility.
Scan Head STM Tips Vibration Isolation Electronics Software Scans Image Gallery Useful Links This project is my attempt to build a low-cost scanning tunneling microscope (STM) capable of atomic res…
Ernst Stuhlinger wrote this letter on May 6, 1970, to Sister Mary Jucunda, a nun who worked among the starving children of Kabwe, Zambia, in Africa, who questioned the value of space exploration. A…
As the first crop of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are being rolled out, we can start to see the light at the end of this pandemic tunnel. Still, in the US alone there will probably be another 200,000 deaths before we reach herd immunity. Further, as fast as this vaccine development and deployment was, it's not clear
Happy New Year, everyone! It was exactly two years ago that it first became publicly knowable—though most of us wouldn’t know for at least two more months—just how freakishly horr…
It’s still an open question
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] The essence of a bridge is not just that it goes over something, but that there’s clear space underneath for a river, railway, or road. Maybe this is already obvious to you, but bridges present a unique structural challenge. In
Designing a slightly sneaky blur filter and then poking holes in it.
This article answeres the questions of how to start a rocket engine and takes you on a deep dive into spark plugs, torch ignitors and more.
A playable disease simulation
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
Gentle readers, I have just wrapped up a fun side project that will be of great interest to a very small number of you. The result of one of the most technically demanding efforts of my career, I a…
Restoration of distorted images is one of the most interesting and important problems of image processing - from the theoretical, as well as from the practical point of view. There are especial cases: blurring due to incorrect focus and blurring due to movement - and these very defects, which each of you knows very…
A differential diagnosis for the weird and the awkward
Modifying the optical properties of biological tissues with tartrazine
Many public address systems emit a continuous near-ultrasonic sound that is used for system health monitoring.
The earth contains a lot of titanium - it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust.
The environmental and cognitive factors at play that have people eating more without realising.
A single intravenous dose of Ewingella americana achieved complete tumor elimination in 100% of treated animals, with no detectable toxicity—outperforming chemotherapy and immunotherapy.
The post after this one on “black rust” describes why you should heat the pan before applying oil for seasoning. This helps the seasoning to adhere and makes the pan pleasantly black.
Nine observations about what happens when you eat only potatoes
