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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 75 posts.
I remember seeing once the following photo from Flickr, and having my brain melt slightly from trying to figure out what went wrong: The issue was the propeller was rotating as the camera detector 'read out', i.e. there was some motion during the exposure of the camera. This is an interesting thing to think about…
Andy Howlett and Mark Williamson in our group have been developing fantastic software. It can read the whole scientific literature and analyse it in minute detail. One of the things we are starting with is chemistry. ChemVisitor (part of AMI2) can read chemical structure diagrams and chemical names and work out what…
Making a cheap and simple radar with a range of about 100 meters.
People often ask me "What good is Relativity?" It is a commonplace to think of Relativity as an abstract and highly arcane mathematical theory that has no consequences for everyday life. This is in fact far from the truth.
The Maersk Triple E is the largest ship on the planet, the pride and joy of the largest shipping company in the world. The ship was a huge hit with the public last year when it docked ...
It’s a huge surprise, and shows up in the most unlikely of places!
The Fermi Paradox: There should be 100,000 intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy — so why haven't we found any of them?
An animated look at just how much bigger NFL players have gotten over time.
There are two ways to teach quantum mechanics. The first way -- which for most physicists today is still the only way -- follows the historical order in which the ideas were discovered. So, you start with classical mechanics and electrodynamics, solving lots of grueling differential equations at every step. Then you…
The society (closed access) journal ‘Copeia’ also has these spider trap links in it’s HTML, e.g. on this contents page: http://www.asihcopeiaonline.org/toc/cope/2013/4
I’m not ashamed to say that I like root beer. There’s something about the herbal and woodsy flavors that I enjoy. It’s refreshing, but also a time machine. A sip of root beer brin…
Why are the loops on roller coasters never circular?
What is special about cylinders, and why do they have specific aspect ratios?
I saw an article on the Guardian website here on the 3D-printing of shapes which project interesting patterns of light. Ignoring the strangely forced Halloween reference, I thought this would be an interesting project to attempt for an arbitrary pattern, perhaps as a personalised lampshade. Buoyed by the continuing…
This article was discussed on Hacker News. Introduction How do we lose (or gain) weight? Is it really as simple as “calories in, calories out” (i.e., eat less than you burn), or i…
So this is a bit of a deviation from my normal MATLAB oriented posts. In-fact MATLAB was not used once in this analysis! I've been followi...
[ Metanote: This explanation arose out of a lunch-time discussion with a colleague who claimed a light saber could not exist since the light beam it emits could not just stop in mid-air after 75 cm. I thank this colleague for the challenge. ]
Imagine if a chemist told you offhandedly that the Russians had different chemical elements than we did. Here in America, we use elements like lithium and silicon and bismuth. We have figured out l…
Today another in my ongoing, seldom-updated series of posts about building my own backyard foundry. Today I’ll describe how the final step works: actually melting and pouring the metal. First…
Please forgive me for the lack of new content over the last five or so months. After my most recent post about neural networks and quadcopte...
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Watch how IKEA expanded around the world in this data visualisation
