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Internal Combustion Engine
Interactive article explaining how an internal combustion engine works.
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 169 posts.
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How to grow sodium chloride crystals at home
After trying for 3 years, I found a way to grow transparent, high quality sodium chloride crystals at home. Here's my procedure.
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Conterintuitive facts in mathematics, CS, and physics
It is possible to compute over encrypted data without access to the secret key: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
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Curves and Surfaces
Interactive article explaining how curves and surfaces are modeled.
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Poisson's Equation
If you aren’t used to staring at math, Poisson’s equation looks a little intimidating:
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Naval Architecture
Interactive article explaining how ships float and maintain their stability.
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The health benefits of better air
Why the air you breathe matters, and what to do about it.
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Milky Way, 12 years, 1250 hours of exposures and 125 x 22 degrees of sky
This blog is all about astrophotography and it works mainly as an imaging diary. J-P Metsavainio is a Finnish astrophotographer,
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Reprojecting the Perseverance landing footage onto satellite imagery
The landing of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover last month amazed the world. The stunning footage of the descent shows each stage of the sequence. If you have not seen it already you can watch it here .
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How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation
The purpose of this article is to explain how to make a CPU out of rocks and sand as fast as possible without using too many words. As the world of proprietary hardware and software crushes in around us, we risk losing the ability to make things for ourselves as individuals. It is for this reason that I felt compelled…
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Why we're blind to the color blue
I'm always in the market for surprising facts. One of my favorites is that the color blue is always out of focus for the human eye. It's hard to believe since it appears that we see blue clearly, but it's astonishing when shown an example. Here', I'll explain why we're unable to focus on blue, and show examples of…
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Please commit more blatant academic fraud
This week, I was thrilled to read about the first well-documented case of explicit academic fraud in the artificial intelligence community. I hope that this is the beginning of a trend, and that other researchers will be inspired by their example and follow up by engaging in even more blatant...
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Helion
I’m delighted to be investing more in Helion. Helion is by far the most promising approach to fusion I’ve seen. David and Chris are two of the most impressive founders and builders (in the sense...
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Experiments on a $50 DIY air purifier (2020)
You can make a DIY air purifier in 30s. To test if it works, I generated smoke, and measured how well it removes tiny particles.
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How The Chronicle is trying to malign Sci-Hub
A new article was published in The Chronicle about me running Sci-Hub, a project dedicated to providing free access to academic journals all over the world. Their goal is to present Sci-Hub and its…
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CPM MagnaCut
CPM MagnaCut is a new stainless knife steel designed to be better than anything that has been available before. Is it a success?
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Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people? English adults under 60 who have watched the 1984 Ghostbusters movie are dying at twice the rate of people who have watched the 2021 Ghostbusters move the same age.And have been for six months. The chart may seem unbelievable or impossible but it is correct…
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Peer-reviewed papers are getting increasingly boring
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…
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Home-Built Scanning Tunneling Microscope (2015)
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…
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Chemistry of Cast-Iron Seasoning (2010)
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.
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What really happened at the Millennium Tower?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] The Millennium Tower is the tallest residential building in San Francisco, with 58 stories above the ground and 419 luxury condominium units. The tower opened to residents in 2009, but even before construction was finished, engi
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Movies every physics lover should watch (2020)
Biographical, time travel, quantum physics and philosophy films
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The Martians of Budapest
The Martians of Budapest”, sometimes referred to as simply “The Martians” is a colloquial term used to describe a group of prominent Hungarian physicists and mathematicians who emigrated to the United States following the Great Purge of 1933. The term refers to—what appeared, from the perspective of Americans—to be a…
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“Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors
Note: I link to a bunch of paywalled studies in this essay. Please do not use sci-hub to access them for free and do not use this trick (a) to easily redirect papers to sci-hub. For the clearest example of deliberate data manipulation, see how Walker edits out the data that contradicts his argument from the graph…
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A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes
People with the same big five personality types tend to be more happy, successful, intelligent, creative, and popular. Why aren’t there more tradeoffs?
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