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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday
src= alt="Always has been astronaut meme" / "Wait, the singularity is just humans freaking out?" "Always has been." Everyone in San Francisco is talking about t
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Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 159 posts.
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Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants
An accessible deep dive into the science (⏱️ 30 min read)
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Artemis II is not safe to fly
On Wednesday, NASA will attempt to send four astronauts around the moon on a mission called Artemis II. This will be second flight of NASA’s SLS rocket, and the first time the 20-year-old Orion capsule flies with people on board.
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The bottleneck might be the air in the room
You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions. Then, somewhere in the second hour, the room quietly gets worse at making them. Not the people. The room.
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Why is the sky blue?
The internet’s default answer to “why is the sky blue?” is “Rayleigh scattering”. And that’s not wrong, but it’s also not very useful.
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I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis
I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis . It is an autoimmune disorder where your body’s normally helpful antibodies start acting strangely . This leads to inflammation in the brain. This blog briefly discusses some of my experience and prognosis.
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A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times
In a post entitled, “How Institutional Failures Undermine Trust in Science: The Case of a Landmark Study on Sustainability and Stock Returns,” Andy King (my collaborator on the project on scheduled post-publication review ) tells a disturbing story of the failure of the scholarly publication process :
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Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?
the question everyone is asking
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God sleeps in the minerals
I took this snapshot, and the rest of them, at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County’s Unearthed: Raw Beauty exhibition yesterday. Enjoy.
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A cryptography engineer's perspective on quantum computing timelines
The risk that cryptographically-relevant quantum computers materialize within the next few years is now high enough to be dispositive, unfortunately.
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How an oil refinery works
Though wind and solar continue to carve out larger and larger shares of world energy supply, the modern world still runs on petroleum, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
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Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You
An atlas of the vibrance of the real world
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How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?
We’ve documented more than 450 instances of apparent data manipulation in Thermo’s catalog
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If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it
[This is a guest post by Grant Sanderson. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] A sentiment echoing throughout the mathematics communit…
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Autoresearch on an old research idea
Yogesh Kumar's personal website
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The hidden engineering of runways
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] September 2025 was an unusually bad month for runway overruns in the US. On the night of September 24th, an Embraer 145 with 53 people on board landed long at the Roanoke-Blacksburg Regional Airport in Virginia, overshooting the
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The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] On the northern edge of Los Angeles, fresh water spills down two stark concrete chutes perched on the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, a place simply called The Cascades. It’s a deceptively simple-looking finish line: the
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The Mathocalypse
More Updates (Oct. 12): Jeffrey Ketchersid has used Claude Code agents to show that BusyBeaver(10) exceeds Graham’s number, beating the previous best result that BB(13) does so. In response t…
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Why vampires live forever
The modern longevity movement's obsession with blood transfusions makes perfect sense — if you accept that Peter Thiel and Bryan Johnson are vampires.
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Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals
OR: the long overdue forest fire
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Mathematics has changed. Let's act like it
[This is a guest post by Frank Calegari. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Why we should not be sad The release by OpenAI on Octobe…
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The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated
Some skepticism of vitamin D skepticism
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How to sequence your own DNA at home
I have now sequenced my own genome 5 times with an Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION. This means collecting them from a swab, prepping them for sequencing, running them through a sequencer, then doing analysis over them.
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Helium is hard to replace
The war in Iran, and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has unfortunately made us all familiar with details of the petroleum supply chain that we could formerly happily ignore.
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AI is dramatically accelerating AI research
If acceleration compounds, the naive extrapolation implies superintelligence within a year
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Loss of cell identity drives human aging: Two new papers
That’s What Biological (Epigenetic) Aging Clocks Are Measuring
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Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
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…
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It's all a blur
Designing a slightly sneaky blur filter and then poking holes in it.