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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 384 posts.
New testing done at China’s Shidaowan nuclear power plant has confirmed its ability to be naturally cooled down, an industry-first milestone for achieving commercial-scale inherent safety, according to researchers.
Fossils of a new group of animal predators have been located in the Early Cambrian Sirius Passet fossil locality in North Greenland. These large worms may be some of the earliest carnivorous animals to have colonised the water column more than 518 million years ago, revealing a past dynasty of predators that…
The Great Green Wall being built in Africa to halt the southern progress of the Sahara Desert is a favorite public works project of mine — it’s massive, ambitio
When a country parson first described black holes in 1783, the concept was so ahead of its time it was mostly ignored.
Update 7-15-2024 : This article suddenly saw a brief spike of enormous readership in July of 2024! It became the all-time most-viewed-ever...
Wolfram tech and its dedicated website now easily predict eclipses. A look at advances in understanding and science from ancient eclipse data thousands of years old through current eclipse calculations.
No. But they don’t need to. In preparation for the 5th test flight of Starship, SpaceX announced that they would try to catch the booster using “Mechazilla’s chopsticks.” Later du…
Up until the late 1960s, physiologists believed that the maximum depth a person could descend to was determined by the depth at which their total lung capacity (TLC) was compressed to the same volume as their residual volume (RV) which is the smallest lung volume a person can breathe to. The TLC was predicted to be…
A useful theorem attributed to the probably first mathematician ever, Thales of Miletus (ca. 624 BC-ca. 546 BC) is one of most elementary and intuitive ever stated.
"Science and The Way to Health" by Andress and Brown
Recently one of my colleagues was reading Alan Turing’s groundbreaking 1936 article “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” This is the article in…
The Royal Society is a venerable institution founded in 1660, whose original members included such eminent men as Christopher Wren, Robert H...
Behavioural economics, data science and artificial intelligence.
Protein “language” is a lot like human language. Given the similarities, researchers have been building and training language models on protein sequence data, replicating the success seen in other domains, with profound implications. In this post, I will explore how transformer models have been applied to protein data…
Luke Horton asked in a comment on a recent post: Given the chance to examine a titanosaur cadaver with your hypothetical army of anatomists, what would you look for first? *FACEPALM* How we’v…
Liquid metal printing, developed by MIT researchers, rapidly creates 3D metal structures by depositing molten aluminum along into a bed filled with microscopic glass beads. The process can produce low-resolution objects like frames for chairs and tables in minutes.
Yesterday, I had a coronectomy: the top halves of my bottom wisdom teeth were surgically removed. It was my first time being sedated, and I didn’t know what to expect. While I was unconscious…
Wow — evidence that very massive neutron stars may have cores made of deconfined quark matter! The idea of a ‘quark star’ is not new, but I didn’t know it was a serio…
Some of the most perfectly preserved trilobite fossils ever found have revealed details of the extinct arthropod unknown until now.
In a new study , a molecule identified and synthesized by UCLA Health researchers was shown to restore cognitive functions in mice with symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease by effectively jumpstarting the brain's memory circuitry.
Alok Singh's Blog
<p>More than most technical procedures in the ancient world, drilling of hard stone such as quartz and granite has evoked […]</p>
MIT engineers built a solar-powered desalination system that produces large quantities of clean water despite variations in sunlight throughout the day. Because it requires no extra batteries, it offers a much more affordable way to produce drinking water, compared to other solar-driven designs.
(with thanks to René Zandbergen, Ray Clemens, Roger Easton, Claire Bowern, Bill Endres, and the curatorial and conservation staff at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library) I have some exc…
After years of research, TU/e scientists Jom Luiten and Peter Mutsaers and their team have successfully generated high-quality hard X-rays with a compact device.
