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Forbidden Spheres
A document from 1947 points towards an interesting Los Alamos policy: banning all spheres, innocuous or not, from technical areas.
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 4,455 posts.
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Why Does the Sunlight Always Come from the North in Shaded Relief Maps?
If you've got a sharp eye and a knack for details, you might have noticed the sun coming from an unrealistic angle in most shaded relief maps: the north. In this article we explain why.
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Space Emerging from Quantum Mechanics
The other day I was amused to find a quote from Einstein , in 1936, about how hard it would be to quantize gravity: “like an attempt to breathe in empty space.” Eight decades later, I think we can still agree that it’s hard.
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Greenland Sharks
Greenland shark swimming under an ice flow in the Canadian arctic WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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An interactive guide to Fourier series (2022)
Drawing with the Fourier Series
3187
A Peek into Einstein's Zurich Notebook
John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh This page at http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies
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New study simulates gravitational waves from failing warp drive
Warp drives are staples of science fiction, and in principle could propel spaceships faster than the speed of light. However, there are many problems with constructing them in practice, such as the requirement for an exotic type of matter with negative energy. Nevertheless, physicists have been exploring the…
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Understanding is a poor substitute for convexity (2012)
Something central, very central, is missing in historical accounts of scientific and technological discovery. The discourse and controversies focus on the role of luck as opposed to teleological programs (from telos, "aim"), that is, ones that rely on pre-set direction from formal science. This is a faux-debate: luck…
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Diabetes in mice cured rapidly using human stem cell strategy
New technique efficiently converts human stem cells into insulin-producing cells
3193
Book Review: The Body Keeps the Score
I. The Body Keeps The Score is a book about post-traumatic stress disorder. The author, Bessel van der Kolk, helped discover the condition and lobby for its inclusion in the DSM, and the brief fora…
3194
Opioids and the Labor Market (2018)
This paper finds evidence that opioid availability decreases labor force participation while a large labor market shock does not influence the share of opioid abusers. We first identify the effect of availability on participation using the geographic variation in opioid prescription rates. We use a combination of the…
3195
Parrondo's Paradox: How two ugly parents can make a beautiful baby
"How two ugly parents (mathematically) can make a beautiful baby"
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A laser-based process that enables adhesive-free paper packaging
Paper packaging offers a number of advantages over its plastic counterparts: It has a high recycling rate, lower CO₂ emissions, and lower disposal costs. However, it cannot yet be sealed without adhesives or layers of plastic—a disadvantage for manufacturing and recycling processes. In the PAPURE project, four…
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Ancient Stars Made Extraordinarily Heavy Elements (2023)
How heavy can an element be? Ancient stars were capable of producing elements heavier than any element on the periodic table found naturally on Earth.
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The inspection paradox is everywhere (2015)
I have updated this article with new data, better code, and friendlier data visualization. You can read the new version here . Th...
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AI predicts certain esophageal and stomach cancers three years before diagnosis
AI can predict certain forms of esophageal and stomach cancer Michigan Medicine study says.
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A Meta-Scientific Perspective on Thinking: Fast and Slow (2020)
2011 was an important year in the history of psychology, especially social psychology. First, it became apparent that one social psychologist had faked results for dozens of publications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel). Second, a highly respected journal published an article with the incredible claim…
3205
So You Think You Have a Power Law (2007)
Regular readers who care about such things — I think there are about three of you — will recall that I have long had a thing about just how unsound many of the claims for the presence of power law distributions in real data are, especially those made by theoretical physicists, who, with some honorable exceptions…
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Creating a Pluto flyby using unaligned New Horizons images
Last month, a few days before NASA’s New Horizons probe made its historic flyby of Pluto, I posted a GIF of it doing so to Reddit .
3208
My God, It’s Full of Dots
Please click or tap in the gray square below. It will fill with a jolly tableau of colored disks—first big blue ones, then somewhat smaller purple ones, and eventually lots of tiny red dots.
3209
Public's Dread of Nuclear Power Limits Its Deployment
In the ongoing effort to decarbonize U.S. energy production, one energy source often attracts great controversy.
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Aldous Huxley predicts Adderall and champions alternative therapies
If delivered today, the last of Huxley’s 7-part lecture series at MIT would probably be categorised under motivational talks or self-help strategies. It surv...