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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 4,455 posts.
We employ deep multi-agent reinforcement learning to model the emergence of cooperation. The new notion of sequential social dilemmas allows us to model how rational agents interact, and arrive at more or less cooperative behaviours depending on the nature of the environment and the agents’ cognitive capacity. The…
First of all, don’t panic. I’m going to try in this post to introduce you to quantum field theory, which is probably the deepest and most intimidating set of…
Explore the science behind the headlines with our leading experts.
Rickover's famous speech about the distinction between academic (paper) reactors and practical reactors.
Updates on the ESA Gaia mission
The sound made by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 was so loud it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and wa
Novel "photonic latch" technology paves the way for ultra-fast, light-based computing for AI and data centers.
The way that most physicists teach and talk about partial differential equations is horrible, and has surprisingly big costs for the typical understanding of the foundations of the field even among professionals. The chief victims are students of thermodynamics and analytical mechanics, and I've me
Proposing technology for pure mathematics: curating concepts, constructs, theorems, & literature; precise symbolic language; automated computations...
Some notes about acquiring power that I wish I'd understood years ago.
A group of Hopkins students have a special gift just in time for Christmas for a 2-year-old with a rare genetic disorder
In Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), the Inuit people are known for carving portable maps out of driftwood to be used while navigating coastal waters. These pieces, which are small enough to be carried…
UC San Diego scientists find an auto-signaling mechanism driving the T cell anti-tumor response; findings may inspire new cancer therapeutics and biomarkers.
A study from MIT neuroscientists reveals how neurons in the brain’s retrosplenial cortex use both visual information and spatial feedback to encode specific landmarks that are useful for navigation.
I heard this morning about the death yesterday of Philip Anderson, at the age of 96. It’s not hard to make the case that Anderson was the most important condensed matter theorist of the twent…
For those who haven’t seen it: Aubrey de Grey, better known to the world as a radical life extension researcher, on Sunday posted a preprint on the arXiv claiming to prove that the chromatic …
Shocking new research confirms the ancient Carthaginians ritually sacrificed children as offerings to the gods, overturning decades of denial. Uncover the dark secrets of this long-forgotten civilisation.
April 10, 2023. The backlash was immediate after I spoke at the 2016 Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism , which bills itself as a “celebration of science and critical thinking.” Although the conference had allotted me 10 minutes for questions, the stage manager, Jamy
No, but they’re probably good for you.
[Edit May 2024: This concept was republished in Asterisk Magazine.] Just a couple of hours drive east of Los Angeles lies the Imperial Valley, home to Palm Springs, some of the most productive agri…
How many deaths make a natural disaster newsworthy?
Out there in the wider world—OK, OK, among Luboš Motl, and a few others who comment on this blog—there appears to be a widespread opinion that P≠NP is just “a fashionable dogma of…
Ensemble averages and time averages
On 9 July 1925, in a letter to Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg revealed his new ideas, which were to revolutionise physics
