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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 4,455 posts.
More green spaces were associated with slower biological aging, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. People who lived near more green spaces were biologically 2.5 years younger, on average, than those who live near less greenness.
Crisps and mash owe their existence to a series of precise events that took place nine million years ago.
Blood is pumped from the heart through arteries to the hoof and is assisted in its return through a “pumping mechanism” in the hoof. This mechanism is necessary due to the position of the hoof in relation to the heart. There are no muscles in the lower leg or hoof to aid in the return of venous blood to the heart…
We can define roundness in many ways. For example, as you may know, the circle is the shape that given a fixed perimeter maximizes the area. This definition has many problems. One of the problems is that countries generally have chaotic perimeters (also known as borders), so they tend to be much longer than they seem…
This is in complete contrast to companies. The Google boys in the back garage so to speak with ideas of the search engine, were no doubt promoting all kinds of crazy ideas and maybe having even crazy people around them.
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is replacing the current version of the PubMed database with a newly re-designed version. The new version is now live and can be found at You can still acces…
Eating protein and vegetables before carbohydrates leads to lower post-meal glucose and insulin levels in obese patients with type 2 diabetes.
New research proves comb jellies are a unique lineage or “sibling group” whose ancestors diverged before the common ancestor of all other animals.
John D. Cook, Greg Egan, Dan Piponi and I had a fun mathematical adventure on Twitter. It started when John Cook wrote a program to compute the probability distribution of distances $latex |xy R…
You might already know that atoms are mostly empty space. Physical size behaves a bit weirdly at the atomic scale, but essentially the radius of an atom’s nucleus is tens of thousands of times smal…
Physics researchers from Drexel University at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory led the production of the unique neutrino-based image of the Milky Way Galaxy using particles of matter instead of the usual electromagnetic energy.
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
Observations on Frank Herbert’s 𝐷𝑢𝑛𝑒 series—the notes are probably overstated, the Butlerian Jihad was 𝑛𝑜𝑡 a robot uprising seeking to exterminate humanity, and precognition/prescience in the Dune universe appears to work backwards allowing for retro-causality and stable time-loops as exemplified by Leto II’s Golden…
A mishap during an experiment led UNSW quantum computing researchers to crack a mystery that had stood since 1961.
Roger Highfield explores the beauty of mathematics at a recent event at the Science Museum
Lagrange multipliers are used in multivariable calculus to find maxima and minima of a function subject to constraints (like "find the highest elevation along the given path" or "minimize the cost of materials for a box enclosing a given volume"). It's a useful technique, but all too often it is poorly taught and…
A Harvard study links chemicals used in flavored electronic cigarettes to cases of severe respiratory disease.
Follow Stephen Wolfram's evolution of research on the 2nd Law from early interest as a 12-year-old to his current findings in the Wolfram Physics Project. View a large collection of images of early and published works.
An examination of the software that powers modern Climate simulations.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in the body’s system for reward and pleasure. A recent trend has people avoiding stimulating activities in the belief that doing so allows the body to rese...
[Content Warning: Trying to understand the contents of this essay may be mind-warping. Proceed with caution. Featured image credit: Paul Nylander] Friends, right here and now, one quantum away, the…
As I write this post, New Horizons is nearing the end of a weeklong optical navigation campaign. The last optical navigation images in the weeklong series…
Update: a newer version of this little project helps you make your complaints about daylight saving time—whether they’re for or against it—with clearer messages about whether keeping DST, abolishing it, or making it permanent would be best for your daylight preferences. Give it a whirl over at Observable.
Last time we talked about free will, superintelligent predictors, and Dr. Evil planning to destroy the earth from his moon base. Today I'd like to talk about a more down-to-earth topic: time travel. The first point I have to make is one that Carl Sagan made: we're all time travelers—at the rate of one second per…
Fortran is a language that is specialized for high-performance computing. Believe it or not, it's still alive and evolving.
New study finds rumination can cause those with depression to get ‘stuck’ on thoughts, limiting their ability to mentally juggle options available to them when making decisions.
