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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 4,455 posts.
Researchers at EPFL are assessing Switzerland’s solar power potential. Their results show that photovoltaic panels could be installed on more than half of the country’s 9.6 million rooftops. The resulting power would meet more than 40% of Swiss electricity demand.
You use L a T e X instead of a WYSIWYG word processing program because they can’t cope with the high quality required for publication. But your nice professional looking documents can be ruined because you insert the wrong type of figures. Bitmap figures are easily pixelated because the actual size is not always known…
The event that would eventually lead to Isaac Newton writing and publishing his magnum opus, the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), too…
If you click on this picture, you’ll see a zoomable image of the Milky Way with 84 million stars: But stars contribute only a tiny fraction of the total entropy in the observable Universe. If…
The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), an international committee headed by an EPFL professor, has just unveiled JPEG XS. With this new format, the image-compression process uses less energy, and higher-quality images can be sent with low latency over broadband networks like 5G. JPEG XS will have applications in…
A closer look at op-amp feedback loops and the stability criteria for circuits that use them.
[I am not a neuroscientist and apologize in advance for any errors in this article. A recent study came out contradicting some of the claims mentioned here. See here for study, this comment for som…
Tiny diatoms in the ocean are masters at capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the environment. They fix up to 20 percent of the Earth’s CO2. A research team at the University of Basel has now discovered a protein shell in these algae that is necessary for efficient CO2 fixation. This groundbreaking discovery can…
Tests at wastewater treatment plants in China revealed antibiotic-resistant bacteria were not only escaping purification but also breeding and spreading their dangerous cargo.
Treatment with the amino acid arginine enhanced the effectiveness of radiation therapy in cancer patients with brain metastases in a clinical trial from investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine and Angel H. Roffo Cancer Institute.
Hopkins engineers have created robots the size of a pencil tip intended to travel through the body to deliver medicine to infections inside a beating heart
My colleague Jed Sundwall wrote the guest post below to show you how one of the newest AWS Public Data Sets is being put to use. — Jeff; You can now access over 85,000 Landsat 8 scenes through our newest Public Data Set: Landsat on AWS. The scenes are all available in the landsat-pds bucket […]
New research identifies the genes necessary for zebrafish to regenerate their hearts after damage—work that could ultimately impact the recovery of human patients after heart attacks.
Archived MIT Admissions blog post 'Introducing Amino: Desktop Bioengineering for Everyone,' published October 13, 2015. Preserved for historical context; not maintained as current admissions policy.
Serendipity without physical proximity? Maybe, maybe not.
Scientists say the warming climate is triggering chemical reactions that leach toxic metals into once-pristine Arctic waters, degrading fish habitat, water quality, and life for local people.
Bureaucratic and logistical roadblocks, not the science, stand in our way
In 1965, I. J. Good described for the first time the notion of “intelligence explosion”, as it relates to artificial intelligence (AI):
The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) is the national association for amateur radio, connecting hams around the U.S. with news, information and resources.
TerraPower in Mega Deal with Meta for Eight 345 MW Natrium Advanced Nuclear Plants DOE Awards $2.7 Billion for Uranium Enrichment Oklo, Meta Plan 1.2 GW Nuclear Energy Development in Southern Ohio …
Many restaurants, theatres and offices are using infrared thermometers to get the country back to work. Multiple companies are advertising these as a way to ‘reassure’ employers and employees. In China, security guards have even been given infra-red spectacles in order to detect people with fever. But where’s the…
Human emissions of greenhouse gases are the primary driver of climate change. The world needs to decarbonize to reduce them.
Correlations are oft interpreted as evidence for causation; this is oft falsified; do causal graphs explain why this is so common, because the number of possible indirect paths greatly exceeds the direct paths necessary for useful manipulation?
Butterfly wing patterns have a basic plan to them, which is manipulated by non-coding regulatory DNA to create the diversity of wings seen in different species, according to new research.
