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Artificial “muscles” achieve powerful pulling force
MIT researchers have created a fiber-based, lightweight, fast-acting artificial muscle that could be useful for robotics and for prosthetics.
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 4,455 posts.
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Space Shuttle Endeavour's 20-story vertical display
The California Science Center has begun the complex process of moving components into place for space shuttle Endeavour’s awe-inspiring vertical display.
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Euclid opens data treasure trove, offers glimpse of deep fields
On 19 March 2025, the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission released its first batch of survey data, including a preview of its deep fields. Here, hundreds of thousands of galaxies in different shapes and sizes take centre stage and show a glimpse of their large-scale organisation in the cosmic web.
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Rubin Observatory's first LSST Camera release: 500k galaxies in the COSMOS field
A new image from NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory offers a spectacularly deep view into a famous region of sky known as the COSMOS field. Located in the constellation Sextans, COSMOS is one of the most observed patches of the Universe — and Rubin’s new image adds a powerful new view of this well-known cosmic landmark.
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A Ring of Controversy Around a Black Hole Photo
[Note Added: Thanks to some great comments I’ve received, I’m continuing to add clarifying remarks to this post. You’ll find them in green.] It’s been a couple of months si…
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The mountain that weighed the Earth
Suppose you want to find out how much you weigh. It’s easy enough – get a scale, stand on it, and read the number. Now suppose you want to know how much the Earth weighs. You get out a scale and…hm…
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First evidence of social relationships between chimpanzees, gorillas: study
Drawn from more than 20 years of observations at Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo, a long-term study led by primatologist Crickette Sanz of Washington University in St. Louis documented social ties between individual chimpanzees and gorillas that persisted over years and across different contexts.
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Wikipedia graph mining: dynamic structure of collective memory
Wikipedia graph dynamic pattern discovery. Dynamic graph analysis in GraphX. Collective memory research. Gephi graph visualization.
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Science is political, and that's a bad thing
People who say “science is political” usually aren’t just stating facts - they’re trying to push something on you. Don’t let them
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Climeworks lays the foundation to scale up carbon dioxide removal significantly
Climeworks has signed groundbreaking agreements with Carbfix and ON Power to lay the foundation for a new plant that will significantly scale-up carbon...
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United flies passenger flight on sustainable aviation fuel supplying one engine
United Flies World’s First Passenger Flight On 100% Sustainable Aviation Fuel Supplying One Of Its Engines
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Powering the Mars Base
This post is part of the series on space topics. This post is not the last word on this topic. The usual caveats apply. I’m curious if you have strong opinions on different fuel mixes. A grow…
3916
A new method boosts wind farms’ energy output, without new equipment
MIT engineers have developed a method to increase wind farms’ energy output. Whereas individual turbines are typically controlled separately, the new approach models the wind flow of the entire collection of turbines and optimizes the control of individual units.
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How common was it for parents to lose a child?
The death of a young child has always been the most devastating tragedy mothers and fathers could experience. How common was it?
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Combating olive oil fraud with nuclear innovations
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is developing new and rapid methods to rapidly screen and authenticate the origin of foods like extra virgin olive oil.
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Cancer survival rates are misleading
UPDATE: I submitted a more formal version of this article to the UMAP Journal (Undergraduate Mathematics and Its Applications), which publishes articles that use mathematical modeling for real-world problems, often with a pedagogical or expository angle. A preprint is available on arXiv at…
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Sixth mass extinction: The era of ‘biological annihilation’
We read, with no small concern, a recent CNN article by John D. Sutter, columnist. He notes several statistics that should not be ignored, such as, “three-quarters of all species could disapp…
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What comes next: π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, ...?
I’m eager to summarize the (largely excellent) discussion of last week’s nightmares and to talk about what it all means. I’ll surely get to that in the next few days. But meanwhil…
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Autistic children with imaginary friends have better social skills
Results suggest that pretend play provides similar social benefits to autistic children as it does to neurotypical children.
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"Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People", 7 Years Later
In the post about GPT-4V, I mentioned the paper “Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People” (https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.00289) by Brenden Lake, Tomer Ullman, Joshua Tenenbaum, and Samuel Gershman.
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Keeping David MacKay's 'Sustainable Energy – without the hot air' up-to-date
As the anniversary of Sir David MacKay’s untimely death approaches, I think we should honour his memory by trying to update Sustainable Energy as a crowd-sourced project. I have made an initial attempt to suggest how we might develop the section on photovoltaics but others will want to suggest other
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Gravity assist maneuvers in space
Ingenious maneuvers by missions to go over the Sun, chase a comet and sail using the Sun.
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The Philosophy of Linear Algebra (2021)
Whenever a student wonders why linear algebra, matrices, and vectors are important, the response from teachers usually sounds like this: