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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 4,455 posts.
An analysis of data by researchers at Oxford Population Health’s Cancer Epidemiology Unit has shown that use of progestogen-only hormonal contraceptives is associated with a 20-30% higher risk of breast cancer. The results are published in PLOS Medicine.
Mathematics is famously concerned with numbers . However, most of the physical quantities that we encounter in everyday experience cannot be expressed as numbers alone.
UC Berkeley’s SETI@home, one of the most popular crowd-sourced research projects ever, turned up some 12 billion signals of interest. A lengthy analysis found 100 worth another look.
Being able to feel empathy and to take in the other person's perspective – these are two abilities through which we understand what is going on in the other person's mind. Although both terms are in constant circulation, it is still unclear what exactly they describe and constitute. Scientists at the Max Planck…
Development of fusion power, a carbon-free, combustion-free source of energy, is now on a faster track toward realization, thanks to a collaboration between MIT and a new private company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems. CFS will join with MIT to carry out rapid, staged research leading to a new generation of fusion…
There's an optical illusion known by names like the "lunar terminator paradox". This has much discussion and descriptions online, but none made sense in my head, so I wrote this program to figure out what was going on. The paradox:
A deep link between two seemingly unconnected areas of modern science - quantum physics and game theory - is described by researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Geneva in a paper published in Nature Communications.
The strange interactions of Selfhood and Multiplicity
With a portfolio of over 2,700 journals and 220,000 books, Springer is a global leader in academic and scientific publishing.
Dissolve MSG in water to form a saturated solution. Wait for small MSG crystals to form. Then, tie it to a string to let it grow bigger.
Read the latest news stories from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Discover breakthroughs, events, and campus updates.
A new randomized control trial tested personalized vitamin D supplementation based on blood test results.
It turns out that Earth is not a planet. Asteroid 2016 H03, first spotted on April 27, 2016, by the Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid survey telescope…
Another of history's great killers is on the chopping block
Noether's theorem is an amazing result which lets physicists get conserved quantities from symmetries of the laws of nature. Time translation symmetry gives conservation of energy; space translation symmetry gives conservation of momentum; rotation symmetry gives conservation of angular momentum, and so on.
Scientists are developing artificial photosynthesis to help make food production more energy-efficient here on Earth, and one day possibly on Mars
There was some wanking among the US foreign policy wonkosphere about the nuclear torpedo “accidentally” mentioned in a Russian news video. The device described in the leak is a megat…
Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) found that the Multiple Demand and Language brain systems encode specific code properties and uniquely align with machine-learned representations of code.
The idea of "statistical significance" has been a basic concept in introductory statistics courses for decades. If you spend any time lookin...
Spoiler alert: I found some intriguing patterns…
Solar engineers from UNSW's Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics have set a new world-record in solar energy efficiency, achieving an electricity conversion rate of over 40%.
Is mental illness a thing? What kind of thing is it?
Venus hosts brutal conditions today, but the planet may have once been more hospitable to life.
The history of superconducting materials has been a tale of two types: s-wave and d-wave. Now, Cornell researchers have discovered a possible third type: g-wave.
Map of the cognitive science, historical from 1930 to 2020 with prehistory and future prediction. Including Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics, Neuroscience, Biology and more.
I have just learned that Jean Bourgain passed away last week in Belgium, aged 64, after a prolonged battle with cancer. He and Eli Stein were the two mathematicians who most influenced my early ca…
