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How Do Semiconductors Work? Introduction to SiliWiz
How SiliWiz helps you get an understanding of how semiconductors work and are manufactured
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 440 posts.
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Deteriorating mitochondria linked to major depression in older adults
'One problem feeds into another, and make what began as a small issue into a much larger one'
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Earth's blobs are remnants of an ancient planetary collision
In the 1980s, geophysicists made a startling discovery: Two continent-sized blobs of unusual material were found deep near the center of the Earth, one beneath the African continent and one beneath the Pacific Ocean.Each blob is twice the size of the moon, and research over the last decade has shown that they are…
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Pharmacokinetics: Drug development's broken stair
There’s a blog post that floats around the Internet about the metaphor of the broken stair.
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Mars will have a lot of wicker furniture
So we've landed on Mars, now we need somewhere to sit. It's pretty expensive to ship furniture from earth, so time to start building some chairs.
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Training immune cells to remove ‘trash’ helps resolve lung inflammation
Inflammation is a standard part of our bodies’ immune system response. But sometimes this response becomes hyperactivated in our lungs, causing inflammation to continue unchecked, which can be fatal. Many deaths from COVID-19 have been due to excessive inflammation, which results in acute lung injury.
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DIY Nitrogen TEA Laser (2020)
Abstract : in the cover image the homebuilt TEA nitrogen laser in use at PhyscsOpenLab. The entire l
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Passive radiative cooling ceramic with high solar reflectivity
A significant breakthrough in developing a passive radiative cooling (PRC) material has been announced by researchers at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) . The findings have just been published in the prestigious scientific journal Science titled “ Hierarchically structured passive radiative cooling ceramic with…
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How Correlated Are You?
This post is an offshoot from Chapter 1 of Probably Overthinking It, which is available for pre-order now! Suppose you measure the arm and leg lengths of 4082 people. You would expect those measurements to be correlated, and you would be right. In the ANSUR-II dataset, among male members of the armed forces, this…
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Scientists unveil fire-safe fuel
UC Riverside chemical engineers have designed a fuel that ignites only with the application of electric current. Since it doesn’t react to flames and cannot start accidental fires during storage or transport, it is a “safe” liquid fuel.
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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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The world needs computational social science
The world needs computational social science, and it is not only, or even primarily, about the AI revolution. The reasons follow below and I also cover what a computational social scientist should …
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The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
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Days of Awe: The clinical trial drug that might save my husband's life
"G’mar Chatimah Tovah” – May you be inscribed into the Book of Life
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Scientists document two separate reservoirs of latent HIV in patients
This research, led by UNC School of Medicine scientists Laura Kincer, Sarah Joseph,and Ron Swanstrom with international collaborators, shows that in addition to HIV’s ability to lay dormant in the blood/lymphoid system, the virus may also lay dormant in the central nervous system, delineating another challenge in…
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Squawk bots: Can generative AI lead us to understanding animals?
The Earth Species Project is using large language models to develop tools to decipher animal communication.
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Any type of hormonal contraceptive may increase risk of breast cancer
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.
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What Is Dimensional Analysis?
Mathematics is famously concerned with numbers . However, most of the physical quantities that we encounter in everyday experience cannot be expressed as numbers alone.
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Fiber-infused ink enables 3D-printed heart muscle to beat
The ink helps heart muscle cells align so that they can contract in coordination
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Aerobic exercise is good for the brain; easy wins for behaviour change
mood, memory, education; five easy wins for behaviour change
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Space travel via tether between asteroids
I wish I knew if my math was correct...
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11.8M CHF for clinical trials of novel arthritis repair
Swiss government and European Union award 11.8 million CHF for next generation clinical trials of novel arthritis repair. The researchers at the Department of Biomedicine, University of Basel and University Hospital Basel, are actively recruiting for clinical trials.
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Geneticists develop novel gene therapy for glaucoma
The gene therapeutic approach, which shows promise for treating age related macular degeneration (AMD), may also be effective in treating other eye conditions such as glaucoma. It provided benefit in three additional models of mitochondrial dysfunction, including cells taken from patients living with an optic…
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Research group detects a quantum entanglement wave for the first time
A team from Aalto University and the University of Jyväskylä have created an artificial quantum magnet featuring a quasiparticle made of entangled electrons, the triplon
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A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place
Explaining Y Combinator