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Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 4,455 posts.
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James Randi: This Cruel Farce Has To Stop
James Randi Educational Foundation
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Clocks, Kids, and General Relativity on Mt Rainier
In September 2005 (for the 50th anniversary of the atomic clock and 100th anniversary of the theory of relativity) we took several cesium clocks on a road trip to Mt Rainier; a family science experiment unlike anything you've seen before.
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A Classic of Soviet Engineering - The Typhoon-class sub
In one of my sailing classes, one of my shipmates was a Russian ex-navyman who served on a Delta IV class (designated
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A Rocket to Nowhere (2005)
The Space Shuttle Discovery is up in orbit, safely docked to the International Space Station, and for the next five days, astronauts will be busy figuring out whether it's safe for them to come home. In the meantime, the rest of the Shuttle fleet is grounded (confined to base, not allowed to play with its spacecraft…
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How much do rockets pollute?
Some might find it ironic that an organization like NASA, who studies our atmosphere, is ok with rockets polluting it so much. Or isn’t it weird that Elon Musk, the same person who is pushing sustainable energy with Tesla also has a rocket company that runs on fossil fuels? So today we are going to do a deep dive into…
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James Burke’s Connections: A BBC History of Innovation
Science historian James Burke’s entire iconic Connections series, tracing the origin of innovation, is now available for free online.
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The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)
An allegory against complacency about aging and death.
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Vaccines don't cause autism
The debate is essentially over and the final word is in: vaccines do not cause autism. The results of a rigorous study conducted over several years were just an
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How much is time wrong around the world? (2014)
Why Spaniards have dinner so late? A map of the difference between solar time and clock time around the world.
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Why I Am Not An Integrated Information Theorist (or, The Unconscious Expander)
Happy birthday to me! Recently, lots of people have been asking me what I think about IIT—no, not the Indian Institutes of Technology, but Integrated Information Theory, a widely-discussed &#…
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The calculus of caffeine consumption
Your life is the best story! Just start your blog today!
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Lead Poisoning and Rome
"The bellows are burned, the lead is consumed of the fire; the founder melteth in vain: for the wicked are not plucked away. Reprobate silver shall men call them, because the Lord hath rejected them."
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Calorie restrictive eating for longer life? The story we didn’t hear in the news
Junkfood Science - truth about food and health
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GPT-2 as step toward general intelligence (2019)
A machine learning researcher writes me in response to yesterday’s post, saying:I still think GPT-2 is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you bac…
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Insanely deep fractal zoom
I was really into fractals in college (I know…) when I was making rave flyers (I know!) for a friend’s parties in Iowa (I know! I know! Shut up already!). Anywa
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How to destroy the earth
Preamble Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe. You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing...
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If the Earth Stood Still
Learn how Earth's geography and the shape of the globe would transform if its rotation stopped. ArcGIS was used to perform complex raster analysis and volumetric computations, generating maps that visualize the results.
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Why aeroplane wings aren't dimpled like golf balls
Before explaining the purpose of dimples, we first need to understand the aerodynamic properties of a sphere. Let us start by looking at a smooth sphere without any dimples, like a ping-pong ball. If we lived in an ideal world without any friction, the air flowing around a smooth sphere would behave like that shown in…
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Galactic-Scale Energy (2011)
[ An updated treatment of this material appears in Chapter 1 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook , and also appears as part of an article in Nature Physics in 2022.]
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