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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 208 posts.
From vaccinations to climate change, getting science wrong has very real consequences. But journal articles, a primary way science is communicated in academia, are a different format to newspaper articles or blogs and require a level of skill and undoubtedly a greater amount of patience. Here Jennifer Raff has…
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted 23andMe authorization to offer ten genetic health risk reports including late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, celiac disease, and a condition associated with harmful blood clots. For several years, 23andMe has worked on demonstrating that its reports are…
Almost all life on earth is based on DNA being copied, or replicated, and understanding how this process works could lead to a wide range of discoveries in biology and medicine. Now for the first time scientists have been able to watch individual steps in the replication of a single DNA molecule, with some surprising…
STFC supports research in astronomy, physics, space science and operates world-class research facilities for the UK.
I’ve been talking a lot recently about how quantum algorithms don’t work. But last week JR Minkel, an editor at Scientific American, asked me to write a brief essay about how quantum al…
Patrick Winston is one of the greatest teachers at M.I.T., and for 27 years was Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (which later became part of CSAIL ).
There’s growing scientific consensus that one of the most common types of sugar, fructose, is toxic to the liver, just like alcohol.
Auto-Tune — one of modern history’s most reviled inventions — was an act of mathematical genius.
This package provides an essential feature to LaTeX that has been missing for too long. It adds a coffee stain to your documents. A lot of time can be saved by printing stains directly on the page rather than adding it manually.
Hopkins researchers identify specific exercise that boosts memory, attention
I was staring at a bonfire on a beach the other day and realized that I didn’t understand anything about fire and how it works. (For example: what determines its color?) So I looked up some s…
Light pollution is a rapidly growing problem. Most of the population in the United States cannot see the Milky Way. When I look up at the sky from Venice, California, I can see about 20 stars. The rest of the galaxy is hidden by an orange haze of light pollution. This guide talks about a method called ETTR or…
The Department of Applied Physics pursues vigorous research in physical sciences and creates important industrial applications.
[Previously in series: Antidepressant Pharmacogenomics: Much More Than You Wanted To Know; SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, etc. This is all preliminary and you should not take it as a rea…
Embracing your darker moods can actually make you feel better in the long run, psychologists find
This article was originally written in 2014, but has had some minor improvements in December 2017 and January 2018 when I received some useful feedback after the article had unexpectedly been posted on Hacker News in December 2017.
A light-by-light scattering candidate event measured in the ATLAS detector. (Image: ATLAS Collaboration/CERN) Geneva, 14 August 2017. Physicists from the ATLAS experiment at CERN have found the first direct evidence of high energy light-by-light scattering, a very rare process in which two photons – particles of light…
Yesterday Ryan Mandelbaum, at Gizmodo, posted a decidedly tongue-in-cheek piece about whether or not the universe is a computer simulation. (The piece was filed under the category “LOL.…
Heights are normally distributed because height is determined by many factors. But why are other things with many inputs not normally distributed?
[Epistemic status: Total wild speculation] I. The predictive processing model offers compelling accounts of autism and schizophrenia. But Surfing Uncertainty and related sources I’ve read are…
Lotfi Zadeh - professor emeritus, world-renowned computer scientist and leader of the college community - died on September 6, 2017 at the age of 96.
How close are we to building the hosts?
