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Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 4,454 posts.
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The Remarkable Brain Waves of High Level Meditators [video]
What’s going on in the brains of people who meditate? Anecdotal evidence suggests that meditation does something to people’s minds and bodies…quiets and calms t
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First in-utero stem cell therapy for fetal spina bifida repair is safe: study
A UC Davis Health research team has safely performed the world’s first spina bifida treatment combining fetal surgery with stem cells, according to results from Phase 1 of an ongoing clinical trial. These results have been published today in The Lancet.
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Planes are still decades away from displacing most bird jobs
Note: Parts of this essay were written by GPT-3, so it might contain untrue facts. Introduction Many of my friends are extremely excited by planes, rockets, and helicopters. They keep showing me videos of planes flying at enormous speed, rockets taking off from the ground while creating fiery infernos around them, and…
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Get the location of the ISS using DNS
I love DNS esoterica. Weird little things that you can shove in the global directory to be distributed around the world instantly(ish). Domain names, like www.example.com usually resolve to servers. As much as we think of "the cloud" as being some intangible morass of ethereal Turing-machines floating in probability…
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Craig Venter has died
La Jolla, California—April 29, 2026—The J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) announced that J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., the Institute’s founder,...
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Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks
Tim Ferriss Intro Hundreds of people have asked me about Soylent, a controversial Silicon Valley team trying to replace food with a grayish liquid. “Does it really deliver all the nutrients the human body needs?” “Is it safe?” “Why hasn’t anyone tried this before?” [Hint: they have] And most often: “What do you think…
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Fossil fuels fall below 50% of US electricity for the first month on record
Record-high solar and wind bring the US to a clean power tipping point.
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Navier-Stokes Announcement
The Millennium Prize Problems were unveiled by the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) at a meeting in Paris in 2000 to celebrate “The Universality of Mathematical Thought”. These problems encapsulate some of the most difficult challenges that mathematicians were grappling with at the turn of the millennium. CMI’s…
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Does creatine make you smarter?
And why does the brain use creatine anyway?
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Bird brains (2023)
A kea parrot in New Zealand learned to drag traffic cones onto a highway so cars would stop and humans would feed it. That sent me down a rabbit hole on how we actually measure bird intelligence.
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Why cancer cells waste so much energy
MIT biologists have found a possible explanation for the Warburg effect, first seen in cancer cells in the 1920s. They found cancer cells use fermentation, an inefficient metabolic pathway, because it helps them to generate large quantities of a molecule called NAD+, which they need to synthesize DNA and other…
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Hospitals and universities repurposing drugs at lower cost
Universities and hospitals are repurposing existing drugs through late-stage trials with funded costs up to 90% lower than those taking place in the pharmaceutical industry.
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How pharmaceutical industry financial modelers think about rare diseases
How does industry decide whether curing your disease would be profitable, and how can you convince them it will be?
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LIGO Detects Gravitational Waves for Third Time
Newest LIGO observation provides clues about the spins, and possible origins, of binary black holes.
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Wireless devices go battery-free with new communication technique
University of Washington engineers have created a new wireless communication system that allows devices to interact with each other without relying on batteries
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Can you use a magnifying glass and moonlight to light a fire? (2016)
A magnifying glass concentrates light on a small spot. As many mischevious kids can tell you, a magnifying glass as small as a square inch in size can collect enough light to start a fire. A little Googling will tell you that the Sun is 400,000 times brighter than the Moon, so all we need is a 400,000-square-inch…
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Why haven't quantum computers factored 21 yet?
Craig Gidney's computer science blog
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GPT-4 and professional benchmarks: the wrong answer to the wrong question
OpenAI may have tested on the training data. Besides, human benchmarks are meaningless for bots.
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π in Other Universes
How the value of π depends on the definition of distance.
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Candle Flame Oscillations as a Clock
Todays candles have been optimized for millenia not to flicker. But it turns out when we bundle three of them together, we can undo all of these optimizations and the resulting triplet will start t…
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Average color of each country (using satellite imagery)
*Couple of weeks ago we have noticed the article getting attention around twitter. As it is using our WMS EOxMaps endpoint we have asked Erin Davis if we could host her idea here. At EOX we endorse brilliant and unique ideas that utilize our tools and data. Thank you for this most interesting contri ...
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CERN scientists find evidence of quantum entanglement in sheep
Update: did you enjoy our April Fool’s day story? While sheep do roam the CERN site and exhibit interesting flocking behaviour, no evidence has been found of their quantum entanglement (yet). However, CERN is participating in the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology . You can see the list of public…
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Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)
These tiny insects kill more than 1,000,000 people every year
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Impacts of lack of sleep
Sleep is important. People vastly underestimate the extent to which not sleeping is harmful, viewing it as a valid trade off for productivity and overlooking all of the longterm negative effects.
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ACM Is Now Open Access
As of January 1, 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library are now open access. This change reflects the long-standing and growing call across the global computing community for research to be more accessible, discoverable, and reusable.