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Open Source Goes to Mars
Celebrating the nearly 12,000 developers who aided Ingenuity's first Martian flight with a profile badge that recognizes their contributions to this historic achievement.
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 4,454 posts.
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Batteries: How cheap can they get?
How dirt cheap batteries will completely transform our electricity grid, paving the way for solar and wind and replacing grid reinforcements with grid buffers.
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Quantum winter is coming
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Soil in Midwestern US is eroding 10 to 1k times faster than it forms
In a discovery that has repercussions for everything from domestic agricultural policy to global food security and the plans to mitigate climate change, researchers at UMass Amherst recently announced that the rate of soil erosion in the Midwestern US is 10 to 1,000 times greater than pre-agricultural erosion rates.
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2023 ACM Turing Prize awarded to Avi Wigderson
Avi Wigderson is the recipient of the 2023 ACM A.M. Turing Award for foundational contributions to the theory of computation, including reshaping our understanding of the role of randomness in computation, and for decades of intellectual leadership in theoretical computer science.
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Wild mammal biomass has declined by 85% since the rise of humans
Explore the diversity of wildlife across the planet. What are species threatened with? What can we do to prevent biodiversity loss?
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Big Tobacco knew radioactive Po210 in cigarettes posed cancer risk, kept quiet
Tobacco companies knew that cigarette smoke contained radioactive alpha particles for more than four decades and developed "deep and intimate" knowledge of these particles' cancer-causing potential, but they deliberately kept their findings from the public, according to a new study by UCLA researchers.
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Vitamin D, part 3 – The Evidence
Vitamin D deficiency is linked to cancer, heart disease, respiratory infection, stroke, diabetes, and death. It might seem reasonable that we should all be taking this supplement.
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False memory implantation in adults is easy
false memory implantation in adults is easy (bonus: here's one way to do it)
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Thousand year-old windmills in Iran (2017)
The Long Now Foundation fosters long-term thinking. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.
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How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?
Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With specfp, Sun managed to increase its score on 179.art (a sub-benchmark of specfp) by 12x with a compiler tweak that…
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Cells are fast and crowded places (2011)
I recently learned that cells are extremely crowded and busy places. I knew there's a lot of activity in cells, but I didn't realize just h...
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Letter in Response to Jan. 17 Article in The New York Times
Gideon Lewis-Kraus ( Jan. 17 ) profiles the nascent field of ancient DNA, which in the last few years has contributed to a transformation in our understanding of the deep human past. His article touches on important issues that we, as a field, have yet to deal with fully: including how to handle ancient remains…
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The Riemann Hypothesis
Note: These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards . They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in…
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Look at yourself objectively
In the 1840s, hospitals were dangerous places. Mothers who went in to give birth often didn’t make it out. For example, at Vienna General Hospital’s First Obstetrical Clinic, as many as 10% of mothers died of puerperal fever after giving birth. But there was some good news: at the Second Clinic, the number was just…
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How to Destroy the Earth (2006)
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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UChicago doctors see ‘remarkable’ success using ventilator alternatives
The page you requested could not be found. Here are some suggestions to help you get back on track.
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“Invisible Electrostatic Wall” at 3M adhesive tape plant (1996)
SESSION 7: SPECIAL SESSION, 17th Annual EOS/ESD Symposium THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1995, 8:00 am SESSION 7: SPECIAL SESSION: ELECTROSTATIC CONSIDERATIONS IN INDUSTRY MODERATOR: D. Swenson, 3M 7.7 CASE STUDY - LARGE PLASTIC WEB ELECTROSTATIC PROBLEMS, RESULTS, AND CURE, D. Swenson, 3M Company Tremendous static charge…
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Show HN: Interactive Essay on Signals, Sampling and the Fourier Transform
This text is designed to accompany your study of introductory digital signal processing. 1 It’s an eccentric piece of not-so-rigorous literature with a preoccupation for explaining things using interactive visualizations, animations and sound. 2 My goal is to explain the Discrete Fourier Transform using a miniature…
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How Shor's Algorithm works (2007)
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…
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Experiments on a $50 DIY air purifier that takes 30s to assemble
You can make a DIY air purifier in 30s. To test if it works, I generated smoke, and measured how well it removes tiny particles.
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A Lean companion to Analysis I
Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a textbook in real analysis called “Analysis I”. It was intended to complement the many good available analysis textbooks out there by focusing more on foun…
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Patrick Winston Explains Deep Learning
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 ).