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Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 128 posts.
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Sequence of Events in the Cockpit on Asiana Flight 214
Last week, the NTSB held the Asiana Flight 214 Investigative Hearing. On the 6th of July 2013, Asiana Flight 214, a scheduled passenger flight from Incheon, South Korea to San Francisco, CA, crashe…
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Nicotine as a useful stimulant
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
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Shakespeare.txt.jpg: A JPEG compression experiment
Experimenting with JPEG compressing text.
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F-1 Engine Recovery
Thanks to the conservation team at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, the Apollo F-1 artifacts are ready for display. A few weeks ago the first shipment of artifacts arrived at The Museum of Flight here in Seattle, and I joined museum president Doug King, adjunct curator for space history Geoff Nunn, and…
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Rat Park Experiment: A New Theory of Addiction
We all learned this in DARE class. About the rats in a cage who can self-administer morphine who get addicted to the stuff, and then just hit that lever until they die. A seemingly keystone...
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Timelapse of a supercell near Booker, Texas
Still prints of this storm for purchase can be found on my gallery. Follow me on Instagram as well for storm photos and whatnot -> MikeOlbinski It took four years but I finally got it. A rotating supercell. And not just a rotating supercell, but one with insane structure and amazing movement. I’ve been visiting the...
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Wild Ideas
A wild idea is one that many people think is obviously quite unlikely. I'd say at least a third of these wild ideas are likely true. (Parenthetic links are to more of my writings .)
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The Myth of Japanese Longevity
Bioinformatics, genomics, and Javascript
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A back-projection algorithm to extract 3D volume from shadows
If you'd rather read python than english you can go straight to the code on github: https://github.com/jminardi/volume-from-shadow
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Hyperloop lets you travel on a resonant acoustic wave?
Elon Musk is a fascinating guy, and his Hyperloop concept equally so. Now that the details have started trickling out, almost in the form...
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World's largest natural sound archive is now online
The Macaulay Library natural sound archive at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has been fully digitized and is now available online.
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Gravitational Lensing to Observe Ancient Earth
I was at SFMOMA with Erika a few weekends ago and we saw an exhibit showing the work of Lebbeus Woods – a futuristic architect and illustrator.
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When Einstein Met Tagore
Collision and convergence in Truth and Beauty at the intersection of science and spirituality.
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Why high fructose corn syrup replaced sugar in US
Once in a while I come across an animated debate on health benefits of sugar vs. high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). It is enzymatically produced mixture of glucose and fructose that approximately matches the chemical composition of sucrose, aka sugar. It is not this debate that is my concern; rather,…
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Three Planets in Habitable Zone of Nearby Star
A team of astronomers has combined new observations of Gliese 667C with existing data from HARPS at ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope in Chile, to reveal a system with at least six planets. A record-breaking three of these planets are super-Earths lying in the zone around the star where liquid water could exist, making them…
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Gödel, Turing and Cantor: The Math
This is mathematical section of the parent essay Gödel Incompleteness for Startups Gödel Numbering A formal system is just a collection of axioms and rules. Just like we did before we can record ax…
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Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.
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Algernon's Law
Why most supplements fail: IQ improvement skepticism, Yudkowsky & Bostrom’s heuristics, nootropics
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Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong
Yesterday several people asked my opinion of a preprint claiming to solve the Graph Isomorphism problem in deterministic polynomial time. I responded: If I read all such papers, then I wouldn’t hav…
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Physicists offer new theory on cancer
ASU's Paul Davies has proposed a new way to look at cancer by tracing its deep evolutionary roots to the dawn of multicellularity, more than a billion years ago.
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The Saddest Map In America
Yep, there it is: the result of a scholarly study by Dorothy Gambrell of the “missed connections” section of Craigslist. This is where you thought you saw your future spouse or date or …