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Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 147 posts.
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Stanford engineers' breakthrough heralds super-efficient light-based computers
Light can transmit more data while consuming far less power than electricity, and an engineering feat brings optical data transport closer to replacing wires.
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How did Einstein Think?
John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Center for Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton This page at http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies Prepared to accompany cityLIVE! "everything einstein" November 15, 2007, 6:30 pm The New Hazlett Theater…
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Intellectual pursuits may buffer the brain against addiction
Mice engaged in stimulating activities were less likely to seek out cocaine
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Retire This Idea: Scientific Knowledge Structured as “Literature”
In my view, what's most outmoded within science, most badly in need of retirement, is the way we structure and organize scientific knowledge itself. Academic literature, even as it moves online, is a relic of the era of typesetting, modeled on static, irrevocable, toothpaste-out-of-the-tube publication. Just as the…
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Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
Stephen Wolfram shares what he learned in researching Ada Lovelace's life, writings about the Analytical Engine, and computation of Bernoulli numbers.
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New Horizons enters safe mode 10 days before Pluto flyby
New Horizons decided to put on a little 4th of July drama for the mission's fans. It's currently in safe mode, and it will likely be a day or two before…
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Lorentz forces and cheating at the Pinewood Derby
The annual Pinewood Derby in my Cub Scout troop was always an exciting time for my friends and me growing up. Just look how happy I am in this amazing digital photo composition that my dad put together using Microsoft PictureIt! 99:
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The Mysterious Aging of Astronauts
When I took Physics courses in college, I learned about how astronauts should age a tiny bit slower than us. Of course, they would be exposed to a lot more radiation so they might develop more cancers. But all in all, I would have been excited about the prospect of living in space. Then the … Continue reading The…
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Homemade Memristor (2011)
Modified curve tracer is applying AC voltage. Horizontal axis represents voltage and the vertical axis represents current. In both cases, the curve always passes through zero voltage and current. This requirement must be met in order to be classified as a memristor.
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Lab explosions and accidents
If you're working on serious projects there are often serious risks. A lot of these can be mitigated by preventative measures and safety ge...
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Will Our Understanding of Math Deteriorate Over Time?
Scientific American writes about rescuing the enormous theorem (classification of finite simple groups) before the proof vanishes. How can...
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Ceres' Deepening Mysteries
Even as we discover more about Ceres, some mysteries only deepen. Mission Director Marc Rayman gives an update on Dawn as it moves ever closer to its next…
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How a Handgun Works: 1911 .45
Check out Animagraffs on youtube > .
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Telomere extension turns back aging clock in cultured human cells, study finds
Researchers delivered a modified RNA that encodes a telomere-extending protein to cultured human cells. Cell proliferation capacity was dramatically increased, yielding large numbers of cells for study.
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Regression to the mean is the main reason ineffective treatments appear to work
Jump to follow-up “Statistical regression to the mean predicts that patients selected for abnormalcy will, on the average, tend to improve. We argue that most improvements attributed to the p…
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Clifford Algebra: A visual introduction (2014)
Clifford Algebra, a.k.a. Geometric Algebra, is a most extraordinary synergistic confluence of a diverse range of specialized mathematical fields, each with its own methods and formalisms, all of wh…
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A metabolic master switch underlying human obesity
In a promising new approach to preventing or even curing obesity, researchers at MIT and Harvard Medical School have unveiled a new pathway that controls human metabolism by prompting adipocytes, or fat cells, to store fat or burn it away.
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Processed meats as bad as cigarettes: bad reporting on good science
Today, the WHO issued a report that says, in essence, processed meats and red meats are carcinogens. This has been reported in a variety of…
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Creating a Pluto flyby using unaligned New Horizons images
Last month, a few days before NASA’s New Horizons probe made its historic flyby of Pluto, I posted a GIF of it doing so to Reddit .
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Homemade synthetic aperture radar
Second version of the 6 GHz FMCW radar now with SAR images
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After 100 Years, Ramanujan Gap Filled (2013)
History of mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan’s lost notebooks and an exploration of solutions to those equations using Mathematica.
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An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory
First of all, don’t panic. I’m going to try in this post to introduce you to quantum field theory, which is probably the deepest and most intimidating set of…