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Why does nuclear power plant construction cost so much?
The source of clean energy shouldn't be displaying "negative learning" over time
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 4,454 posts.
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Why does science news suck so much?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong
“Birth order” refers to whether a child is the oldest, second-oldest, youngest, etc. in their family. For a while, pop psychologists created a whole industry around telling people how t…
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The 2002 Überlingen midair collision
The story of a tragedy which touched the hearts of the world and forced the industry to ask whether it had done enough to keep planes…
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Exploring the software that flies SpaceX rockets and starships
Spaceflight, from the beginning, has depended on computers – both on the ground and in the spacecraft. SpaceX has carried it to a new level. We recently spoke with Steven Gerding, Dragon’s software development lead, about the special challenges software development has for SpaceX's many missions.
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Desalination Breakthrough Could Lead to Cheaper Water Filtration
AUSTIN, Texas — Producing clean water at a lower cost could be on the horizon after researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and Penn State
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Adult immune systems ‘remember’ germs to which they’ve never been exposed (2013)
A new study shows that, contrary to established dogma, key immune cells in healthy adults somehow acquire "memory" of microbes that have never entered their bodies.
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The Orbit of Planet Nine
Five and a half years after our proposal of the existence of Planet Nine, we have finally accomplished what is perhaps the most important t...
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Eye prosthesis is the first to restore sight lost to macular degeneration
In a Stanford Medicine-led clinical trial of a wireless retinal prosthesis, people with advanced macular degeneration regained enough vision to read books and subway signs.
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How Audio Fingerprinting Works
An intuitive explanation of how audio fingerprinting works helping users in identifying music from short snippets
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Using grape harvest dates to estimate summer temperature over 650 years
It’s hot these days, it’s unusually hot, even dangerously hot, in a lot of places a lot of the time. While America has been hit hard this summer, it seems that Europe has been hit even …
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Against Against Pseudoaddiction
I. “Pseudoaddiction” is one of the standard beats every article on the opioid crisis has to hit. Pharma companies (the story goes) invented a concept called “pseudoaddiction”…
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New finding may explain heat loss in fusion reactors
Solving a longstanding mystery, MIT experiments reveal two forms of turbulence interacting. The new finding may explain heat loss in nuclear fusion reactors.
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From seawater to drinking water, with the push of a button
MIT researchers created a portable desalination unit that can remove particles and salts simultaneously to generate drinking water. The user-friendly unit, which weighs less than 10 kilograms and does not require filters, can be powered by a small, portable solar panel.
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Biomanufactured materials are coming
And they hint at a future with vastly better products
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Ultraviolet corona discharges on treetops during storms
Penn State experts in meteorology and atmospheric science made their way down the nation’s eastern coast in June 2024 in search of corona discharges, a long-hypothesized atmospheric weather phenomenon where miniscule pulses of electricity dance at the tips of tree leaves, causing the canopy to glow in the ultraviolet…
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Butterflies accumulate static electricity to attract pollen without contact
Butterflies and moths collect so much static electricity whilst in flight, that pollen grains from flowers can be pulled by static electricity across air gaps of several millimetres or centimetres.
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How Intelligent Are Cats? (2004)
Cat owners often claim that cats are too intelligent to do the sort of tricks that dogs do willingly. Others believe cats are unintelligent because it's harder to train them to do tricks. In this article (on 2 pages) I aim to explain some of these differences and explore feline intelligence and the limitations on…
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Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The story of EgyptAir flight 804
In 2016, an EgyptAir A320 spiraled into the Mediterranean, killing 66 people. Was it an act of sabotage, or something even scarier?
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Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to join SRI International
Signaling a new chapter for Silicon Valley, two veteran R&D leaders are combining minds to advance and accelerate world-changing science and technology.
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USA Temperature: can I sucker you?
Suppose I wanted to convince people that temperature in the USA wasn’t going up, it was going down. What would I show? Let’s try yearly average temperature in the conterminous U.S., als…
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Satellogic's Open Satellite Feed
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech
To keep below two degrees, we'll need to dramatically reduce current emissions and simultaneously remove 10-15 gigatons of CO2/yr from the atmosphere by 2050. Read on for what that means, why, and how we might do it.