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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 190 posts.
Scientists have discovered three Earth-sized exoplanets, just 40 light years away, that could be potentially habitable for life. The extrasolar planets were found with the TRAPPIST telescope orbiting a dim dwarf star.
Some time ago I gave a talk in which I showed that something unexpected happened with a deck of playing cards. I had some volunteers try it, and while they did so I talked about just how many orderings there are for 52 cards. I computed (an approximation to) $52!$ (52 factorial) by hand. It's not so hard - you just…
Note: the following is a record of some whimsical mathematical thoughts and computations I had after doing some grading. It is likely that the sort of problems discussed here are in fact well studi…
A tragic case of how poor data analysis can lead to very bad outcomes.
I built a prawn trap from lawyer cane, sticks and vine. Then I caught some prawns and ate them. Prawn (and fish) traps are simple traps designed to catch aquatic life due to their shape. It consist…
Researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Shiley Eye Institute, with colleagues in China, have developed a new, regenerative medicine approach to remove congenital cataracts in infants, permitting remaining stem cells to regrow functional lenses.
Scientists report that amino acids, not sugar, supply most building blocks for cancerous tumor cells. The findings offer a new way to look at cancer cell metabolism, a field that may yield new treatments.
However, many others have contributed in one form or another (newsgroup postings, email, laser parts, etc.). They are cited in the Acknowledgments and/or in the individual sections which contain their material. And, by the way, the name: "Sam's Laser FAQ" was more or less created by those who have read and commented…
Abstract It has been a common practice in social psychology to publish only significant results. As a result, success rates in the published literature do not provide empirical evidence for the existence of a phenomenon. A recent meta-analysis suggested that ego-depletion is a much weaker effect than the published…
I came across this fun column the other day listing a number of Famous Inventions , like the airplane, the camera, electricity, the car, e...
Cartoon Law I Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation. Daffy Duck steps off a cliff, expecting further pastureland. He loiters in midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down. At this point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second per second takes over.
A few weeks ago, I attended the Seven Pines Symposium on Fundamental Problems in Physics outside Minneapolis, where I had the honor of participating in a panel discussion with Sir Roger Penrose. T…
A new retrospective study of the health records of prostate cancer patients supports an association between androgen deprivation therapy and future risk of dementia.
Some people on the internet are getting very excited at the (unconfirmed) reports of an "Earth-like" exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri , a mere 4.25 light-years away from Earth. If correct, the planet is orbiting in the liquid water zone around our nearest stellar neighbour and is of the same order of mass as the…
Posted by Sergey Levine (Google Brain Team), Timothy Lillicrap (DeepMind), Mrinal Kalakrishnan (X)The ability to learn from experience will likely ...
Some time ago I came across a very good read by David McCay - Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air. I’ve seen many good reviews of the book, so it didn’t t...
Learn about public engagement activities from the American Physical Society
What happens when you ignore the math
… and post a write-up on this blog. That sounds crazy of course – who has the time to read a paper every weekday? Let alone write it up! I’ve done it for each of the last two calendar y…
Follow ESA's mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
In celebration of the detection of gravitational waves, Stephen Wolfram looks forward and discusses what technology black holes could make possible.
Researchers from University of Toronto developed an AI system that creates and then sings a Christmas song based by analyzing the visual components of an uploaded image. With the help of CUDA…
