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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 4,454 posts.
It turns out that launching, losing, finding, and recovering a balloon is way easier than getting the imagery ready. Let's find out why! (If you see an image in this post, click it. If you regret i...
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Today’s rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide increase is 10 times faster than at any other point in the past 50,000 years, researchers have found through a detailed chemical analysis of ancient Antarctic ice. The findings, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide…
“Every one of the stars in the sky uses fusion to generate enormous amounts of energy. Why shouldn’t we?”
Yesterday Ryan Mandelbaum, at Gizmodo, posted a decidedly tongue-in-cheek piece about whether or not the universe is a computer simulation. (The piece was filed under the category “LOL.…
[ An updated treatment of some of this material appears in Chapter 6 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook. ]
In Michael Sipser’s Introduction to the Theory of Computation textbook, he has one Platonically perfect homework exercise, so perfect that I can reconstruct it from memory despite not having …
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
UCSB researchers’ new method enables high-quality imaging of still objects with WiFi by using the Geometrical Theory of Diffraction and the corresponding Keller cones to trace edges of the objects.
As data-driven research becomes more mainstream, the need for efficient and powerful scientific computing tools increases. To help meet this need, the Gordon an…
Using Sentinel-1 radar imagery to make out the shapes of our changing seaborne energy system
These multicellular, cross-kingdom assemblages were more resistant to antimicrobials and removal and caused more extensive tooth decay than their single-species equivalents, according to research led by School of Dental Medicine scientists.
Heights are normally distributed because height is determined by many factors. But why are other things with many inputs not normally distributed?
The Fall of Civilizations podcast put out a 6¾-hour episode on the history of the Mongol Empire, which I eagerly listened to. After finishing the episode I wondered about contemporary Mongolian society, I wanted to learn what the lands that the Mongol Empire exploded from are like in our current day. There are many…
Turn your chocolate into an edible color spectrum…
Using high speed cameras, it’s possible to record the vibrations of everyday objects caused by nearby sounds and reverse engineer the sounds…essentially turning
I hope everyone in the States had a fantastic Thanksgiving (even if you’re a Dallas Cowboys football fan).
A new population-based study, involving 22 million people, shows that autoimmune disorders now affect around one in ten individuals
News, research, and insights from Stanford University.
[Epistemic status: Total wild speculation] I. The predictive processing model offers compelling accounts of autism and schizophrenia. But Surfing Uncertainty and related sources I’ve read are…
If we were still in the 1990s, I would agree with Thomas. 1990s cryptography was full of holes, and the best you could hope for was to know how your tools were broken so you could try to work around their deficiencies. This was a time when DES and RC4 were widely used, despite having well-known flaws. This was a time…
Introduction I read a lot of deep learning papers, typically a few/week. I've read probably several thousands of papers. My general problem with papers in machine learning or deep learning is that often they sit
Tại Việt Nam, sự gia tăng phổ biến của trò chơi điện tử đang định hình lại bối cảnh cá cược thể thao. Khi các game thủ trẻ đắm mình vào các cuộc thi ảo, niềm đam mê của họ sẽ
The notion of standard deviation has confused hordes of scientists; it is time to retire it from common use and replace it with the more effective one of mean deviation. Standard deviation, STD, should be left to mathematicians, physicists and mathematical statisticians deriving limit theorems. There is no scientific…
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
AUSTIN, Texas — Scientists have discovered that bacteria can create something like memories about when to form strategies that can cause dangerous
