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Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten
Study shows how a dopamine circuit between two brain regions enables mice to extinguish fear after a peril has passed.
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 4,455 posts.
1532
100 Years to Solve an Integral (2020)
The integral of sec(x) is well known to any beginners calculus student. Yet this integral was once a major outstanding maths problem. It was first introduced...
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Ramanujan's Easiest Formula
A while ago I decided to figure out how to prove one of Ramanujan’s formulas. I feel this is the sort of thing every mathematician should try at least once. I picked the easiest one I could f…
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A CD Spectrometer (2006)
A simple spectrometer can be built from a CD and a box. Cut a slit on one side of the box. Place the CD on the other side with about 60 degree angle. Look down into the openning on the box. The slit should not be too wide, otherwise the spectrum lines will be blurred. It should not be too narrow either, otherwise the…
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Diatom Arrangements
An odd post. Diatoms are single-celled algae with glass shells, and people arrange them into patterns under a microscope.
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First detection of light from behind a black hole
Fulfilling a prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, researchers report the first-ever recordings of X-ray emissions from the far side of a black hole.
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Arctic Ocean started getting warmer decades earlier than we thought
The Arctic Ocean has been getting warmer since the beginning of the 20th century – decades earlier than records suggest – due to warmer water flowing into the delicate polar ecosystem from the Atlantic Ocean.
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Why does my diet soda taste off? Aspartame hydrolysis
If you’ve ever been given a can of Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi and it tastes a little off, or way off, you probably just toss it out. Why does this happen and what can you do about it? Many diet soft d…
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Johns Hopkins surgeons perform world's first male genital transplant
Recipient is a combat veteran who sustained injuries while serving in Afghanistan
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Does Gravity Travel at the Speed of Light? (1998)
Updated 2011 by Steve Carlip, and 1998 by Steve Carlip, Matthew Wiener and Geoffrey Landis. Original by Steve Carlip.
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Leonardo da Vinci’s experiments explored gravity as a form of acceleration
A new look at da Vinci’s papers reveals his insightful attempts to probe the nature of gravity 500 years ago
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Satellites Taking Pictures of Rockets Carrying More Satellites
In the hours leading up to our recent Soyuz launch we determined that a Dove would be near enough to Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to get a shot of our newest flock launching.
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Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media
While most ghostwriting scandals in science involve physicians, the agrichemical company ran a unique and sophisticated campaign to promote GMO technology and attack critics.
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Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a giant geothermal power plant?
It’s become fairly common knowledge that Yellowstone National Park, in addition to being incredibly beautiful, is sitting on top of an enormous supervolcano that catastrophically erupts every few hundred thousand years.
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Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021 was awarded jointly to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian "for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch"
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Geometry from Another Universe
You start on an enclosed lawn, surrounded by four walls with a doorway in one of them. If you go in and explore, you might begin to feel trapped. You'll find you can visit five different rooms in the house, or go back outside to the lawn, but there's no way to go anywhere else. It's not because there are walls…
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Over 140k virus species in the human gut, half of which are new to science
Researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) explored and catalogued the biodiversity of the viral species found in 28,060 public human gut metagenomes and 2,898 bacterial isolate genomes cultured from the human gut
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I finally understand methane lifetimes
How to arrive at a number you can trust
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Sleep helps process emotions
Researchers at the Department of Neurology of the University of Bern and University Hospital Bern identified how the brain triages emotions during dream sleep to consolidate the storage of positive emotions while dampening the consolidation of negative ones. The work expands the importance of sleep in mental health…
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Birds make nests out of anti-bird pins
Biologists present the latest innovation in nest building: bird nests made from anti-nesting spikes.
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Differences between expert and novice brains in mice: study
When mice learn to do a new task, their brain activities change over time as they advance from ‘novice’ to ‘expert.’ The changes are reflected in the wiring of cell circuits and activities of neurons. Using a two-photon imaging microscope and a wealth of genetic tools, researchers from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory…