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Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 208 posts.
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Andrew Wiles on the struggle and beauty of mathematics
Roger Highfield explores the beauty of mathematics at a recent event at the Science Museum
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Insert D-Wave Post Here
In the two months since I last blogged, the US has continued its descent into madness. Yet even while so many certainties have proven ephemeral as the morning dew—the US’…
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How To Use 23andMe Irresponsibly (2014)
As you might remember, the FDA stomped on 23andMe for using too many irresponsible genetic tests that purported to tell you things about yourself and your health with limited support. They eventual…
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An Adversarial Review of “Adversarial Generation of Natural Language”
Or, for fucks sake, DL people, leave language alone and stop saying you solve it.
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‘Instantly rechargeable’ battery could change the future of electric automobiles
Purdue University is a world-renowned, public research university that advances discoveries in science, technology, engineering and math.
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Planet Launches Satellite Constellation to Image the Whole Planet Daily
Today Planet successfully launched 88 Dove satellites to orbit — the largest satellite constellation ever to reach orbit.
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High quality graphics for Latex documents: The Matlab route
You use L a T e X instead of a WYSIWYG word processing program because they can’t cope with the high quality required for publication. But your nice professional looking documents can be ruined because you insert the wrong type of figures. Bitmap figures are easily pixelated because the actual size is not always known…
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The impossibility of intelligence explosion
In 1965, I. J. Good described for the first time the notion of “intelligence explosion”, as it relates to artificial intelligence (AI):
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Computers Create Recipe for Two New Magnetic Materials
After a major metamaterials breakthrough, David Smith learned how to turn promising research into real-world applications.
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The Ferocious Complexity of the Cell
Fifty years ago, the first molecular dynamics papers allowed scientists to exhaustively simulate systems with a few dozen atoms for picoseconds. Today, due to tremendous gains in computational capability from Moore’s law, and due to significant gains in algorithmic sophisticiation from fifty years of research, modern…
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How Powerful Are Microsoft Azure’s Free Jupyter Notebooks?
For a while now, Microsoft have provided a free Jupyter Notebook service on Microsoft Azure. At the moment they provide compute kernels for Python, R and F# providing up to 4Gb of memory per sessio…
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The first genome data from ancient Egyptian mummies
Study finds that ancient Egyptians were most closely related to ancient populations from the Near East.
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The Axiom of Choice Is Wrong (2007)
When discussing the validity of the Axiom of Choice, the most common argument for not taking it as gospel is the Banach-Tarski paradox. Yet, this never particularly bothered me. The argument …
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A Theory of Sequence Memory in Neocortex
Why neurons have thousands of synapses, a theory of sequence memory in neocortex Hawkins & Ahmad, Front. Neural Circuits 2016 It all began with a fascinating lunchtime conversation with Martin …
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Engineers Investigate a Simple, No-Bake Recipe to Make Bricks from Martian Soil
Explorers planning to settle on Mars might be able to turn the planet’s red soil into bricks without needing to use an oven or additional ingredients. Instead, they would just need to apply pressure to compact the soil—the equivalent of a blow from a hammer. These are the findings of a study published in Nature…
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Wikipedia graph mining: dynamic structure of collective memory
Wikipedia graph dynamic pattern discovery. Dynamic graph analysis in GraphX. Collective memory research. Gephi graph visualization.
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Sixth mass extinction: The era of ‘biological annihilation’
We read, with no small concern, a recent CNN article by John D. Sutter, columnist. He notes several statistics that should not be ignored, such as, “three-quarters of all species could disapp…
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Keeping David MacKay's 'Sustainable Energy – without the hot air' up-to-date
As the anniversary of Sir David MacKay’s untimely death approaches, I think we should honour his memory by trying to update Sustainable Energy as a crowd-sourced project. I have made an initial attempt to suggest how we might develop the section on photovoltaics but others will want to suggest other
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The United States of Toxins
Ranking the cities and states and release the most toxins into the environment.
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UH Researchers Report New, More Efficient Catalyst for Water Splitting
Discovery Could Remove Hurdle to Producing Hydrogen from Water
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Predicting Properties of Molecules with Machine Learning
Posted by George Dahl, Research Scientist, Google Brain TeamRecently there have been many exciting applications of machine learning (ML) to chemist...
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Rotating molecules enable near 100% efficient OLEDs
Scientists have discovered a group of materials which could pave the way for a new generation of high-efficiency lighting, solving a quandary which has inhibited the performance of display technology for decades. The development of energy saving concepts in display and lighting applications is a major focus of…