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Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 248 posts.
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Yann LeCun vs. Christopher Manning on Need for Priors in Deep Learning
Earlier this month, I had the exciting opportunity to moderate a discussion between Professors Yann LeCun and Christopher Manning, ti...
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Three Meanings of E=mc²
It’s so much more than mass-energy equivalence; it’s the key to unlocking the quantum Universe.
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Why is nuclear fusion so hard?
Why does water fall out of an inverted cup? Before considering nuclear fusion, let's consider something much more familiar. If you turn a...
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Age of Invisible Disasters (2017)
1400 words, 5 minutes. The Tay Bridge disaster occurred during a violent storm on 28th December 1879 when the first Tay Rail Bridge collapsed while a train was passing over it from Wormit to Dundee, killing all 70 people aboard.
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Nicotinamide riboside effects on aging similar to caloric restriction
Nicotinomide riboside (NR) mimics caloric restriction, kick-starting the same pathways responsible for reducing cardiovascular aging.
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Back-and-forth exchanges boost children’s brain response to language
MIT cognitive scientists have found that engaging children in conversation is more critical to their language development than the number of words they hear early in life. In a study of children 4 to 6, they found differences in the number of “conversational turns” accounted for much of the differences in language…
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Drones that can plant 100k trees a day
Drones could fight deforestation by planting 1 billion trees a year.
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Nematode Neural System Uploaded to a Computer and Trained to Balance a Pole
TU Wien News. Press releases. Calendar of Events. University Gazette.
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You need 16 times the sample size to estimate an interaction than a main effect
In causal inference, it is often important to study varying treatment effects: for example, a treatment could be more effective for men than for women, or for healthy than for unhealthy patients. Suppose a study is designed to have 80% power to detect a main effect at a 95% confidence level. Further suppose that…
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Facts about smell (2014)
The home of typing by Alice Bartlett 👩🏻💻
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The Dipole Drive: A New Concept for Space Propulsion
It’s a fascinating concept but I’d like to see a comparison toDr. Young Bae’s laser thruster concept for solar system travel.
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A polymer made from waste cooking oil and sulphur can clean up crude oil spills
Polluted beaches, oily water, dead birds and marine life destruction caused by crude oil spills could be a thing of the past with pioneering new research […]
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The Strangest Book on the Theory of Computation (2009)
Based on the description of the book in the World Scientific Press catalogue, I asked my university library to order a book entitled Automat...
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Gravitational attraction of stars and cows
One attempt at rationalizing astrology is to say that the gravitational effects of celestial bodies impact our bodies. To get an idea how hard the stars and planets pull on us, let's compare their gravitational attraction to that of cows at various distances. Newton's law of gravity says that the gravitational…
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Experiment: Recoil vs. Muzzle Velocity
A detailed experiment to find any statistically-significant relationship between muzzle velocity and recoil management technique.
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A global array of telescopes reveals details on event horizon scales in Sgr A*
A global array of telescopes, including APEX, reveals the finest details so far on event horizon scales in the centre of our Galaxy
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Smoking around the world
Tobacco smoking is one of the world’s largest health problems today.
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The spotlight of attention is more like a strobe, say researchers
Despite the 'illusion' of continuity, human perception pulses in and out four times per second, says Princeton neuroscientist Sabine Kastner.
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Understanding is a poor substitute for convexity (2012)
Something central, very central, is missing in historical accounts of scientific and technological discovery. The discourse and controversies focus on the role of luck as opposed to teleological programs (from telos, "aim"), that is, ones that rely on pre-set direction from formal science. This is a faux-debate: luck…
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So You Think You Have a Power Law (2007)
Regular readers who care about such things — I think there are about three of you — will recall that I have long had a thing about just how unsound many of the claims for the presence of power law distributions in real data are, especially those made by theoretical physicists, who, with some honorable exceptions…