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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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Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 409 posts.
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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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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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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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Ph.D student demonstrates a single, working laser on silicon
Engineering physics PhD student Khadijeh Miarabbas Kiani has fabricated a laser on silicon using a simple, cost-effective method - something that has been a longstanding challenge in the field of silicon photonics. [...]Read More...
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Philippine ethnic group has most Denisovan DNA
The Philippine ethnic group Ayta Magbukon has the highest proportion of genes from our extinct relatives, the Denisovans, a new study led by Uppsala University shows. Their Denisovan share far exceeds that of ethnic groups in Papua New Guinea, who previously held the record. The study is published in the scientific…
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The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science
Much of climate research is focused on implausible scenarios of the future, but implementing a course correction will be difficult
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Exploring the Supply Chain of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 Vaccines
Sections of this post were co-authored by Cornelia Scheitz. Noah Leidinger created a German translation. Piotr Kwapin created a Polish translation. Last updated on February 7, 2021. Bert Hubert’s excellent and widely shared article about Reverse Engineering the source code of the Pfizer-BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine is…
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Antiviral Molnupiravir Reduces Risk of Hospitalization/Death by ~50 Percent
At the Interim Analysis, 7.3 Percent of Patients Who Received Molnupiravir Were Hospitalized Through Day 29, Compared With 14.1 Percent of Placebo-Treated Patients Who were Hospitalized or Died Merck Plans to Seek Emergency Use Authorization in the U.S. as Soon as Possible and to Submit Applications to Regulatory…
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The software that flies SpaceX rockets and starships
Spaceflight, from the beginning, has depended on computers – both on the ground and in the spacecraft. SpaceX has carried it to a new level. We recently spoke with Steven Gerding, Dragon’s software development lead, about the special challenges software development has for SpaceX's many missions.
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Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA
The International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook 2020 report has found that, in most major countries, solar power is now cheaper than coal and gas.
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Noted study in psychology fails to replicate, crumbles with evidence of fraud
About 80 people pointed me to this post by Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, and Leif Nelson about a 2012 article, “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end.” Apparently some of the data in that paper were faked; see for example here:
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The Achilles Heel of the Coronavirus
SARS-CoV-2 is critically dependent on a special mechanism for the production of its proteins. A collaborative team led by a research group at ETH Zurich obtained molecular insights into this process and demonstrated that it can be inhibited by chemical compounds, thereby significantly reducing viral replication in…
164
Engineers grow pancreatic organoids that mimic the real thing
MIT engineers developed a way to grow tiny replicas of the pancreas, using either healthy or cancerous pancreatic cells. Their models could help researchers develop and test potential drugs for pancreatic cancer.
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Nuclear radiation used to transmit digital data wirelessly
Engineers have successfully transferred digitally encoded information wirelessly using nuclear radiation instead of conventional technology.
166
What we learned doing Fast Grants
We launched an abnormally fast source of emergency science funding during COVID-19. The results revealed flaws in current science funding models.
167
The Wendelstein 7-X concept proves its efficiency
One of the most important optimisation goals underlying the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device at Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald has now been confirmed. An analysis by IPP scientists in the journal Nature shows: In the optimised magnetic field cage, the energy losses of the plasma are reduced in the…
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What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars?
Starlink is a point of departure to consider the costs of the unrelenting drive toward artificial illumination, a technological development most of us now take for granted.
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Steven Weinberg has died
I heard this morning the news that Steven Weinberg passed away yesterday at the age of 88. He was arguably the dominant figure in theoretical particle physics during its period of great success fr…
173
Why does an A note sound different across instruments?
If you pull up a tuner app on your phone and play an A note on a piano, the tuner will say ~440 hz. Do the same thing on a violin's A note and you'll also get 440 hz.
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New Evidence Against the Standard Model of Cosmology
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
175
So you want to build a carbon capture company
Would you like to win one hundred million bucks from Elon Musk? Carbon capture (CC) is all the rage these days, with dozens of companies springing up to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and help stab…
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Human Rapamycin Longevity Clinical Trials Begin
Today is a doubly important day: it marks the final day of the PEARL campaign and it is a celebration of another victory for the life extension community.
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Science upside for Starship
This blog is a direct follow up of Starship Is Still Not Understood, and is part of the series on popular misconceptions in space journalism. Now available in audio form. I think it is relatively s…
180
A lesser known mechanism for alcohol tolerance
People who drink a lot of alcohol have a high alcohol tolerance. By this, I mean two things: