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Mechanical computer relies on kirigami cubes, not electronics
The mechanical computer uses a complex structure of rigid, interconnected polymer cubes to store, retrieve and erase data without relying on electronic components.
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Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 384 posts.
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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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How do MRI Headphones work? (2022)
Thoughts and more by Tom Lingham
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Why are Texas interchanges so tall?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] This is the Dallas High Five, one of the tallest highway interchanges in the world. It gets its name from the fact that there are five different levels of roadways crossing each other in this one spot. In some ways, it’s kind of
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Research shows plant-based polymers can disappear within seven months
Finding viable alternatives to traditional petroleum-based plastics and microplastics has never been more important. New research from scientists at UC San Diego and Algenesis shows that their plant-based polymers biodegrade — even at the microplastic level — in under seven months.
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We're not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon
[This post received first place in the 2024 Blog Extravaganza at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History. Many thanks, Adam!] I first had this thought in 2019, and I started this draft in ear…
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Music and Geometry: Intervals and Scales
An article about music and geometry, in particular about musical intervals and scales and their geometric equivalent ...
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Vehicle brakes produce charged particles that may harm public health: study
The work could help efforts to contain an important source of air pollution
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The unnecessary decline of U.S. numerical weather prediction
This blog provides updated forecasts and comments on current weather or other topics
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New mRNA cancer vaccine triggers immune response to malignant brain tumor
In a first-ever human clinical trial of four adult patients, an mRNA cancer vaccine developed at the University of Florida quickly reprogrammed the immune…
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Why Are Sloths So Slow?
What does it really mean to be a sloth? Why are they so slow? And why does it work?
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The AI Scientist: Towards Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery
The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery
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New gel breaks down alcohol in the body
Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a protein-based gel that breaks down alcohol in the gastrointestinal tract without harming the body. In the future, people who take the gel could reduce the harmful and intoxicating effects of alcohol.
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Reasons not to take Lumina's anticavity probiotic
It's unsafe and probably ineffective
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Which power plant does my electricity come from?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] In June of 2000, the power shut off across much of the San Francisco Bay area. There simply wasn’t enough electricity to meet demands, so more than a million customers were disconnected in California's largest load shed event si
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Controversial pesticide research all but vanished from a major conference
During hundreds of sessions, a significant topic went missing: scholarly research on one of Corteva’s products – neonicotinoids.
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Noninvasive imaging method can penetrate deeper into living tissue
MIT researchers developed a non-invasive imaging technique that enables laser light to penetrate deeper into living tissue, capturing sharper images of cells. This could help clinical biologists study disease progression and develop new medicines.
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Semiconductor Fabrication 101
Free online course from Purdue University in collaboration with Intel Corporation, the University of Texas at Austin, and leading worldwide partners in the field*
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Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model
We identified how millions of concepts are represented inside Claude Sonnet, the first detailed look inside a production-grade language model.
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We have surpassed 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries that sustain human life (2023)
The planetary boundaries framework highlights the rising risks from human pressure on nine critical global processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth
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A new rare high-rank elliptic curve, and an orchard of Diophantine equations
I got an email the other day from mathematician Bogdan Grechuk, whose book Polynomial Diophantine Equations: A Systematic Approach ( was recently released. This is to my mind a rather remarkable bo…
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Covid-19 Intranasal Vaccine
A next-generation COVID-19 mucosal vaccine is set to be a gamechanger not only when delivering the vaccine itself, but also for people who are needle-phobic.
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Reports of the death of dental cavities are greatly exaggerated
If I asked you to name the most common chronic disease in children, what would you say? Asthma comes top of mind, but there is something five times more common in kids: cavities. We don’t typically think of dental cavities as a chronic disease—in part because of the separation between medicine and dentistry—but it is…
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Fructose in diet enhances tumor growth: research
Fructose is a sweetener added to ultra-processed foods, typically in the form of high-fructose corn syrup. WashU research shows that the liver turns fructose into lipids that many types of cancers crave.
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Satellites Spotting Ships
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Seven Dyson Sphere Candidates
A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from natural phenomena when enough stars are examined!
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DARPA wants to bypass the thermal middleman in nuclear power systems
Nuclear power already has an energy density advantage over other sources of thermal electricity generation. But what if nuclear generation didn’t require a steam turbine? What if the radiation from a reactor was less a problem to be managed and more a source of energy? And what if an energy conversion technology could…
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STS-93: We don’t need any more of those (2014)
It was about a quarter past midnight on July 23, 1999 when the Ralph Roe, the Shuttle Launch Director, told Eileen’s crew that they were go for launch and wished them good luck. The launch, which h…