1891
Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
I’m late to posting this, but it’s important enough to be worth sharing anyway: Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord on Dissolving the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox asks: given the immense num…
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 4,455 posts.
1892
Why not string theory? Because enough is enough
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
1893
The neurology of self-awareness
What is the self? How does the activity of neurons give rise to the sense of being a conscious human being? Even this most ancient of philosophical problems, I believe, will yield to the methods of empirical science. It now seems increasingly likely that the self is not a holistic property of the entire brain; it…
1894
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…
1895
From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery
Last year, we introduced Brain2Qwerty v1, research that uses AI to decode brain activity into text without any surgical implant. Now we're sharing the next step: Brain2Qwerty v2, the highest-performing end-to-end pipeline capable of real-time sentence decoding from non-invasive brain recordings, approaching levels of…
1896
Functioning ‘mechanical gears’ seen in nature for the first time (2013)
Previously believed to be only man-made, a natural example of a functioning gear mechanism has been discovered in a common insect - showing that evolution developed interlocking cogs long before we did.
1897
What number is halfway between 1 and 9?
A new information-theoretical model of human sensory perception and memory sheds light on some peculiarities of the nervous system.
1898
1899
An Interesting SETI Candidate in Hercules
Although the presence of ET planetary-based life as we know life and don’t know it, is all, comparatively as, and less and in gradations more technologically and cognitively achieved or advanced than our species, such life, in mathematical and thermochemical terms, is a must on a vast in raw numbers but quite possibly…
1900
The first autonomous, entirely soft robot
Developed by a team of Harvard researchers, the first autonomous, entirely soft robot is powered by a chemical reaction controlled by microfluidics. The 3-D-printed “octobot” has no electronics.
1901
1902
Particle Physicists Continue to Make Empty Promises
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
1903
City street orientations around the world
This post is adapted from this research paper that you can read/cite for more info. It analyzes and visualizes 100 cities around the world.
1904
Peer Review
This blog is not peer reviewed at all. I write it, I put it out there, and people read it or not. It is my little megaphone that I alone control.
1905
Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound Cr2Gr2Te6?
I was reading the latest issue of the journal Science , and a paper mentioned the compound Cr 2 Gr 2 Te 6 . For a moment, I thought my knowl...
1906
5D ‘Superman memory’ crystal could lead to unlimited lifetime data storage
Scientists at the University of Southampton have made a major step forward in the development of digital data storage that is capable of surviving for billions of years.
1907
The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory
Eva Silverstein has a new preprint out, entitled The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory. The title is I guess intended to be playful, not referring to its accurate description of the current st…
1908
1909
Archaeologists discover oldest wooden structure
Archaeologists discover world’s oldest wooden structure
1910
1911
1912
AlphaFold at CASP13: What just happened?
Update: An updated version of this blogpost was published as a (peer-reviewed) Letter to the Editor at Bioinformatics, sans the “sociology” commentary. I just came back from CASP13, the…
1913
Linus Torvalds winner of the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize
Technology Academy Finland (TAF) awards the global one-million-euro Millennium Technology Prize and runs associated events and initiatives.
1914
Visualizing black holes with general relativistic ray tracing
Okay I ended up making this write-up waaaaaay too long, so before I get into any of the jargon, let’s take a look at the finished product:
1915
Our muscles will atrophy as we climb the Kardashev Scale
If you like this, you might also like my Instagram channel Nerd on Bars @nerdonbars where I calculate the power output of various athletes and myself.
1916
GLP-1 may slow biological aging
A new study provides the first clinical evidence that popular semaglutide drugs, like Ozempic or Wegovy, could slow down processes associated with biological aging.
1917
The Blowtorch Theory: A new model for structure formation in the universe
How early, sustained, supermassive black hole jets carved out cosmic voids, shaped filaments, and generated magnetic fields
1918
The field of longevity biotech is a mess
Right before the Thanksgiving break, while simultaneously attending the SfRBM annual conference (an event featuring lots of hard core wet-bench science grounded in reality), I had the dubious honor of also attending the Longevity Summit . The latter is a new online event featuring talks from leaders in the burgeoning…
1919
Science Is Getting Harder
Evidence that discoveries are getting smaller on average
1920
Report on an Unidentified Space Station (1982)
By good luck we have been able to make an emergency landing on this uninhabited space station. There have been no casualties. We all count ourselves fortunate to have found safe haven at a moment when the expedition was clearly set on disaster.