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Black holes ruled out as universe’s missing dark matter
A statistical analysis says that black holes can make up no more than 40 percent of dark matter, the strongest limit yet
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Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 248 posts.
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Measuring abstract reasoning in neural networks
Neural network-based models continue to achieve impressive results on longstanding machine learning problems, but establishing their capacity to reason about abstract concepts has proven difficult. Building on previous efforts to solve this important feature of general-purpose learning systems, our latest paper sets…
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The World’s Loudest Sound (2014)
The sound made by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 was so loud it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and wa
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Progress on longstanding open problems
For those who haven’t seen it: Aubrey de Grey, better known to the world as a radical life extension researcher, on Sunday posted a preprint on the arXiv claiming to prove that the chromatic …
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How many deaths make a disaster newsworthy?
How many deaths make a natural disaster newsworthy?
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The Dunedin Study Has Been Studying Aging for 45 Years
Epigenetic predictors of age, known as epigenetic clocks or biological age tests, have varying degrees of accuracy and precision. Elysium Health collaborated with Dr. Levine of Yale University to develop Index, a next-generation epigenetic clock with precision at the individual level.
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Random Points on a Sphere
John D. Cook, Greg Egan, Dan Piponi and I had a fun mathematical adventure on Twitter. It started when John Cook wrote a program to compute the probability distribution of distances $latex |xy R…
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Genetics and Eugenics in Frank Herbert's DUNE
Observations on Frank Herbert’s 𝐷𝑢𝑛𝑒 series—the notes are probably overstated, the Butlerian Jihad was 𝑛𝑜𝑡 a robot uprising seeking to exterminate humanity, and precognition/prescience in the Dune universe appears to work backwards allowing for retro-causality and stable time-loops as exemplified by Leto II’s Golden…
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No, negative masses have not revolutionized cosmology
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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A new JPEG format
The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), an international committee headed by an EPFL professor, has just unveiled JPEG XS. With this new format, the image-compression process uses less energy, and higher-quality images can be sent with low latency over broadband networks like 5G. JPEG XS will have applications in…
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Adult Neurogenesis – A Pointed Review
[I am not a neuroscientist and apologize in advance for any errors in this article. A recent study came out contradicting some of the claims mentioned here. See here for study, this comment for som…
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Wireless system can power devices inside the body
MIT researchers have developed a new way to power and communicate with devices implanted deep within the human body. Such devices could be used to deliver drugs, monitor conditions inside the body, or treat disease by stimulating the brain with electricity or light.
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Research Finds Tipping Point for Large-Scale Social Change
This tipping point — roughly 25% of people — applies to any kind of movement or initiative.
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Improving Connectomics by an Order of Magnitude
Posted by Viren Jain, Research Scientist and Technical Lead and Michal Januszewski, Software Engineer, Connectomics at Google The field of connecto...
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An Augmented Reality Microscope for Cancer Detection
Posted by Martin Stumpe, Technical Lead and Craig Mermel, Product Manager, Google Brain Team (Updated Aug 12, 2019: The work described in this blog...
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Interactive computational neuroscience – part 1, spiking neurons
An interactive introduction to spiking neuron models -- all in the browser. Learn about modeling neurons as dynamical systems and the computational properties of neurons.
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Intro to Quantum Information Science
Someone recently wrote that my blog is “too high on nerd whining content and too low on actual compsci content to be worth checking too regularly.” While that’s surely one of the…
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Income Inequality (2016)
How is inequality measured, who produces key databases, and what does the data tell us?