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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 4,455 posts.
It was not easy or quick, and there were so many qualifiers that, for over a decade, I didn’t really think I “deserved” the label. But as I got older, those qualifiers started dropping off one by one, and today I’m convinced that I have perfect pitch. I describe my musical journey and thoughts on what perfect pitch…
Scientists say a long-feared megadrought, worse than anything in recorded history, seems to be starting up in southwestern North America.
The first thing I wanted to do with my Saab 96 was to establish a baseline weight.
Imagine if a chemist told you offhandedly that the Russians had different chemical elements than we did. Here in America, we use elements like lithium and silicon and bismuth. We have figured out l…
There was a marked acceleration in deforestation in the 20th century. But, global deforestation peaked in the 1980s. Since then, it has slowed.
Where did complex numbers come from? You might think that people invented \(i\) just so that they had a solution to the quadratic equat...
Encoding memories in engram cells is controlled by large-scale remodeling of the proteins and DNA that make up cells’ chromatin, according to an MIT study. This chromatin remodeling, which allows specific genes involved in storing memories to become more active, takes place in multiple stages spread out over several…
Three men were accused of selling firearms to South London gangs. At their 2012 trial in Croydon Crown Court, the prosecution played the jury a recording, taken undercover, of the trio allegedly arranging a sale. But the men’s lawyers claimed that the recording was a fake, and that the police had fabricated it by…
Some time ago I gave a talk in which I showed that something unexpected happened with a deck of playing cards. I had some volunteers try it, and while they did so I talked about just how many orderings there are for 52 cards. I computed (an approximation to) $52!$ (52 factorial) by hand. It's not so hard - you just…
Explore how Shazam and song identification work through interactive visualizations: spectrograms, constellation maps, hash fingerprints, and time-offset matching.
We all know what sound is. Except actually, no we don't. Let's fix that.
Researchers have long have puzzled over why it’s so hard to break a piece of dry spaghetti into only two pieces. A new MIT study follows up on the musings of physicist Richard Feynman, showing how and why it can be done.
Yale researchers have demonstrated one of the key steps in building modular quantum computers: “teleporting” a quantum gate between two qubits, on demand.
It has long been assumed that lifespan and health are strongly correlated, but although there has been an overall increase in human life expectancy
Lambdaclass's blog about distributed systems, machine learning, compilers, operating systems, security and cryptography.
To avoid catastrophic climate impacts, excessive carbon emissions must be addressed. At this point, cutting emissions isn’t enough. Direct air capture, a technology that pulls carbon dioxide out of ambient air, has great potential to help solve the problem.
The mammalian brain stores a single memory across a widely distributed, functionally connected complex spanning many brain regions, rather than in just one or even a few places.
Mathematicians study a variety of different mathematical structures, but perhaps the structures that are most commonly associated with mathematics are the number systems, such as the integers $late…
