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131M American Buildings
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 384 posts.
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New algorithm discovers language just by watching videos
Mark Hamilton, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science and affiliate of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), wants to use machines to understand how animals communicate. To do that, he set out first to create a system that can learn human language “from…
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Earth rotation limits in-body image stabilization to 6.3 stops (2020)
In 2016, Olympus Camera made some buzz in the photo world when they claimed that their new camera was capable of an impressive 6.5 stops of stabilization and that the limiting factor was in fact th…
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Chronic stress spreads cancer
Stress is inevitable. But too much of it can be terrible for our health. Chronic stress can increase our risk for heart disease and strokes. It may also help cancer spread. How this works has remained a mystery—a challenge for cancer care. Xue-Yan He, a former postdoc in Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Adjunct…
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The physics of airplane flight
A common misconception about wings is that they need to have the classic airfoil shape to work. In reality, just about any surface can create lift and function as a wing.
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Did fermented foods fuel brain growth?
Researchers hypothesize it’s fermentation, not fire, that’s behind our ancestors’ increasing brain size.
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Adventures in Probability
I hope everyone had a good weekend. I went on a hike. It was great. Statistics One of my great school regrets, next to “taking three years of business...
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Constructing a Four-Point Egg
For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, I have been investigating elliptical and ovoid shapes. The Wikipedia article for Moss’s egg has a link to a tutorial on Euclidean Eggs by Freyja Hreinsdóttir which (amongst other things) describes how to construct the “four point egg”. I think it is a nicer shape than Moss’s…
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Simulating a minimal cell in the browser
Simulating an entire cell using kinetic parameters of reactions in a well-stirred environment
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How far could the sun possibly be?
The Greeks found the minimum possible distance to the Sun is a few million miles. Today we'll see how the speed of light can provide a maximum distance.
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The Antikythera mechanism – 254:19 ratio
A couple of followups on a recent episode of In Our Time.
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The first amateur radio station on the moon
The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) is the national association for amateur radio, connecting hams around the U.S. with news, information and resources.
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MPPP – The first 'designer drug' disaster (2023)
The origin of the term is credited to Dr Gary L. Henderson, of the University of California at Davis. A designer drug is based on the structure of an existing drug – which may be naturally sourced from a plant (like cocaine or morphine ) or be synthetic (like amphetamine ) - but with a slightly different structure…
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How to prevent Lyme disease this summer
The risk of Lyme disease has increased due to climate change and warmer temperature. A rheumatologist offers advice on how to best avoid ticks while going outdoors.
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Study shows N95 masks near-perfect at blocking escape of airborne Covid-19
COLLEGE PARK, Md. – In a head-to-head comparison of masks worn by people with active COVID-19, the inexpensive “duckbill” N95 came out on top, stopping 98% of COVID-19 particles in the breath of infected people from escaping into the air. Led by researchers from the University of Maryland School of Public Health…
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Iron as an inexpensive storage medium for hydrogen
Researchers at ETH Zurich are using iron to store hydrogen safely and for long periods. In the future, this technology could be used for seasonal energy storage.
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What made Earth a giant snowball 700M years ago? Scientists have an answer
More than 700 million years ago, planet Earth was plunged into a 57-million-year-long ice age. Australian scientists led by Dr Adriana Dutkiewicz and Professor Dietmar Müller at the University of Sydney now have an answer why this happened.
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The disunity of consciousness in everyday experience
A substantial philosophical literature explores the " unity of consciousness ": If I experience A, B, and C at the same time, A, B, and C will normally in some sense (exactly what sense is disputed) be experientially conjoined. Sipping beer at a concert isn't a matter of experiencing the taste of beer and separately…
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The regenerative urban garden I: No-till gardening
I am an advocate of regenerative farming . But I’m not a farmer myself. The piece of land I steward is 1/3 acre — still sizable for an urban lot, but laughably minuscule compared to what Real Farmers are working with.
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Gravitational wave researchers cast new light on Antikythera mechanism mystery
Techniques developed to analyse the ripples in spacetime detected by one of the 21st century’s most sensitive pieces of scientific equipment have helped cast new light on the function of the oldest known analogue computer.
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Why your brain is 3 milion more times efficient than GPT-4
Wild ramblings, raport from the field about choosing Vector Database for a particular project and a little bit of a rant about the current state of AI and how it's perceived, why human brains are a wonder of nature, and why it's far from 'thinking' and 'consciousness'.
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Capturing the ripples of spacetime: LISA gets go-ahead
Today, ESA’s Science Programme Committee approved the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, the first scientific endeavour to detect and study gravitational waves from space.
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The science behind on-the-wrist blood pressure tracking
The next Apple Watch and Samsung wearables measures blood pressure using pulse wave analysis and artificial intelligence. Here's how it would work and what it means for health.
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The real data wall is billions of years of evolution
Careful with those human analogies
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Cure for male pattern baldness given boost by sugar discovery
The key to curing male pattern baldness - a condition that affects up to 50 per cent of men worldwide - could lie in a sugar that naturally occurs in the human body, according to scientists at the University of Sheffield.
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Double trouble: ESA's Gaia hit by micrometeoroid and solar storm
Launched in December 2013, ESA’s Gaia spacecraft is on a mission to map the locations and motions of more than a billion stars in the Milky Way with extreme precision.But it’s not easy being a satellite: space is a dangerous place. In recent months, hyper-velocity space dust and the strongest solar storm in 20 years…