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NASA paywalls first papers arising from Curiosity rover – I am setting them free
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
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42
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, the number 42 is the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”. But he didn’t say wha…
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Are Placebos Really Sugar Pills?
Bioinformatics, genomics, and Javascript
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H5N1
Most of the time, we worry far too much about tail risk. We worry about terrorist attacks and necrotizing fasciitis, but not much about heart disease or car crashes. But in 2011, 17 US citizens...
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Melatonin
Melatonin improves sleep, & sleep is valuable
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Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks
Tim Ferriss Intro Hundreds of people have asked me about Soylent, a controversial Silicon Valley team trying to replace food with a grayish liquid. “Does it really deliver all the nutrients the human body needs?” “Is it safe?” “Why hasn’t anyone tried this before?” [Hint: they have] And most often: “What do you think…
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Go Pro on a soaring eagle [video]
What does it feel like to soar majestically like an bird? Maybe something like this video, shot with a camera strapped to the back of an eagle flying near Chamo
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Thorium Reactors
My last article about thorium as an alternative nuclear reactor fuel drew way more readers than I expected. I intentionally glossed over the complexities of specific reactor designs for the sake of simplicity, but in this article I want to go deeper. This article explains some of the differences between traditional…
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How far can you overhang blocks?
How hungover can you get? Kids blocks and Calculus!
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Hillbilly Tracking of Low Earth Orbit Satellites
An adventure of the Southern Appalachian Space Agency, by Travis Goodspeed <travis at radiantmachines.com>, as presented at Summercon 2013...
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We don't know why lithium batteries work
If you are a scientist, you confront ignorance as soon as you open your eyes. For example -- I am typing this post on a laptop computer that is powered by a lithium battery. No one has the slightest idea how and why it works. Metallic lithium can intercalate between the graphene sheets in graphite…
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D-Wave: Truth finally starts to emerge
Wrap-Up (June 5): This will be my final update on this post (really!!), since the discussion seems to have reached a point where not much progress is being made, and since I’d like to oblige …
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Negative temperatures are not colder than absolute zero
There’s been a lot of buzz lately in the science blogosphere about a recent experiment where physicists created a gas of quantum particles with a negative temperature – negative as in, …
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I sent a balloon up to capture 360x180 degree imagery/video from 100K feet
It turns out that launching, losing, finding, and recovering a balloon is way easier than getting the imagery ready. Let's find out why! (If you see an image in this post, click it. If you regret i...
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Cryptography is a science, not engineering
If we were still in the 1990s, I would agree with Thomas. 1990s cryptography was full of holes, and the best you could hope for was to know how your tools were broken so you could try to work around their deficiencies. This was a time when DES and RC4 were widely used, despite having well-known flaws. This was a time…
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The physics of that ‘kickalicious’ kick
Last Friday, the New York Times ran a cover page story about Håvard Rugland, a Norwegian man who scored an NFL tryout for the Jets, based on a youtube video called Kickalicious that has picked up n…
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How much usage can a Lego piece take before it loses its 'clutch power'?
Have you ever asked yourself this question: "How many times can I assemble LEGO bricks before they wear out?" Well... probably never but I...
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Mercury Colonization
There is a good reason for colonizing another planet, which is to avoid extinction if the Earth is hit by a 10km or larger asteroid, as has happened many times in the Earth's history. Colonization of Mercury appears to be a very real and practical possibility, whereas colonization of Mars or the other planets, moons…
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Temperature chart for the last 11,000 years
For the first time, researchers have put together all the climate data they have (from ice cores, coral, sediment drilling) into one chart that shows the “globa
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How To Deconstruct Almost Anything (1993)
This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind…
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Does Gravity Travel at the Speed of Light? (1998)
Updated 2011 by Steve Carlip, and 1998 by Steve Carlip, Matthew Wiener and Geoffrey Landis. Original by Steve Carlip.
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Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (1974)
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The Big Data Brain Drain: Why Science is in Trouble
Update, August 2014: see Hacking Academia , my most recent reflection on this subject.
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