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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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Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home
University of Washington researchers have shown it's possible to leverage Wi-Fi signals around us to detect specific movements without needing sensors on the hu
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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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Wireless devices go battery-free with new communication technique
University of Washington engineers have created a new wireless communication system that allows devices to interact with each other without relying on batteries
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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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Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Englert and Higgs
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by…
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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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Good sleep, good learning, good life
Discover effective online language learning with SuperMemo. Learn languages with proven courses, intelligent repetitions, and AI tools. Start today!
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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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Scientists discover second code hiding in DNA
Finding a second code hiding in the genome casts new light on how changes to DNA impact health and disease.
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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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