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Death of the sampling theorem?
tl;dr: A team from Columbia University led by Ken Shepard and Rafa Yuste claims to beat the 100 year old Sampling Theorem [1,2]. Apparently anti-aliasing filters are superfluous now because one can…
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Johns Hopkins surgeons perform world's first male genital transplant
Recipient is a combat veteran who sustained injuries while serving in Afghanistan
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23andMe Granted FDA Authorization for Genetic Test on Cancer Risk
23andMe Granted First FDA Authorization for Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Test on Cancer Risk
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AI Can Detect Illnesses in Human Breath
Researchers from Loughborough University, Western General Hospital, the University of Edinburgh, and the Edinburgh Cancer Centre in the United Kingdom, recently developed a deep learning-based method…
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I simulated California housing and learned about simulators
Back in the early 2000s, XML was all the rage. An unusual evolution from HTML, which itself was an evolution (devolution?) from SGML, XML w...
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Evidence that drinking baking soda can promote an anti-inflammatory environment
AUGUSTA, Ga. – A daily dose of baking soda may help reduce the destructive inflammation of autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, scientists say.
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Bret Victor Redesigns Classic Strogatz Paper (2011)
This page presents a scientific paper that has been redesigned as a sequence of illustrations with captions. This comic-like format, with tightly-coupled pictures and prose, allows the author to depict and describe simultaneously — show and tell.
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Why is only half of Mars magnetized?
An article in the September 26 issue of Science neatly explains why only the southern half of Mars is strongly magnetized.
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Planets evenly spaced on log scale
The distances to the planets are fairly evenly distributed on a logarithmic scale, not only in our solar system but in extrasolar systems as well.
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Before cancer kills, it cheats
Evolutionary biologist Athena Aktipis of Arizona State University delivered a lecture titled “Why Cancer is Everywhere” at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.
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Gödel and the unreality of time
In 1949, in a festschrift devoted to Einstein , Kurt Gödel published a very short but profound paper titled “A Remark About the Relati...
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Study reveals how, when a synapse strengthens, its neighbors weaken
Neuroscientists at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT have discovered that when a synapse strengthens, neighboring synapses weaken based on the action of a crucial protein called Arc. The finding provides an explanation of how synaptic strengthening and weakening combine in neurons to produce…
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J.C. Bose: 60 GHz in the 1890s
(1) The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
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Mathematical Patterns That Eventually Fail
Sometimes patterns can lead you astray. For example, it’s known that $latex \displaystyle{ \mathrm{li}(x) = \int_0^x \frac{dt}{\ln t} }$ is a good approximation to $latex \pi(x),$ the number …
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The 8000th Busy Beaver number eludes ZF set theory (2016)
I’ve supervised a lot of great student projects in my nine years at MIT, but my inner nerdy teenager has never been as personally delighted by a project as it is right now. To…
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Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
I’m late to posting this, but it’s important enough to be worth sharing anyway: Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord on Dissolving the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox asks: given the immense num…
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City street orientations around the world
This post is adapted from this research paper that you can read/cite for more info. It analyzes and visualizes 100 cities around the world.
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AlphaFold at CASP13: What just happened?
Update: An updated version of this blogpost was published as a (peer-reviewed) Letter to the Editor at Bioinformatics, sans the “sociology” commentary. I just came back from CASP13, the…
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Duke Team Finds Missing Immune Cells That Could Fight Lethal Brain Tumors
DURHAM, N.C. -- Glioblastoma brain tumors can have an unusual effect on the body’s immune system, often causing a dramatic drop in the number of circulating T-cells that help drive the body’s defenses. Where the T-cells go has been unclear, even as immunotherapies are increasingly employed to stimulate the body’s…
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Gamifying propositional logic: QED, an interactive textbook
About six years ago on this blog, I started thinking about trying to make a web-based game based around high-school algebra, and ended up using Scratch to write a short but playable puzzle game in …
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The Plasma Magnet Drive: A Simple, Cheap Drive for the Solar System and Beyond
I guess we should also include a Planet Nine mission (once confirmed) among the possibilities opened up by this technology. In fact, since that planet seems to be near aphelion (otherwise we should have found it), it should also be beyond the gravitational focus of the Sun and thus any mission there could double as a…
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Myth of the Brown Recluse
Myth of the Brown Recluse: Fact, Fear, and Loathing Rick Vetter Department of Entomology, University of California, Riverside, CA
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Executing gradient descent on the earth
A common analogy for explaining gradient descent goes like the following: a person is stuck in the mountains during heavy fog, and must navigate their way down. The natural way they will approac......
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Electrical properties of dendrites help explain our brain’s computing power
MIT neuroscientists have discovered that human dendrites have very different electrical properties from those of other species. These differences may contribute to the enhanced computing power of the human brain.
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Observable Universe contains 10x more galaxies than previously thought (2016)
Astronomers using data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescopes and other telescopes have performed an accurate census of the number of galaxies in the Universe. The group came to the surprising conclusion that there are at least 10 times as many galaxies in the observable Universe as previously thought. The results…