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Open Problems in Robotics
Robotics is one of those things the business funny papers regularly wonder about; it seems like consumer robotics is a revolutionary trillion dollar market which is perpetually 20-years away -more…
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A new form of brain stimulation relieved severe depression in a small study
Stanford Medicine researchers used high doses of magnetic stimulation, delivered on an accelerated timeline and targeted to individual neurocircuitry, to treat patients with severe depression.
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Study: Low Carb Diet May Prevent, Reverse Age-Related Effects Within the Brain
The news in brief: 1) Brain changes associated with aging become visible much earlier than would be expected, in the late 40's. 2) This is hypothesized to result from neurons’ loss of energy; if so, researchers may have found a way to prevent or reverse these effects. 3) This can be done with diet, by
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Vitamin D, part 2: Shannon's story
How much Vitamin D should I take? This is still the looming question, and it’s time to address it. First, though, imagine that someone in a public forum online asked me, “How much metoprolol (a…
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20 Years Later
Almost exactly twenty years ago I started writing a short article about the problems with string theory. I had been thinking about doing this for quite a while, and the timing of entering the twent…
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The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
Discuss this study on my forum or see discussion on Hacker News (>400 points, >350 comments). Abstract I slept 4 hours a night for 14 days and didn’t find any effects on cognition (assessed via Psychomotor Vigilance Task, a custom first-person shooter scenario, and SAT). I’m a 22-year-old male and normally I sleep 7-8…
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Pollution from tire wear is worse than exhaust emissions?
Pollution from tyre wear can be 1,000 times worse than what comes out of a car’s exhaust, Emissions Analytics has found.
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Vitamin D, part 1: back to basics
Vitamin D is a big deal. Recent studies have shown that patients with low Vitamin D levels are more likely to die from Covid-19 than their Vitamin D-rich counterparts,(1) and deficiency in the…
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How Distortion Works in Music
Ben’s software blog. Mostly Scala, with a few other things.
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Lights and Shadows
Interactive article explaining how lights and shadows behave.
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Popular seafood species in sharp decline around the world
Fish market favourites such as orange roughy, common octopus and pink conch are among the species of fish and invertebrates in rapid decline around the world, according to new research.
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Please Fund More Science
Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out—that is, for life, health, and the economy to return roughly to normal. Either we get a vaccine good enough that R0 for the...
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Six works of Computer Science-Fiction (2015)
Computer Science-Fiction 1 is not actually fiction. Instead, these are books of computer science and/or programming that when you read them you can’t quite believe that what they claim is reality. Indeed, very often works of Computer Science-Fiction push the limits of your understanding of just what constitutes the…
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There is one, and only one strain of SARS-CoV-2
The moment a preprint emerges describing a new patient isolate of SARS-CoV-2, with a change in the genome sequence, the world seems to explode with concern ...
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2+1=4, by quinoa
I was struck the other day by the following: The cooking instructions on my Bob’s tri-colored quinoa package said to combine 2 cups of water with 1 cup of dried quinoa, which would ultimately create 4 cups of cooked quinoa. See image above. My first reaction was to believe …
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To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language
MIT neuroscientists have found reading computer code does not rely on the regions of the brain involved in language processing. Instead, it activates the “multiple demand network,” which is also recruited for complex cognitive tasks such as solving math problems or crossword puzzles.
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Age Reduction Breakthrough?
If you eschew hyperbole and hang in for the long haul, maintaining a discipline of understatement in the midst of a flashy neon world, you may be offered a modicum of credence when you make an extraordinary announcement.
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Images Created from Prime Numbers
Inspired by James McKee’s Trinity Hall prime, physics researcher Gilles Esposito-Farese (of the self-descriptive pangram) has worked out that this 2,258-digit prime number: 53084469288402965415857953902888840109250315594591772197851275320 59910735745658243457138160802170063601085186072703319516241231606…
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It took two days to develop Moderna’s vaccine
As the first crop of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are being rolled out, we can start to see the light at the end of this pandemic tunnel. Still, in the US alone there will probably be another 200,000 deaths before we reach herd immunity. Further, as fast as this vaccine development and deployment was, it's not clear
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Outbreak – playable simulations of a disease outbreak
A playable disease simulation
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Do we really travel through time with the speed of light?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Bosch develops rapid test for Covid-19
The PCR diagnostic platform Vivalytic enables COVID-19 rapid tests — a blessing for Clemens Weller and his mother, who suffers from dementia. Learn more!
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Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it
Rootclaim helps people understand complex issues by combining the power of crowdsourced information with the mathematical validity of statistics.
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The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 was divided, one half awarded to Roger Penrose "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity", the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our…
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Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)
These tiny insects kill more than 1,000,000 people every year
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Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
Radio signals from deep space: Astronomers including researchers at MIT have detected the first periodic fast radio burst from 500 million light years away.