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Why have I never heard of the Ene-Farm? (2017)
While reading up on architecture in Japan recently, I came across a technology that I hadn’t heard of before: the Ene-Farm. It’s a domestic energy system that is being used in Japan and…
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How far behind a plane is its noise?
If you’re ever near a relatively low flying airplane, you may have noticed that it sounds like it’s in a different spot in the sky than where it actually is. You can hear the loud engines, and your ears tell you it should be in one place, but your eyes tell you it’s clearly well ahead of its noise. It’s a funny visual…
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Endemic Pathogens Are Making You Crazy and Then Killing You
In February 2022, Jim Keller organized a scientific anarchism event in Woodside, California. Scientific anarchism, a term borrowed from the controversial philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, concerns the way science is performed in the laboratory and the way that ideas are generated, refuted, and incorporated into…
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I wrote a short story about von Neumann probes
"They would have eaten our whole house and probably the whole cul-de-sac if we didn't find those jelly beans."
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For the first time in four decades, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque is dry
For the first time in ~40 years (? – see below) New Mexico’s Rio Grande has “broken” – is no longer flowing – in what we call “the Albuquerque reach”…
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First evidence of social relationships between chimpanzees, gorillas: study
Drawn from more than 20 years of observations at Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo, a long-term study led by primatologist Crickette Sanz of Washington University in St. Louis documented social ties between individual chimpanzees and gorillas that persisted over years and across different contexts.
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Science is political, and that's a bad thing
People who say “science is political” usually aren’t just stating facts - they’re trying to push something on you. Don’t let them
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United flies passenger flight on sustainable aviation fuel supplying one engine
United Flies World’s First Passenger Flight On 100% Sustainable Aviation Fuel Supplying One Of Its Engines
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A new method boosts wind farms’ energy output, without new equipment
MIT engineers have developed a method to increase wind farms’ energy output. Whereas individual turbines are typically controlled separately, the new approach models the wind flow of the entire collection of turbines and optimizes the control of individual units.
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Autistic children with imaginary friends have better social skills
Results suggest that pretend play provides similar social benefits to autistic children as it does to neurotypical children.
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The Philosophy of Linear Algebra (2021)
Whenever a student wonders why linear algebra, matrices, and vectors are important, the response from teachers usually sounds like this:
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Some neurons are active when adding, others when subtracting
Most elementary school children probably already know that three apples plus two apples add up to five apples. However, what happens in the brain during such calculations is still largely unknown. The current study by the Universities of Bonn and Tübingen now sheds light on this issue.
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Flying the Unflyable Plane: The near crash of Air Astana flight 1388
A deeper analysis of the events which caused a Kazakh airliner to go out of control over Portugal in November 2018.
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Split Brain Psychology
The strange interactions of Selfhood and Multiplicity
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How to grow monosodium glutamate (MSG) crystals
Dissolve MSG in water to form a saturated solution. Wait for small MSG crystals to form. Then, tie it to a string to let it grow bigger.
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Noether's Theorem in a Nutshell (2020)
Noether's theorem is an amazing result which lets physicists get conserved quantities from symmetries of the laws of nature. Time translation symmetry gives conservation of energy; space translation symmetry gives conservation of momentum; rotation symmetry gives conservation of angular momentum, and so on.
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Artificial photosynthesis can produce food without sunshine
Scientists are developing artificial photosynthesis to help make food production more energy-efficient here on Earth, and one day possibly on Mars
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Discovering which parts of the brain are engaged when coding
Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) found that the Multiple Demand and Language brain systems encode specific code properties and uniquely align with machine-learned representations of code.
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I used Benford’s law to analyze Covid-19 in 113 countries (2020)
Spoiler alert: I found some intriguing patterns…
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The Soviet Union’s Nuclear Icebreakers
If you want to watch the video first, it is below
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No increased risk of brain tumours for mobile phone users, new study finds
Longstanding fears that using mobile phones may increase the risk of developing a brain tumour have been reignited recently by the launch of 5G (fifth generation) mobile wireless technologies. Mobile phones emit radiofrequency waves which, if absorbed by tissues, can cause heating and damage.
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How does the land use of different electricity sources compare?
All energy production takes up land, but which sources use the most land, and which use it most efficiently?
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The examples in the textbooks are not representative of real world problems
Bill Harris points to this cartoon from Randall Munroe. I think he (Munroe) is really on to something here. Not about Bayes’s theorem but about the sorts of examples that are in textbooks.
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Generating true random numbers from bananas
It was a dreary afternoon in Milan last year when, procrastinating on studying, I was struck by a flash of genius. “What would happen if I made a banana-powered random number generator?“. I immediately went to tell my roommate, who was also an electronic engineer.He looked me in the face and burst out laughing. At ……
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Scientists discover new “origins of life” chemical reactions
The reaction generates amino acids and orotic acid, the building blocks of proteins and DNA.