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Bicycle
Interactive article explaining the physics of a bicycle.
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ArXiv now offers papers in HTML format
arXiv’s goal is equitable access to scientific research for all – and to achieve this, we have been working to make research papers more accessible for arXiv…
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First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student
Vesuvius Challenge \$700,000 Grand Prize “now definitely achievable”
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My $500M Mars rover mistake
Some mistakes feel worse than death.
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A journey into the shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma controversy
Cambridge University Press is publishing a textbook I have co-edited with five colleagues, Shaken Baby Syndrome, Investigating the Abusive Head Trauma Controversy, by Findley et al. With contributions by 32 authors, this book provides a thorough analysis of an interdisciplinary subject lying at the intersection of…
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Why Not Mars
It's slow, expensive, the engineering is mostly port-a-potty chemistry, and the best-case outcome is that thirty years from now we’ll get to watch someone remotely operate a soil scoop from Mars instead of Pasadena
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Why do railway tracks have crushed stones alongside them?
Track ballast is the name for the crushed stones next to railway tracks. They are used by Railway Track Designers for numerous reasons
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Maps distort how we see the world
30 Maps to Rethink the World
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Why is desalination so difficult?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] This is the Carlsbad Desalination Plant outside of San Diego, California. It produces roughly ten percent of the area’s fresh water, around 50 million gallons or 23,000 cubic meters per day. Unlike most treatment plants that cle
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Poor sleep drove me insane, and my long path to recovery
I'm sharing my experience dealing with what might be the most underdiagnosed and under-treated health disorder today.
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Have attention spans been declining?
[This is one of the finalists in the SMTM Mysteries Contest, by a reader writing under the pseudonym Cennfaeladh. We’ll be posting about one of these a week until we have gotten through all th…
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Scientists have discovered the first virovore – an organism that eats viruses
Husker researchers have found that a single-celled microorganism can eat huge numbers of viruses that share its aquatic habitat. For the first time, the team’s lab experiments have also shown that a virus-only diet, which the team calls “virovory,” is enough to fuel the physiological growth and even population…
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GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting
Our state-of-the-art model delivers 10-day weather predictions at unprecedented accuracy in under one minute
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The Dunning-Kruger effect is autocorrelation
Do unskilled people actually underestimate their incompetence?
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Why was Roman concrete so durable?
Researchers have discovered ancient Roman concrete-manufacturing strategies that incorporated self-healing. Applying this knowledge toward modern cement production, they hope to improve the material’s environmental impact.
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OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models
LLMs have become privately-controlled research infrastructure
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ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades
Cornell Tech has announced a total of more than $10 million in gifts and grants from the Simons Foundation and the National Science Foundation, respectively, to support arXiv, a free distribution service and open-access archive for scholarly articles.
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Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023 was awarded jointly to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman "for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19"
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Replace peer review with “peer replication” (2021)
As I’ve posted before and many others have noted , there is a serious problem with lack of adequate replication in many fields of science. The current peer review process is a dreadful combination of being both very fallible and also a huge hurdle to communicating important science.
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Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
ETH Zurich researchers taught an autonomous excavator to construct dry stone walls itself using boulders weighing several tonnes and demolition debris.
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Electric vehicle battery prices are falling faster than expected
We harness every resource, insight, relationship, and competitive advantage to drive superior results for our clients.
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Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes
After successful recommissioning in autumn 2022, the Greifswald nuclear fusion experiment has surpassed an important target.
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Significant breakthrough in search for Parkinson's biomarker
We are charting the path to a future free from Parkinson’s. Your support will get us there.