Tagged “science”
What I learned as a hired consultant for autodidact physicists
Improving tomato shelf-life with CRISPR
Airfoil – Bartosz Ciechanowski
Death, Lonely Death
a little history on Voyager
What does a chiropractor actually do?
Was Venus ever Habitable? (pdf)
Teaching nature to break manmade chemical bonds
Bridge RNA manuscript (PDF)
NASA Tech Briefs, April 1995 (PDF)
Source of the spiders on drugs experiment from the 80s!
A central role for amyloid fibrin microclots in long COVID/PASC: origins and therapeutic implications
Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?
yes
New study: Intelligence and Group Differences in Preference for Breasts over Buttocks
Mapping Emotions On The Body
where feelings are felt
Building Apollo - by Brian Potter - Construction Physics
so many crazy tech developments. inventing new materials and figuring out how to weld enormous pieces of them.
Moderna’s mRNA cancer vaccine
Historical shifting in grain mineral density of landmark rice and wheat cultivars released over the past 50 years in India
another one of the declining nutrient charts
Biology breakthrough may start with menopause
Discovery of a structural class of antibiotics with explainable deep learning
big news for BJJ
Old-School Hair Analysis Is Junk Science. But It Still Keeps People Behind Bars
twitter thread on breakthroughs of 2023"
Millions of new materials discovered with deep learning
More deepmind doing things. Curious how many turn out to be realisable or useful
Big Oil, Whales and Offshore wind
Subtitle: Fossil-funded Atlas Network 'think-tank' disinformation is driving misinformed community opposition to the vitally important Illawarra Renewable Energy Zone
First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by 21yo computer science student
Decoding scrolls from Pompeii
Do LLMs diminish diversity of thought?
maybe? Saw some tweet on the equivalent of "I can't remember phone numbers" but for coming up with ideas. Maybe worrying, probably fine.
Sex differences in the developmental trajectories of impulse control and sensation-seeking from early adolescence to early adulthood
I think this is the source of the "men at 25 at mature as women at 18" thing.
Against Automaticity
any field with “behavioral” in its name is not real
Visualizing the mysterious dance: Quantum entanglement of photons captured in real-time
why are they yin-yangs
Reproductive health needs more hard science, not just more apps
Microplastics effect on brain underestimated - worse with weathered plastics
The stilling: global wind speeds slowing since 1960
cool new thing to worry about this week
Henneguya zschokkei
weird little anaerobic guys
Could Every Electron in the Universe Be the Same One?
probably not. fun idea though
The Poop Detective
one of the best MR comments sections I have seen
Human cryptochrome exhibits light-dependent magnetosensitivity
The impact of starvation
People become preoccupied with food
Fermi Bubbles
very very very very big things
Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science
too many papers being published leads to "ossification of canon"
Creatures That Don’t Conform
Essay about slime molds
What was it like to grow up in the last Ice Age?
Why do paper cuts hurt so much?
paper fibres make the edges quite rough and serrated
We will never be able to live on another planet. Here’s why
Lot of interesting stats throughout.
- To add enough CO2 to Mars to make the atmosphere thicker (which reduces temp fluctations), would make the atmosphere unbreathable regardless of O2 content
- Earth-like does not mean like current earth. For most of the planet's history the water and atmosphere were toxic to us
- It would take 79,000 years at current rocket speeds to get to Alpha Centauri
A meeting with Enrico Fermi
“There are two ways of doing calculations in theoretical physics”, he said. “One way, and this is the way I prefer, is to have a clear physical picture of the process that you are calculating. The other way is to have a precise and self-consistent mathematical formalism. You have neither.”
Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable?
Impurities (lime clasts) that heal cracks when water runs through them.
Big thread on masking
The rise and fall of peer review
Why Not Mars
Some craaazy facts about microbes in there. And I actually came away convinced! Have previously taken the same argument NASA made for space exploration originally - all the incidental inventions and discoveries made make it worthwhile. But the extreme cost (and risk of contamination) make sending humans to Mars seem like a not great idea. Just let robots do it.
Humans in space is more of a biology problem than an engineering problem. Or at least the engineering of life support systems is the bigger challenge than building rockets.
A multivalent nucleoside-modified mRNA vaccine against all known influenza
Changes in the distribution of body mass index of white US men, 1890–2000:
The subject selection baffled me. The 1890 group was all people from military, I don't think that was the case for more recent cohort.
Probability (1963)
From hn
Why Do So Many Interventions Help Women, but Not Men?
tldr no idea
Practice Analytically, Perform Intuitively
Don't stop at the first sentence like I did on first open.
Unless you want the opposite takeaway
SocArXiv Papers | Rain, Rain, Go Away: 192 Potential Exclusion-Restriction
Abstract:
Instrumental variable (IV) analysis assumes the instrument only affects the dependent variable via its relationship with the independent variable. Other possible causal routes from the IV to the dependent
variable are exclusion-restriction violations and invalidate the instrument. Weather has been widely used as an instrumental variable in social science to predict many different variables. The use of weather to instrument different independent variables represents strong prima facie evidence of exclusion violations for all studies using weather IVs. A review of 288 studies reveals 192 variables previously linked to weather: all representing potential exclusion violations. Using sensitivity analysis, I show that the magnitude of many of these violations is sufficient to overturn numerous existing IV results. I conclude with practical steps to systematically review existing literature to identify possible exclusion violations when using IV designs.
questions:
- what is an instrumental variable?
- what are exclusion results?
- is 192 variables in 192 studies, or are some shared
- what else is included in weather?
- what is sensitivity analysis?
- what are IV results
Rare, precious, smells like whale: hunting for ambergris in New Zealand
“I Use Weed for My ADHD”: A Qualitative Analysis of Online Forum Discussions on Cannabis Use and ADHD
Our Friend the Atom — Real Life
The continuing value of the little solar system model.
Little planets are easier to comprehend than a probalistic cloud of electrons
A Plane of Monkeys, a Pandemic, and a Botched Deal: Inside the Science Crisis You’ve Never Heard Of
The Alchemy Of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World But Fueled the Rise of Hitler
Recommended from Friedberg when talking about fertilisers
Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes
bit clickbaity
Quite a few microbes have abandoned the human gut, as humans have lost 57 of the 100 or so branches, or clades, of microbes currently found in chimps or bonobos and at least one other nonhuman primate, Moeller reported on 11 June at Microbe 2022, the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. Moeller was also able to estimate when some of the human gut microbes disappeared. A few were lost thousands of years ago, and some have disappeared more recently, with city dwellers having lost the most, Moeller reported.
Dominic Walliman Blog
Why chemists can’t quit palladium
Bright Green Lies: Review
Revenge of the Earthworms
The Kilogram
The Forgotten Stage of Human Progress
Invention is overrated, implementation underrated. Both in difficulty, and importance.
How to resurrect a coral reef
Hacking coral sex to accelerate reef regrowth
Tim Urban: Elon Musk, Neuralink, AI, Aliens, and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #264
The Roaring Game
The physics and background of curling. Some fascinating bits in there. I thought it was just about pushing a stone across some ice.
Jay's Blog
The race to reconnect Tonga
Awesome diagrams of the inside of undersea cables, and the boats and bots used to lay them.
Condition of rovers left on the moon
Pretty damn hard to make things that last
Except the batteries on that rover are long dead. Many, if not all, of the plastic and paper insulators exposed to vacuum are now brittle and broken. All labels or painted surfaces are likely bleached white. Differential expansion during lunar daylight cycles has likely snapped a few things here and there too. Fifty years of exposure to static electric charges on the moon has put lunar dust in all sorts of places it doesn't belong.
Title:Hyperbolic band theory through Higgs bundles
some very beautiful math drawings
The Webb Space Telescope Will Rewrite Cosmic History. If It Works.
good writing, particularly some of the analogies
Sequencing your DNA with a USB dongle and open source code
Life after Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy (Lecture Notes in Energy Book 81)
Starship is Still Not Understood
Browser Bets: @SpaceMog predicts Humans on Mars, Robot Maids, and a new era of Science
Are zebras white with black stripes or black with white stripes?
They concluded white stripes! The zebra's skin is black, and the change in pigment in the hair makes it white.
What Even Counts as Science Writing Anymore?
Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story.
Can we stretch existing Covid vaccines to inoculate more people?
My (non-expert) opinion is still in favor of fractional dosing. Really needed more non-industry research on it though.
The animal origin of SARS-CoV-2
Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does
Original title was "Why Captcha Pictures Are So Unbearably Depressing", which felt a bit complainy compared to the updated one. I agreed less with that take on the article, but a lot with the sentiment from the HN comments
A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.
Niall Ferguson on Why We Study History (Ep. 128)
Universe 25: The Mouse "Utopia" Experiment That Turned Into An Apocalypse
Some terrifying terms in there. Universe 25 seemed ominous enough, but the 'Beautiful Ones' - the mice that just dedicated their lives entirely to grooming - is like something from a movie.
BirdNET – The easiest way to identify birds by sound.
This is the kind of thing where you think "oh sure that would be a neat side project" but the reality is an immense amount of effort
Extended interval BNT162b2 vaccination enhances peak antibody generation in older people
Pending peer review, but apparently large benefit in waiting 12 weeks rather than three.
In donors without evidence of previous infection the peak antibody response was 3.5-fold higher in donors who had undergone delayed interval vaccination. Cellular immune responses were 3.6-fold lower.
The Antiscience Movement Is Escalating
The transatlantic institutional anti-mask campaign, summarised
How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life
Overview of a century of breakthroughs and other improvements to health and longevity. The many small changes that stack up to reduce mortality.
The Climate Solution Actually Adding Millions of Tons of CO2 Into the Atmosphere
eDNAir: proof of concept that animal DNA can be collected from air sampling
Interesting stuff. I have no real background in this but still found the article and experiment outline very readable.
Notes on technology in the 2020s
Ambitious thing to estimate - I don't even try to predict a week ahead!
Some things to get excited about:
- mRNA tech
- geothermal power
- in-orbit manufacturing of things that cannot exist on Earth(!)
Million-dollar Food Planet Prize awarded to CSIRO innovation
Book Review: The Precipice
Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors
I particularly like the interlude:
no, you can't randomly cite 2,000-page-long books and hope nobody will read them
Tradeoffs: The Currency of Decision Making
French Artist Paul Sougy’s Stunning Mid-Century Scientific Illustrations of Plants, Animals, and the Human Body
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