Tagged “science”

The continuing value of the little solar system model.

Little planets are easier to comprehend than a probalistic cloud of electrons

Recommended from Friedberg when talking about fertilisers

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.

Invention is overrated, implementation underrated. Both in difficulty, and importance.

Hacking coral sex to accelerate reef regrowth

The physics and background of curling. Some fascinating bits in there. I thought it was just about pushing a stone across some ice.

Awesome diagrams of the inside of undersea cables, and the boats and bots used to lay them.

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.

some very beautiful math drawings

good writing, particularly some of the analogies

They concluded white stripes! The zebra's skin is black, and the change in pigment in the hair makes it white.

My (non-expert) opinion is still in favor of fractional dosing. Really needed more non-industry research on it though.

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.

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.

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

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.

Overview of a century of breakthroughs and other improvements to health and longevity. The many small changes that stack up to reduce mortality.

Interesting stuff. I have no real background in this but still found the article and experiment outline very readable.

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(!)

I particularly like the interlude:

no, you can't randomly cite 2,000-page-long books and hope nobody will read them