Science

2026 93 posts

October 2026 17 posts

Police In Guinea-Bissau Raid Offices Of Danish Anti-Vaxxers Planning CDC-Funded Unethical Study techdirt.com · “The study is designed to knowingly expose 7,000 children to hepatitis B, which can have immensely deleterious long-term health outcomes if exposed.”
Oct 26
The Mother Museum longreads.com · “Despite the claims of collectors, a skull can only belong to its own person, not a museum or any other buyer on the market.”
Oct 26
A 10-year-old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs for skin cancer diagnosis lynchlab.net · “A ten-year-old network, fine-tuned for about twenty minutes, beat both of them at recognising skin cancer.”
Oct 25
Reg readers land on 'Binface' as name for UK space cleanup mission theregister.com · “Binface (and McBinface) have secured the popular vote for a satellite clean-up mission.”
Oct 25
AI-Assisted Paper on Z-Library Cites a TorrentFreak Article That Doesn't Exist torrentfreak.com · “The problem is that this particular legal action is new to us.”
Oct 24
Warhound raises $200M to engineer war dogs and arm them with Anduril gear techcrunch.com · “If we make the dog safer, make it healthier, make it perform better, it’s going to perform better in the line of duty.”
Oct 24
An artist's take on AI in math 3blue1brown.substack.com · “AI is seen as a tool to replace the work done by humans, rather than one to empower those humans.”
Oct 23
Bird Flu Is Raging on a Mink Farm. It Could Spark a Human Pandemic, Experts Say, but Officials Won't Act. propublica.org · “Instead of trying to stop the outbreak and prevent it from spilling into humans, state and federal officials have done little except try to keep its existence quiet, our investigation shows.”
Oct 23
Nuclear Weapons Waste Made Workers Sick. Despite a Law Meant to Help, the DOE Keeps Fighting Their Claims. propublica.org · “State records show that the DOE has filed more than 500 appeals since the presumption law passed in 2018.”
Oct 22
The Other Epidemic thebeliever.net · “I knew that every hypochondriac is eventually vindicated, but that their “I told you so” has a fatal price.”
Oct 20
Will it be a golden age or a dark age for mathematics (and science)? terrytao.wordpress.com · “I therefore disagree with claims that mathematics is over because machines can prove theorems.”
Oct 19
Bringing the magic: Google breaks open a bottleneck in quantum computing blog.google · “We’ve shown that magic state cultivation works on Google Quantum AI hardware.”
Oct 17
Android earthquake alerts now available in more than 200 regions blog.google · “We’ve sent over one billion Android earthquake alerts.”
Oct 17
Russian lab worker dies of suspected plague as 200 enter medical observation nbcnews.com · “The sanitary-epidemiological situation” in the area “is currently stable,” Kobsev said.
Oct 5
Four Kids in One Faith-Healing Family Died. Authorities Could Do Nothing. propublica.org · “If you don’t do anything, kids are going to die.”
Oct 5
Things that Apparently Cause Cancer breakthroughjournal.org · “Sophisticated statistics can produce extremely precise nonsense when the design fails to identify the causal mechanism.”
Oct 5
Toadstools and Toxins aeon.co · “Muscimol killed mice at a lower dose than nearly all psychotropic drugs we examined, including fentanyl.”
Oct 5

September 2026 8 posts

China is excelling in health tech. That's good news for the world restofworld.org · “Chinese products are cheaper and scalable, which is so important for developing countries.”
Sep 25
Ectopic Pregnancy Deaths Have Nearly Doubled. It's Worse in States With Abortion Bans. propublica.org · “Almost 200 women with the condition died from 2020 to 2025, compared with about 100 in the previous six years.”
Sep 22
On Tour with the Eclipse Chasers dispatch-media.com · “Totality is in a league of its own. Totality is what they are chasing.”
Sep 15
The part of Navier-Stokes no one is talking about johndcook.com · “I hesitate to use the word ‘revolutionary,’ but lowering the cost of anything by four orders of magnitude is revolutionary.”
Sep 10
Regulators Knew This Marijuana Product Was Harming People. It Stayed on Shelves for More Than a Year. propublica.org · “Regulators knew this marijuana product was harming people. It stayed on shelves for more than a year.”
Sep 9
Google DeepMind Maps 9 Billion Possible DNA Variants spectrum.ieee.org · “The AI model can compare an original DNA sequence with an altered one and predict how the change might affect gene expression and other regulatory activity.”
Sep 9
Caltech Mathathon: first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics mathathonchallenge.com · “It will be the first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics.”
Sep 7
The Scientist Trying to Keep Kratom Legal Has Not Disclosed Longstanding Ties to Kratom Lobbyists propublica.org · “I’m really confused on where science ends and lobbying begins.”
Sep 2

August 2026 13 posts

Where's the Beef? The Lab-Grown-Meat Revolution That Wasn't harpers.org · “On August 5, 2013, a man and a woman ate a burger. Not just any burger: a world-historical burger, made from cattle cells grown in a lab by Mark Post.”
Aug 26
More Than Half of Adults in U.S. Say They Lack Basic Statistical Understanding psu.edu · “While statistics are not hard to understand, they are even easier to misunderstand.”
Aug 26
His Research on Pregnant Opioid Users Was Widely Celebrated. Auditors and Experts Found Major Flaws. propublica.org · “The misrepresentation is not minor. It runs throughout the piece.”
Aug 24
A trial date has been set in a $1 billion defamation case against Elsevier retractionwatch.com · “A trial date has been set in a $1 billion defamation case against Elsevier that alleges the company published what plaintiffs say was a manipulated study about an air purifying technology over objections from peer reviewers.”
Aug 21
Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study ysph.yale.edu · “Adequate coverage for all could avert about 62,863 deaths annually.”
Aug 17
AI isn't outthinking mathematicians, it's out-remembering them davidepiffer.com · “The machine may appear more mathematically intelligent partly because it is much less constrained by a cognitive limitation that suppresses human performance.”
Aug 15
Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead of Winter severe-weather.eu · “Peak anomalies reach +7 in the eastern parts.”
Aug 15
Abdominal fat predicts heart disease risk better than BMI acc.org · “Those individuals with normal weight or overweight and clinically defined high WC or WHR were associated with a 15% - 50% greater risk for most of the nine studied outcomes.”
Aug 15
What sort of maths are LLMs good at? gowers.wordpress.com · “The most notable mathematical results proved by LLMs have tended to be ones that we would classify as examples or counterexamples.”
Aug 12
Swarms of tiny robots remove microplastics from soil and water phys.org · “In water, they removed about 94% of test polystyrene particles and 89% of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) in around an hour.”
Aug 12
Compression is prediction ngrok.com · “Here’s how an order-1 model stacks up against GPT-2 with arithmetic coding in compressing a famous Charles Dickens quote: order-1 434 bits, 24% of original; GPT-2 176 bits, 10% of original.”
Aug 12
New spinning drone hides in plain sight news.northwestern.edu · “Instead, we asked whether we could design the drone itself around the way humans perceive motion.”
Aug 2
Postmortem for Kernel Soundness Bug #14576 leodemoura.github.io · “This is an implementation bug, not a hole in Lean’s meta-theory.”
Aug 1

July 2026 18 posts

Detect Dark Matter's Mark from Your Backyard spectrum.ieee.org · “Something out there is putting its stamp on how the Milky Way turns. And that basic observation is what allows me to say that, with the help of some roof flashing and a paint-thinner can, I’ve been able to detect dark matter from my backyard.”
Jul 31
The Maxwell Conjecture is False arxiv.org · “We exhibit a configuration of five point charges in Euclidean space whose electrostatic potential admits at least 24 critical points all of which are non-degenerate. Maxwell’s conjecture that the field of n point charges has at most (n-1)² critical points which are all non-degenerate is therefore false.”
Jul 31
Lawmakers Call for CDC to Track Vitamin K Shot Refusals, Cite ProPublica Report propublica.org · “Recent reporting from ProPublica has highlighted a major problem: the federal government does not currently track vitamin K shot refusal, vitamin K deficiency bleeding, or the preventable deaths related to vitamin K deficiency.”
Jul 29
Earth's Biggest Disasters Strike In a Hidden Pattern Every 27 Million Years sciencealert.com · “Whether the apparent cycle reflects a genuine feature of Earth’s history remains an open question.”
Jul 29
AI Systems Out-Persuade Expert Humans, Including Professional Canvassers And World Championship Debaters techdirt.com · “AI systems were reliably more persuasive than expert humans, even when expert humans chose their issues, researched in advance, underwent hours of live, structured practice, and were incentivized with £1,000 cash bonuses.”
Jul 28
Amazon Files Application for Direct-to-Device Satellite Constellation spacenews.com · “Amazon has filed plans with the Federal Communications Commission for a constellation of more than 5,100 satellites that would provide direct-to-device (D2D) services using Globalstar spectrum.”
Jul 28
Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth propublica.org · “Babies who don’t get the vitamin K shot, research shows, are 81 times more likely than those who do to develop late vitamin K deficiency bleeding.”
Jul 28
New HIV Vaccine Shows Unprecedented Success in Preclinical Study lji.org · “We succeeded in taking ultra-rare antibody responses and turning them common responses by the end of the vaccination process.”
Jul 28
Astronauts describe persistent 'observer' sensation after 6 month missions spacedaily.com · “Coming home, it turns out, is its own kind of mission, and the part of you that watched yourself float for six months does not stop watching the moment your boots touch the tarmac.”
Jul 27
Canadian Lab Extracts 90% of Nuclear Waste Danger in 24 Hours autonocion.com · “Moltex projects that a single 300 MW SSR-W could run for its full 60-year life on recycled fuel from about 260,000 used CANDU bundles.”
Jul 26
Astronomers Detect First Atmosphere Around a Rocky Earth-Like Planet in the Habitable Zone space.com · “It’s in the habitable zone, which is super exciting for astrobiology and habitability and searching for life.”
Jul 17
The Extraordinary Life and Quiet Death of the World's Largest Iceberg nationalgeographic.com · “In March 2024, A23a’s progress across the ocean simply halted, and it began to twirl.”
Jul 10
US Food and Drug Administration rejects petition to set PFAS limits in food mondaq.com · “FDA concluded that the petition did not provide sufficient scientific evidence to support establishing tolerances or action levels for the specific PFAS, foods and levels requested.”
Jul 9
The Space-Based Data Center Hype Machine Is Already In Orbit spectrum.ieee.org · “For orbital data centers, which he says will be a cost-effective alternative to terrestrial data centers within three years, the math won’t make sense for several years, if ever.”
Jul 2
'PROMISE' Me the Moon? NASA Wants To Send Spare Nuclear-Powered Mars Rover to the Lunar Surface space.com · “We are in the business of the near impossible, so why not?”
Jul 1
For the First Time, a Cell Built From Scratch Grows and Divides quantamagazine.org · “For the very first time, biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and witnessed the bag of molecules start to behave like life.”
Jul 1
Realta Fusion Generates Electricity Directly From a Fusion Reaction, an Apparent First techcrunch.com · “We can take power from a plasma.”
Jul 1
The First Early Human Eggs From Stem Cells conception.bio · “We have generated the first early human egg cells (‘primary oocytes’) derived from stem cells.”
Jul 1

June 2026 1 posts

An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time scrollprize.org · “To read one was to destroy it. Hundreds of rolls have therefore remained sealed, their contents preserved yet unreachable.”
Jun 25

May 2026 5 posts

The Ballad of TIGIT owlposting.com · “Patients on tiragolumab died faster than the control group.”
May 26
A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro gowers.wordpress.com · “It produced a confident, fluent, and entirely wrong proof, then defended it for four exchanges before conceding.”
May 8
It's Super Weird, Super Odd, Super Rare: Meet the Twins Who Have Different Dads theguardian.com · “I’m still in amazement that this can actually happen. It’s super weird, super odd, super rare, but it makes sense.”
May 5
Secrets of the Bees: Revealing the Sneaky Genius of Nature's Brightest Thinkers nationalgeographic.com · “New research demonstrates that honeybees possess greater cognitive abilities than previously understood.”
May 5
OpenAI's o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors theguardian.com · “In a Harvard trial, OpenAI’s o1 outperformed emergency room triage doctors on initial diagnostic accuracy by twelve to seventeen percentage points.”
May 2

April 2026 10 posts

Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease? freakonomics.com · “Decades of Alzheimer’s research have produced disappointing results.”
Apr 25
Replace IBM Quantum back end with /dev/urandom github.com · “Researchers swapped IBM’s quantum back end with /dev/urandom and got similar results on benchmark tasks.”
Apr 24
Humpback whales are forming super-groups bbc.com · “Humpback whales are gathering in unprecedentedly large feeding groups.”
Apr 21
NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating science.nasa.gov · “NASA has powered down another instrument on Voyager 1 to extend the spacecraft’s operating life.”
Apr 18
Show HN: I made a calculator that works over disjoint sets of intervals victorpoughon.github.io · “A calculator that operates on disjoint sets of intervals instead of single numbers.”
Apr 17
Not all elementary functions can be expressed with exp-minus-log stylewarning.com · “A counter-result to the previous piece on elementary functions.”
Apr 14
All elementary functions from a single binary operator arxiv.org · “Every elementary function can be expressed using a single binary operator.”
Apr 12
Artemis II safely splashes down cbsnews.com · “After a 10-day journey around the moon, the Artemis II crew capsule has safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.”
Apr 10
iNaturalist inaturalist.org · “Over 200 million observations contributed by 3.5 million users worldwide.”
Apr 3
Artemis II Launches Four Astronauts on First Crewed Moon Mission in 50 Years nasa.gov · “Today’s launch marks a defining moment for our nation and for all who believe in exploration.”
Apr 1

March 2026 3 posts

Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies sytse.com · “I started a new company every six months as a way to keep going during treatment.”
Mar 28
Tony Hoare has died blog.computationalcomplexity.org · “Tony Hoare, inventor of quicksort and the null reference, has died at 91.”
Mar 10
Galileo's handwritten notes found in ancient astronomy text science.org · “The annotations imply that Galileo ultimately broke with Ptolemy’s cosmos because his mastery of the traditional paradigm’s reasoning convinced him that a heliocentric system would better fulfill Ptolemy’s own mathematical logic.”
Mar 7

February 2026 7 posts

Rubin Observatory Has Started Paging Astronomers 800,000 Times a Night scientificamerican.com · “We can detect everything that changes, moves and appears. It’s way too much for one person to sift through and monitor.”
Feb 28
Human Brain Cells On a Chip Learned To Play Doom In a Week tomshardware.com · “This was a major milestone, because it demonstrated adaptive, real-time goal directed learning.”
Feb 27
Blood test boosts Alzheimer's diagnosis accuracy to 94.5%, clinical study shows medicalxpress.com · “When relying solely on standard clinical evaluation, doctors correctly diagnosed Alzheimer’s in 75.5% of cases, but when incorporating blood test results, diagnostic accuracy increased to 94.5%.”
Feb 22
Elsevier shuts down its finance journal citation cartel chrisbrunet.com · “The tragedy isn’t that they cheated; it’s that the system was designed to let them thrive for a decade before anyone bothered to look at the data.”
Feb 21
$30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents yahoo.com · “This is not a debate about rejecting technology. It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works.”
Feb 17
The Olympics Are Ditching PFAS Waxes—and the 'Ridiculous' Speed They Gave Skiers grist.org · “Scandinavian wax technicians had blood PFAS levels approximately 25 times higher than the general population.”
Feb 15
Data centers in space makes no sense civai.org · “Cooling is the obstacle, not the launch cost. Vacuum is a worse heat dissipation environment than air, not a better one.”
Feb 3

January 2026 11 posts

Vitamin D and Omega-3 Have a Larger Effect on Depression Than Antidepressants blog.ncase.me · “The best antidepressant would take your mental health grade from an F to F+, or C to C+.”
Jan 29
430,000-Year-Old Well-Preserved Wooden Tools Are the Oldest Ever Found nbcnews.com · “We have never seen anything like it. It’s just really different, and it’s tiny. We’re lucky that we found it.”
Jan 27
Historic Winter Storm: 235 Million in Path of Dangerous Snow, Ice foxweather.com · “A trailing blast of Arctic air associated with the Polar Vortex is expected to bring a dangerous refreeze that could create long-duration power outages and paralyze travel for days.”
Jan 25
Study Shows How Earthquake Monitors Can Track Space Junk Through Sonic Booms apnews.com · “The problem at the moment is we can track stuff very well in space. But once it gets to the point that it’s actually breaking up in the atmosphere, it becomes very difficult to track.”
Jan 24
Active Sitting Is Better For Brain Health sciencealert.com · “Health advice could shift from simply saying ‘sit less’ to encouraging more mentally engaging activities while sitting.”
Jan 23
GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers gptzero.me · “Across the 2025 accepted papers, 100 contain references to journals, citations, or experiments that do not exist.”
Jan 22
Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant media.mit.edu · “Subjects who used AI assistance over a six-month period showed measurable declines in unaided performance on the same tasks.”
Jan 21
How SpaceX Rockets Put Passenger Planes at Risk propublica.org · “We’re too close to the debris.”
Jan 15
An Act of Cosmic Sabotage theatlantic.com · “On Mars, in the belly of a rover named Perseverance, a titanium tube holds a stone more precious than any diamond or ruby on Earth.”
Jan 8
ChatGPT Health openai.com · “ChatGPT Health offers personalized medical guidance, integrates with wearables, and connects users to telemedicine providers.”
Jan 7
Cameras and Lenses ciechanow.ski · “An interactive deep-dive into how cameras and lenses actually form images, with simulations you can manipulate in your browser.”
Jan 1

2025 151 posts

December 2025 5 posts

Most distant supernova: James Webb sees a star explode at cosmic dawn sciencedaily.com · “To our surprise, our model worked remarkably well and the observed supernova seems to match really well the death of stars that we see regularly.”
Dec 28
Subaru Telescope reveals a hidden giant planet sciencedaily.com · “Only about 1 percent of stars are known to host massive planets or brown dwarfs that can be directly photographed with today’s telescopes.”
Dec 22
Scientists found climate change hidden in old military air samples sciencedaily.com · “It’s a considerable difference, especially considering that summer is so short in the north.”
Dec 21
The Birth Keepers: How the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world longreads.com · “They will try to discredit you. They will lie about you. They will attempt to silence what they don’t understand.”
Dec 13
The Unseen Fury of Solar Storms noemamag.com · “The curious paradox at the heart of space forecasting is that the satellites and supercomputers that empower the observations are themselves vectors of vulnerability.”
Dec 10

November 2025 19 posts

Russia's Only ISS Launch Pad Damaged After Soyuz MS-28 Launch nasaspaceflight.com · “If the Baikonur Cosmodrome is disabled as suspected, Russia will have lost the ability to launch people into space for the first time since 1961.”
Nov 28
Ozempic Fails to Slow Alzheimer's Progression in Phase 3 Trials statnews.com · “While semaglutide did not demonstrate efficacy in slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, the extensive body of evidence supporting semaglutide continues to provide benefits for individuals with type 2 diabetes, obesity, and related comorbidities.”
Nov 24
MIT Builds Robots Powered by Living Muscle Tissue and Artificial Tendons news.mit.edu · “The tendon-enhanced gripper moved three times faster and with 30 times more force than one powered by muscle alone.”
Nov 21
First Ramses III Inscription Discovered in Jordan's Wadi Rum jordantimes.com · “This is a landmark discovery that enhances our understanding of ancient connections between Egypt, Jordan, and the Arabian Peninsula.”
Nov 19
Lethal Dose of Plastics for Marine Animals Is Much Smaller Than Expected oceanconservancy.org · “The lethal dose varies based on the species, the animal’s size, the type of plastic it’s consuming, and other factors, but overall it’s much smaller than you might think.”
Nov 17
Hawaiian Monk Seals Have a Hidden Underwater Vocabulary of 25 Distinct Calls hawaii.edu · “We discovered that Hawaiian monk seals—one of the world’s most endangered marine mammals—are far more vocal underwater than previously known.”
Nov 17
Roman Horse Cemetery with Over 100 Skeletons Found in Stuttgart archaeology.org · “Here we see a particularly close bond between the owner and his horse.”
Nov 17
Scientists Extract the Oldest RNA Ever Found from 40,000-Year-Old Woolly Mammoth smithsonianmag.com · “Many researchers thought RNA didn’t stay intact for tens of thousands of years, but the new study challenges that long-held notion.”
Nov 15
700-Year-Old Royal Murder Solved Through DNA and Forensic Analysis phys.org · “Forensic evidence revealed 26 perimortem injuries, suggesting a coordinated, premeditated assassination involving at least three assailants.”
Nov 14
Chinese Astronauts Return on Backup Spacecraft After Space Debris Damages Their Capsule spacenews.com · “The Shenzhou-20 manned spacecraft’s return capsule window glass had developed a minor crack, most likely caused by an external impact from space debris, thus failing to meet the requirements for a safe crewed return.”
Nov 14
Blue Origin Lands New Glenn Booster for the First Time blueorigin.com · “The first stage of the New Glenn rocket, named ‘Never Tell Me the Odds,’ successfully landed on the Landing Platform Vessel Jacklyn positioned 375 miles offshore in the Atlantic Ocean.”
Nov 13
UC Berkeley's First Planetary Mission Launches Twin Satellites to Mars news.berkeley.edu · “ESCAPADE breaks the paradigm of multi-hundred million and billion dollar planetary missions, building on the MAVEN Mars orbiter’s legacy for a fraction of the cost.”
Nov 13
3,500-Year-Old Egyptian Settlement with Royal Wine Production Found Beneath Greek Ruins popularmechanics.com · “An amphora stamped with the name Meritaten dated back to the 18th Dynasty, since Meritaten is known to be the eldest daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti.”
Nov 12
Americas Lose Measles Elimination Status After Canada Stripped of Designation en.wikipedia.org · “On November 10, Canada was stripped of its measles-free designation, and as a result, the Pan American Health Organization declared that the Americas had lost its measles elimination status.”
Nov 10
Peru's Mysterious 'Band of Holes' Was an Ancient Marketplace and Inca Spreadsheet usf.edu · “In a sense, Monte Sierpe could have been an ‘Excel spreadsheet’ for the Inca Empire.”
Nov 10
Self-Healing Concrete Uses Bacteria to Repair Its Own Cracks highways.today · “Results indicated complete healing of cracks in 21 days under optimal curing conditions.”
Nov 8
FDA Creates New Pathway for Personalized Gene Therapy scientificdiscovery.dev · “The FDA launched a new pathway to market for personalized gene therapy procedures in November.”
Nov 7
Shingles Vaccine Reduces Dementia Risk by 20% in Welsh Study med.stanford.edu · “The remarkable findings support an emerging theory that viruses that affect the nervous system can increase the risk of dementia.”
Nov 4
First Paratyphoid Vaccine Shows 73% Efficacy in Human Trials ox.ac.uk · “This is the first time a modern-day vaccine has been shown to protect people against Salmonella Paratyphi A, a disease that affects millions of people every year.”
Nov 3

October 2025 13 posts

Carnivorous 'Death Ball' Sponge Among 30 New Species Found in Southern Ocean oceancensus.org · “Its spherical form is covered in tiny hooks that trap prey, a clear contrast to the gentle, passive, filter-feeding undertaken by most sponges.”
Oct 29
Astronomers May Have Found the Universe's First Stars Using James Webb livescience.com · “Looking at that light, astronomers found clear evidence of helium in LAP1-B—but virtually no heavier elements.”
Oct 27
Scientists Explore Interoception, the Body's Hidden 'Sixth Sense' knowablemagazine.org · “An intricate communication network inside the body constantly monitors breathing, heart rate, digestion, and immune function.”
Oct 25
Iceland Reports First-Ever Mosquitoes, Leaving Only Antarctica Mosquito-Free npr.org · “This is the first record of mosquitoes occurring in the natural environment in Iceland.”
Oct 22
Naked Mole-Rats' DNA Repair Protein Explains Their Longevity rockefeller.edu · “Small tweaks in one of their proteins make it better at fixing DNA damage.”
Oct 20
Scientists Finally Read the Hidden DNA Code That Shapes Disease rockefeller.edu · “SDR-seq decodes both DNA and RNA from the same cell, finally opening access to non-coding regions.”
Oct 18
SpaceX Launches 50th Falcon 9 From Vandenberg This Year spaceflightnow.com · “SpaceX launched its 50th Falcon 9 rocket of the year from Vandenberg.”
Oct 18
The Secret Life of Horus: An Egyptian Mummy's Tumultuous Journey longreads.com · “Horus was showcased inside a decommissioned Edmonton Transit bus alongside various graveyard paraphernalia and taken on tour across Alberta.”
Oct 16
Metal Detectorist Finds 15,000 Roman Coins, Sleeps in Car to Guard Them en.wikipedia.org · “Fearing they could be stolen, Moss slept with the hoard in his car for three days before taking it to experts.”
Oct 15
14 New Marine Species Described, Including 'Popcorn' Parasitic Isopod phys.org · “The genus name derives from Zea, reflecting this resemblance to popped kernels of popcorn.”
Oct 15
Nearest Technological Civilization Could Be 33,000 Light-Years Away en.wikipedia.org · “Such civilizations would need to last for at least 280,000 years to coincide in time with humanity.”
Oct 12
SpaceX Launches 90th Starlink Mission of 2025 spaceflightnow.com · “SpaceX launched its 90th Starlink mission of 2025 from Cape Canaveral.”
Oct 6
First Human Test of Enzyme That Converts Organs to Universal Blood Type sciencenews.org · “Scientists performed the first human test of an enzyme treatment that converts a donor kidney to a universal blood type.”
Oct 3

September 2025 18 posts

Synthetic Magnetic Fields Steer Light On a Chip For Faster Communications phys.org · “Researchers created synthetic magnetic fields within silicon photonic crystals that steer light with unprecedented precision at 140 gigabits per second.”
Sep 21
US Man Still Alive Six Months After Pig Kidney Transplant nature.com · “The longest a xenotransplant organ has survived in a living person. The FDA subsequently approved the first clinical trials.”
Sep 20
Cosmic Simulations That Once Needed Supercomputers Now Run on a Laptop sciencedaily.com · “Effort.jl delivers cosmological simulation results with the same accuracy as supercomputer runs in minutes on standard laptops.”
Sep 19
40,000-Year-Old Symbols Found in Caves Worldwide May Be the Earliest Written Language openculture.com · “32 consistent geometric symbols appearing across 52 European caves spanning 40,000 years.”
Sep 18
The Rise of Conspiracy Physics msn.com · “Conspiracy-minded content creators attacking mainstream theoretical physics, driven by resentment of scientific authority.”
Sep 15
DNA Cassette Tape Can Store Every Song Ever Recorded newscientist.com · “DNA tape can store 36 petabytes by printing synthetic DNA molecules onto plastic tape with crystal armor coating for centuries of preservation.”
Sep 12
Can Lab-Grown Coral Restore Reefs Damaged By Climate Change? cbsnews.com · “With 90-99% of remaining coral reefs projected to deteriorate by 2050, scientists are exploring lab-grown coral.”
Sep 11
Scientists Discuss Next Steps to Prevent Dangerous Mirror Life Research msn.com · “Synthetic biologists are raising alarms about ‘mirror life’ organisms with flipped molecular building blocks.”
Sep 10
China's Space Program Will Soon Equal That of the US arstechnica.com · “Research finds China has made significant progress across all fronts in space exploration.”
Sep 10
Interlune Signs $300M Deal to Harvest Helium-3 from the Moon msn.com · “Finnish quantum computing company Bluefors has purchased tens of thousands of liters of Helium-3 from the moon through Interlune.”
Sep 9
Astronomers Discover Previously Unknown Quasi-Moon Near Earth cnn.com · “A new quasi-moon named 2025 PN7, about 98 feet across, was discovered near Earth. It may be an ancient lunar fragment.”
Sep 9
Dark Oxygen: A Deep-Sea Discovery That Has Split Scientists phys.org · “A controversial discovery of oxygen production in the deep ocean through non-photosynthetic means.”
Sep 3
LHC 2025 First Collisions op-webtools.web.cern.ch · “Dashboard and information about the Large Hadron Collider’s 2025 first collisions run.”
Sep 2
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025 nobelprize.org · “Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs), porous materials with extremely high surface area used to speed up reactions and capture molecules.”
Sep 2
Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 nobelprize.org · “Work on macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling.”
Sep 2
New Quantum State of Matter Found at Interface of Exotic Materials phys.org · “Researchers discovered exotic states of matter at material interfaces, similar to how antiferromagnets were found in labs before being theorized in nature.”
Sep 1
NASA to Launch Space Observatory That Will Map 450M Galaxies nbcnews.com · “NASA’s SPHEREx observatory will scan each object approximately every 6 months during its 2-year mission to map the universe.”
Sep 1
Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 Shortlist rmg.co.uk · “Gorgeous astronomy photography shots with narratives about the photographers and their work.”
Sep 1

August 2025 6 posts

Two Texas Moms Were Forced to Wait for Urgent Care After Pregnancy Loss. They Died. longreads.com · “At the outset of Texas’ abortion ban, medical experts worried women like Porsha and Brenda would die from delays in care.”
Aug 26
Wildfire Fighters, Unmasked in Toxic Smoke, Are Getting Sick and Dying longreads.com · “Give them masks” — the repeated recommendation from Forest Service researchers that the agency rejected, despite CDC findings that crews were breathing carcinogens and harmful chemicals.
Aug 20
'Being Short is a Curse': Men Paying Thousands to Get Legs Lengthened theguardian.com · “At the end of the day, someone’s going to break your legs.”
Aug 17
ULA Launches First National Security Mission On Vulcan Centaur tech.slashdot.org · “This is a truly game-changing capability,” said Andrew Builta of L3Harris Technologies regarding the satellite’s software architecture that allows in-orbit reprogramming.
Aug 13
Unmasking the Sea Star Killer longreads.com · “When the team heated ground-up tissue and bodily fluids from sick stars to kill pathogens before injecting the mixture into healthy stars, none got sick.”
Aug 11
At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery quantamagazine.org · “We were all shocked, absolutely. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like that.”
Aug 1

July 2025 18 posts

Meet the Texans Who Love Their Snails texasmonthly.com · “No way am I going to murder this snail.”
Jul 31
India Safely Launches $1.5B NASA Satellite arstechnica.com · “NISAR will generate more data on a daily basis — 80 terabytes per day — than any other observation satellites that NASA or ISRO have operated.”
Jul 30
A Record-Breaking Baby Born from 30-Year-Old Embryo technologyreview.com · “By some estimates, there are currently as many as 1.5 million embryos frozen in the US.”
Jul 29
Why the Key to a Mathematical Life Is Collaboration quantamagazine.org · “If you’re frustrated or discouraged, then your collaborator might share some light and pull you out.”
Jul 28
Quantum Scientists Have Built a New Math of Cryptography quantamagazine.org · “If someone discovers an ingenious algorithm for rapidly solving the hardest NP problems, the bedrock will crumble, and the whole tower will collapse.”
Jul 25
"Dynamic Programming" Is Not Referring to "Computer Programming" vidarholen.net · “You wouldn’t pour three separate concrete foundations if you have three steps that need a foundation. You’d do it once so that it’s ready for anything that needs it.”
Jul 21
A New Way to Think About Schizophrenia newyorker.com · “Even one percent ends up being almost a million people in the world who should be treated with a different kind of medicine.”
Jul 21
China Jumps Ahead in Orbital Satellite Refueling arstechnica.com · “A game-changing technology.”
Jul 20
Congress Moves to Reject Bulk of White House's Proposed NASA Cuts arstechnica.com · “The White House proposed just $3.9 billion for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate for FY26, but the minibus allocates $7.25 billion, just a 1% drop from enacted 2025 levels.”
Jul 16
A New Geometry for Einstein's Theory of Relativity quantamagazine.org · “Your space-time could have corners, edges and folds, and it doesn’t matter. This approach doesn’t care about non-smoothness.”
Jul 16
Cloning Came to Polo. Then Things Got Truly Uncivilized. wired.com · “I appreciate your friendship more than anything.” “Me to thank you Alan. i feel safe with you.” He shouldn’t have.
Jul 15
The First Babies Born Following 'Simplified' IVF in a Mobile Lab technologyreview.com · “We just needed to figure out how to have everything in a very confined space.”
Jul 12
The Biggest-Ever Digital Camera Is This Cosmologist's Magnum Opus quantamagazine.org · “We don’t understand 95% of our universe. That’s sort of mind-boggling.”
Jul 11
Computer Scientists Figure Out How to Prove Lies quantamagazine.org · “I had the feeling that someone is pulling the carpet from under my feet.”
Jul 9
The Clones Are Here theatlantic.com · “Really and truly, a horse can be alive forever. Forever and ever.”
Jul 8
Why Do Killer Whales Keep Handing Us Fish? science.slashdot.org · “Orcas often share food with each other — it’s a prosocial activity. That they also share with humans may show their interest in relating to us as well.”
Jul 5
A New Interstellar Visitor Has Entered the Solar System science.slashdot.org · “It is traveling toward the inner solar system at around 152,000 mph.”
Jul 3
See Stunning First Images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory technologyreview.com · “This is the dawn of the Rubin Observatory.”
Jul 1

June 2025 20 posts

Nearly 20% of cancer drugs defective in 4 African nations dw.com · “In the study, barely a quarter of the substandard products were identified through visual inspection. Laboratory testing identified the rest.”
Jun 29
Defense Department will stop providing crucial satellite weather data npr.org · “A spokesperson for the U.S. Space Force, which is responsible for the satellites, said in a statement that the satellites and instruments are still functional, and the Department of Defense will continue to use them even as it cuts off access for scientists.”
Jun 28
BusyBeaver(6) is really quite large scottaaronson.blog · “So, between 5 and 6 is where the Busy Beaver function makes its leap, from the millions to beyond the bounds of observable reality.”
Jun 28
Webb finds evidence of a lightweight planet around TWA 7 esa.int · “If confirmed, this would represent Webb’s first direct image discovery of a planet, and the lightest planet ever seen with this technique.”
Jun 27
The effect of noise on sleep empirical.health · “Total sleep duration mirrors the stage-specific trends: nights under 55 dB hover around 6¼–6½ hours, but once noise breaches the upper-50s the average night shortens by nearly an hour”
Jun 27
The first non-opioid painkiller worksinprogress.news · “Journavx failed to outperform that opioid-acetaminophen combination in clinical trials.”
Jun 26
First methane-powered sea spiders found crawling on the ocean floor cnn.com · “Just like you would eat eggs for breakfast, the sea spider grazes the surface of its body, and it munches all those bacteria for nutrition,” said Shana Goffredi
Jun 21
Mathematicians Hunting Prime Numbers Discover Infinite New Pattern for Finding Them scientificamerican.com · “We’re actually nailing all the prime numbers on the nose,” Ono says.
Jun 19
Denmark’s Radical Archaeology Experiment Is Paying Off in Gold and Knowledge scientificamerican.com · “As of 2025, there’s a daunting backlog of more than 50,000 objects in a secret “secure facility” awaiting evaluation.”
Jun 18
Honda Conducts Successful Launch and Landing Test of Experimental Reusable Rocket global.honda · “Although Honda rocket research is still in the fundamental research phase, and no decisions have been made regarding commercialization of these rocket technologies, Honda will continue making progress in the fundamental research with a technology development goal of realizing technological capability to enable a suborbital launch by 2029.”
Jun 17
Clergy Blown Away by Psilocybin nautil.us · “Almost half said it was the most profound thing they had ever experienced, period.”
Jun 16
Childhood leukemia: how a deadly cancer became treatable ourworldindata.org · “Before the 1970s, fewer than 10% of children diagnosed with the disease survived five years after diagnosis. But since then, this outlook has improved dramatically.”
Jun 15
DARPA program sets distance record for power beaming darpa.mil · “The team recorded more than 800 watts of power delivered during a 30-second transmission from a laser 8.6 kilometers (5.3 miles) away.”
Jun 15
Clinical knowledge in LLMs does not translate to human interactions arxiv.org · “However, participants using the same LLMs identified relevant conditions in less than 34.5% of cases and disposition in less than 44.2%, both no better than the control group.”
Jun 14
Strange radio pulses detected coming from ice in Antarctica psu.edu · “It’s an interesting problem because we still don’t actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are, but what we do know is that they’re most likely not representing neutrinos,”
Jun 13
Administering immunotherapy in the morning seems to really, really matter. Why? owlposting.com · “A near 2x~ improvement in the most important metrics doing something that is entirely risk-free and cost-free.”
Jun 8
End of an Era: Landsat 7 Decommissioned After 25 Years of Earth Observation usgs.gov · “For 25 of those years, Landsat 7’s data helped farmers, land managers, city planners, and scientists, as well as communities around the world better understand and manage land, water, and other natural resources.”
Jun 5
Deep learning gets the glory, deep fact checking gets ignored rachel.fast.ai · “Of the 450 “novel” results given in the paper, 135 of these results were not novel at all; they were already listed in the online database UniProt.”
Jun 4
Wendelstein 7-X sets new fusion record heise.de · “The fact that we were able to raise the triple product to tokamak level with long plasma duration times marks another important milestone on the way to a stellarator suitable for power plants.”
Jun 3
Japanese Scientists Develop Artificial Blood Compatible With All Blood Types tokyoweekender.com · “As these artificial cells have no blood type, there is no need for compatibility testing.”
Jun 2

May 2025 15 posts

Street smarts: how a hawk learned to use traffic signals to hunt more successfully frontiersin.org · “That meant that the hawk understood the connection between the sound and the eventual car queue length.”
May 27
For Algorithms, a Little Memory Outweighs a Lot of Time quantamagazine.org · “I just thought I was losing my mind,” said Williams, a theoretical computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
May 21
I got fooled by AI-for-science hype—here's what it taught me understandingai.org · “We found that 60 out of the 76 papers (79 percent) that claimed to outperform a standard numerical method had used a weak baseline, either because they hadn’t compared to more advanced numerical methods, or because they weren’t comparing them on an equal footing.”
May 20
InventWood is about to mass-produce wood that's stronger than steel techcrunch.com · “The result is a material that has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better, the company said.”
May 18
Spaced Repetition Systems Have Gotten Way Better domenic.me · “It turns out it was developed by a college student in 1987 based on his personal experiments.”
May 18
Assuring an accurate research record economics.mit.edu · “While student privacy laws and MIT policy prohibit the disclosure of the outcome of this review, we are writing to inform you that MIT has no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper.”
May 16
NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix theregister.com · “NASA has revived a set of thrusters on the nearly 50-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft after declaring them inoperable over two decades ago.”
May 16
This baby boy was treated with the first personalized gene-editing drug technologyreview.com · “In KJ’s case, the treatment was programmed to correct a single letter of DNA in his cells.”
May 15
AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms deepmind.google · “This solution, now in production for over a year, continuously recovers, on average, 0.7% of Google’s worldwide compute resources.”
May 14
Title of Work Deciphered In Sealed Herculaneum Scroll Via Digital Unwrapping finebooksmagazine.com · “Finding the full title of a work inside a scroll that has been unread for two millennia is an astonishing achievement, and illustrates the huge potential for AI to transform arts and humanities scholarship, our understanding of the past, and breathes new life into ancient artefacts.”
May 11
ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC home.cern · “The ALICE analysis shows that, during Run 2 of the LHC (2015–2018), about 86 billion gold nuclei were created at the four major experiments.”
May 9
'Data manipulations' alleged in study that paved the way for Microsoft's quantum chip science.org · “In April 2021, Mourik sought answers from corresponding author Önder Gül, asking in an email: “Did you know about these undisclosed data manipulations prior to publication of the paper?” Gül responded, 1 day later: “Yes, I did.””
May 9
The Price of Remission propublica.org · “But Revlimid is also, I soon learned, extraordinarily expensive, costing nearly $1,000 for each daily pill. (Although, I later discovered, a capsule costs just 25 cents to make.)”
May 8
The US has approved CRISPR pigs for food technologyreview.com · “He says the company does not think pork chops or other meat will need to carry any label identifying it as bioengineered.”
May 3
Old Soviet Venus Descent Craft Nearing Earth Reentry: What Does New Imagery Suggest? leonarddavid.com · “As this is a lander that was designed to survive passage through the Venus atmosphere, it is possible that it will survive reentry through the Earth atmosphere intact, and impact intact,” reports Marco Langbroek of SatTrackCam Leiden, the Netherlands.
May 2

April 2025 7 posts

AI Helps Unravel a Cause of Alzheimer's Disease and Identify a Therapeutic Candidate today.ucsd.edu · “It really demanded modern AI to formulate the three-dimensional structure very precisely to make this discovery.”
Apr 27
World's First Successful Lightning Triggering and Guiding Using a Drone group.ntt · “However, the drone equipped with the protective cage continued to fly stably even after the lightning strike.”
Apr 23
A weird phrase is plaguing scientific papers – and we traced it back to a glitch in AI training data theconversation.com · “The digitising process erroneously combined ‘vegetative’ from one column of text with ’electron’ from another.”
Apr 22
Scientists hijacked the human eye to get it to see a brand-new color. It's called 'olo.' livescience.com · “With this technique, the researchers enabled five people to see a new color, dubbed “olo,” which the study participants described as a “blue-green of unprecedented saturation.””
Apr 20
Sweetener saccharin shows surprise power against antibiotic resistance brunel.ac.uk · “Saccharin breaks the walls of bacterial pathogens, causing them to distort and eventually burst, killing the bacteria.”
Apr 5
Sports supplement creatine makes no difference to muscle gains, trial finds unsw.edu.au · “The people taking the creatine supplement saw changes before they even started exercising, which leads us to believe that it wasn’t actual real muscle growth, but potentially fluid retention.”
Apr 2
AI misses illnesses in black people and women, analysis of chest x-rays reveals gigazine.net · “The researchers found that in half of cases, conditions such as cardiac hypertrophy were not detected when patients were black women.”
Apr 1

March 2025 10 posts

McMaster researchers discover new class of antibiotics news.mcmaster.ca · “Nearly three decades after the last time a new class of antibiotics reached the market, McMaster researchers have made a breakthrough discovery that could hold the key to addressing antimicrobial resistance.”
Mar 31
Inaugural Isar Aerospace Spectrum Flight Ends in Failure europeanspaceflight.com · “Our first test flight met all our expectations, achieving a great success,” said Metzler.
Mar 30
The Great Hobby Lobby Artifact Heist meghanboilard.substack.com · “Over the course of 40 months, Hobby Lobby acquired over 40,000 artifacts in an unprecedented buying blitz.”
Mar 23
Fully AI driven weather prediction system could start revolution in forecasting cam.ac.uk · “Aardvark is thousands of times faster than all previous weather forecasting methods.”
Mar 23
Stem cell therapy trial reverses "irreversible" damage to cornea newatlas.com · “By the 12-month mark, that number had increased to 11 (79%) patients.”
Mar 9
Andrew Barto Named Co-recipient of 'Nobel Prize of Computing' for Foundational Work on AI Technology cics.umass.edu · “It carries a $1 million prize, for which Google Inc. provides the financial support, and is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the foundations of computing more than 70 years ago.”
Mar 5
NASA Successfully Acquires GPS Signals on Moon nasa.gov · “Then, at 2 a.m. EST on March 3, it was official: LuGRE acquired and tracked signals on the lunar surface for the first time ever and achieved a navigation fix — approximately 225,000 miles away from Earth.”
Mar 5
Tattoos may be linked to an increased risk of cancer sciencedaily.com · “For lymphoma, the rate is nearly three times higher for the group of individuals with large tattoos compared to those without tattoos.”
Mar 4
James Harrison, whose blood donations saved over 2 million babies, has died npr.org · “Harrison donated blood and plasma a whopping 1,173 times, according to Lifeblood, every two weeks between 1954 and 2018.”
Mar 3
Firefly Lands on the Moon spacepolicyonline.com · “Powered only by solar cells, not radioisotope power sources, these small, comparatively inexpensive lunar landers are not expected to survive the lunar night.”
Mar 2

February 2025 13 posts

Google Co-Scientist AI cracks superbug problem in two days! — because it had been fed the team's previous paper with the answer in it pivot-to-ai.com · “It turns out Co-Scientist had been fed a 2023 paper by Penadés’ team that included a version of the hypothesis. The BBC coverage failed to mention this bit.”
Feb 24
How Decades Of Research Misconduct Stalled An Alzheimer's Cure sciencefriday.com · “The drug offers so modest a benefit that doctors and patients might not perceive any effect whatsoever.”
Feb 23
Texas Banned Abortion. Then Sepsis Rates Soared. propublica.org · “The rate of sepsis shot up more than 50% for women hospitalized when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester, ProPublica found.”
Feb 20
FAQ on Microsoft's topological qubit thing scottaaronson.blog · “Yep. Certainly that history is making some experts cautious about the new claim.”
Feb 20
Nuclear fusion: WEST beats the world record for plasma duration! cea.fr · “This was a 25% improvement on the previous record time achieved with EAST, in China, a few weeks previously.”
Feb 18
Among world's top researchers 10% publish at unrealistic levels, analysis finds chemistryworld.com · “Many are producing hundreds of papers each year and gaining hundreds to thousands of new collaborators annually, according to recent analysis by researchers at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia.”
Feb 18
Cancer-free for 18 years: CAR-T therapy sets new milestone in neuroblastoma treatment news-medical.net · “The patient who achieved more than 18 years of complete remission after the infusion never required any other cancer treatment.”
Feb 17
Dust from Car Brakes More Harmful than Exhaust, Study Finds e360.yale.edu · “Surprisingly, newer brake pads proved more harmful than older ones, which were made with asbestos.”
Feb 15
Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture quantamagazine.org · “You didn’t just come up with a cool hash table,” he remembers telling Krapivin. “You’ve actually completely wiped out a 40-year-old conjecture!”
Feb 10
Supersizing vehicles offers minimal safety benefits — but substantial dangers iihs.org · “For vehicles that weigh more than the fleet average, there’s hardly any decrease in risk for occupants associated with additional poundage.”
Feb 8
High levels of microplastics found in human brains thenewlede.org · “The median concentration in brain samples collected from people who died in 2024 was nearly 5,000 micrograms of plastic per gram of brain tissue, tallying almost 0.5% by weight.”
Feb 6
The government had been planning it for 7 years, beavers built the dam in two days and saved them $1 million voxnews.al · “The beavers saved us 30 million Czech crowns. They built the dams without any project documentation and for free…”
Feb 4
Tiny vanes glued to planes promise big savings for US Air Force newatlas.com · “Literally gluing a few microvanes to the rear fuselage of a C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane can result in fuel savings in the tens of millions of dollars.”
Feb 2

January 2025 7 posts

ESA actively monitoring near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4 esa.int · “As of 29 January 2025, ESA estimates that the probability that asteroid 2024 YR4 may impact Earth on 22 December 2032 is 1.2%.”
Jan 29
Kansas' tuberculosis outbreak is one of the largest in the U.S. since the 1950s kcur.org · “We do expect to find more, but we’re hoping the ‘more’ that we find is latent TB and not active.”
Jan 27
Astronomers just deleted an asteroid because it turned out to be Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster astronomy.com · “This incident, along with previous NEOCP postings of the WMAP spacecraft, highlights the deplorable state of availability of positional information on distant artificial objects.”
Jan 26
More Than 40% of Postdocs Don't Stay in Academia insidehighered.com · “The study found that 41 percent of postdocs end up leaving academia, at least in part because there aren’t enough faculty positions for them.”
Jan 23
Flights delayed by SpaceX's falling rocket debris techcrunch.com · “SpaceX chose the southern Indian Ocean as its reentry zone because of its remote location. But the location is very relevant to Qantas: It falls within its route from Sydney to Johannesburg.”
Jan 15
World's darkest and clearest skies at risk from industrial megaproject eso.org · “The proximity of the AES Andes industrial megaproject to Paranal poses a critical risk to the most pristine night skies on the planet,” highlighted ESO Director General, Xavier Barcons.
Jan 11
One of my papers got declined today mathstodon.xyz · “Rejection is actually a relatively common occurrence for me, happening once or twice a year on average.”
Jan 1

2024 127 posts

December 2024 12 posts

Thinking Slowly: The Paradoxical Slowness of Human Behavior caltech.edu · “Caltech researchers have quantified the speed of human thought: a rate of 10 bits per second.”
Dec 30
Why Are Cancer Guidelines Stuck in PDFs? seangeiger.substack.com · “The guidelines represent hundreds of thousands of hours of expert oncologists’ time. But the end result is a dense and hard to navigate PDF.”
Dec 23
First baby conceived via breakthrough fertility tech born newatlas.com · “Gameto says the Fertilo procedure avoids 80% of the hormone injections that traditional IVF requires and reduces the duration of a treatment cycle to three days.”
Dec 19
Dwingeloo telescope receives signals from Voyager 1 camras.nl · “Only a few telescopes in the world have received these signals, which are very faint due to the distance of Voyager 1: almost 25 billion kilometers, more than four times the distance to Pluto.”
Dec 17
Scientists sheds light on how our brains create mental "chapters" with new event segmentation study psypost.org · “The major new finding in this study is that these chapters don’t just come from the way the story is written.”
Dec 15
School smartphone ban results in better sleep and improved mood york.ac.uk · “On average, they were falling asleep 20 minutes faster than before the ban, and reported getting a full hour of extra rest each night.”
Dec 14
What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know. quantamagazine.org · “Entropy depends not on the difference between the gases, but on their distinguishability.”
Dec 14
Fermat's Last Theorem: how it's going xenaproject.wordpress.com · “This story really highlights, to me, the poor job which humans do of documenting modern mathematics.”
Dec 12
The Google Willow thing scottaaronson.blog · “We’re now deeply into the unverifiable regime that I warned about.”
Dec 10
"Eat What You Kill" propublica.org · “Then you’re going to pay me more, because I’m doing more work.”
Dec 7
Researchers Use AI To Turn Sound Recordings Into Accurate Street Images news.utexas.edu · “Our study found that acoustic environments contain enough visual cues to generate highly recognizable streetscape images that accurately depict different places.”
Dec 1
The World's Rarest Mineral Is So Rare It's Only Ever Been Found Once sciencealert.com · “There’s a mineral so rare that only one specimen of it has ever been found in the entire world.”
Dec 1

November 2024 12 posts

Check Out the Highest-Resolution Images Ever Captured of the Sun's Entire Surface smithsonianmag.com · “Each image is actually a mosaic of 25 high-resolution shots snapped by the Solar Orbiter mission on March 22, 2023.”
Nov 23
Weight-loss drug found to shrink heart muscle in mice, human cells ualberta.ca · “up to 40 per cent of the weight lost by people using weight-loss drugs is actually muscle.”
Nov 20
I'm a neuroscientist who taught rats to drive: their joy suggests how anticipating fun can enrich human life theconversation.com · “Bringing Pavlovian conditioning into the mix, rats had to wait 15 minutes after a Lego block was placed in their cage before they received a Froot Loop.”
Nov 19
AlphaProof's Greatest Hits rishimehta.xyz · “Finding these mathematical ideas is hard enough, and having to prove them in Lean makes things even harder.”
Nov 17
Astronomers discover two galaxies aligned in a way where their gravity acts as a compound lens phys.org · “A compound lens, as its name suggests, is made up of two lenses.”
Nov 16
Bypassing regulatory locks, Faraday cages and upgrading your hearing lagrangepoint.substack.com · “To build our initial version of the cage, we lined and wrapped a cardboard box with Aluminium foil.”
Nov 12
Voyager 1 Breaks Its Silence With NASA via a Radio Transmitter Not Used Since 1981 smithsonianmag.com · “it takes almost 23 hours for a command to reach the craft and another 23 hours for its response to reach scientists.”
Nov 11
New Elliptic Curve Breaks 18-Year-Old Record quantamagazine.org · “Mathematicians need at least 29 independent points to characterize them.”
Nov 11
Somebody moved UK's oldest satellite, and no-one knows who or why bbc.co.uk · “Someone moved the UK’s oldest satellite and there appears to be no record of exactly who, when or why.”
Nov 9
Memories are not only in the brain, human cell study finds medicalxpress.com · “It shows that the ability to learn from spaced repetition isn’t unique to brain cells”
Nov 9
FDA Proposes Ending Use of Oral Phenylephrine as OTC Monograph Nasal Decongestant Active Ingredient After Extensive Review fda.gov · “after an agency review of the available data determined that oral phenylephrine is not effective for this use.”
Nov 8
131M American Buildings tech.marksblogg.com · “Compared to anything I’ve seen from Microsoft and Google, this dataset appears to have much more accurate building footprints to the point I initially thought they were manually surveyed.”
Nov 2

October 2024 9 posts

China's first space tourism venture sells first pair of tickets theregister.com · “The two ticket holders will pay an initial ¥50,000 ($7,000) deposit.”
Oct 29
Unlocking Arkansas' Hidden Treasure: USGS Uses Machine Learning to Show Large Lithium Potential in the Smackover Formation usgs.gov · “It is important to caution that these estimates are an in-place assessment. We have not estimated what is technically recoverable based on newer methods to extract lithium from brines”
Oct 22
US startup charging couples to ‘screen embryos for IQ’ theguardian.com · “The recordings show the company marketing its services at up to $50,000 (£38,000) for clients seeking to test 100 embryos, and claiming to have helped some parents select future children based on genetic predictions of intelligence.”
Oct 21
Egypt declared malaria-free after 100-year effort bbc.com · “Certification is granted when a country proves that the transmission chain is interrupted for at least the previous three consecutive years.”
Oct 21
Untangling biological threads from autism’s phenotypic patchwork reveals four core subtypes thetransmitter.org · “Each group is associated with specific genetic variants that influence gene expression at different stages of development, the investigation revealed.”
Oct 19
NASA Freezes Starliner Missions After Boeing Leaves Astronauts Stranded gizmodo.com · ““The timing and configuration of Starliner’s next flight will be determined once a better understanding of Boeing’s path to system certification is established,” NASA wrote in its update.”
Oct 17
The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms vox.com · “In the case of emergency care, “private equity doesn’t pay the hospital rent, they don’t hire the nurses, they don’t pay the electric bills, they don’t provide any of the equipment,” says Robert McNamara, chair of the emergency medicine department at Temple University in Philadelphia.”
Oct 5
The bunkbed conjecture is false igorpak.wordpress.com · “Why look for a counterexample if the conjecture is so obviously true? Well, because you always should.”
Oct 2
ESO telescope captures the most detailed infrared map ever of our Milky Way eso.org · “At 500 terabytes of data, this is the largest observational project ever carried out with an ESO telescope.”
Oct 1

September 2024 12 posts

London saw a surprising benefit to fining high-polluting cars: More active kids grist.org · “a year after the ultra-low emissions zone took effect, 2 out of every 5 London students in the study had switched from “passive” to “active” ways of getting to school.”
Sep 22
"Golden Lettuce" genetically engineered to pack 30 times more vitamins newatlas.com · “The levels of beta-carotene in the Golden Lettuce leaves were up to 30 times higher than those of regular lettuce.”
Sep 17
Apple Watch sleep apnea detection gets FDA approval techcrunch.com · “Once enabled, it requires 10 nights of sleep tracking data spread out over a 30-day span to determine whether a user may have the condition.”
Sep 16
'The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out': Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman theconversation.com · “In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don’t stack up.”
Sep 14
FDA Authorizes First Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Software fda.gov · “The HAF was evaluated in a clinical study with 118 subjects with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss, at multiple U.S. sites.”
Sep 12
NASA Pulls Off Delicate Thruster Swap, Keeping Voyager 1 Mission Alive gizmodo.com · “The opening of the trajectory correction thruster tube was originally 0.01 inches (0.25 millimeters) in diameter, and now it’s been reduced to 0.0015 inches (0.035 mm), or about half the width of a human hair, according to NASA.”
Sep 12
Amazing engineering: How to stretch a cruise ship newatlas.com · “For an average of around $80 million, and just a couple of months out of service, operators can chop an existing ship down the middle, slide in a new slice that’s designed to fit perfectly, weld it together, and come away with enough extra premium cabins to pay off the whole operation within a few years.”
Sep 8
Researchers discover a surprising way to jump-start battery performance eurekalert.org · “Experiments confirmed that charging at high currents has a huge impact, increasing the lifespan of the average test battery by 50%.”
Sep 8
Inside the Tense Decision Between NASA and Boeing to Send Starliner Home Alone inverse.com · “But within a day of launching, Starliner leaked helium and five of its thrusters failed off.”
Sep 5
AlphaProteo generates novel proteins for biology and health research deepmind.google · “However, we know that our AI system has limitations, as it was unable to design successful binders against an 8th target, TNFɑ, a protein associated with autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis.”
Sep 5
Common food dye found to make skin and muscle temporarily transparent theguardian.com · “The procedure has not yet been tested on humans and researchers will need to show it is safe to use, particularly if the dye is injected beneath the skin.”
Sep 5
The Hidden Engineering of Landfills practical.engineering · “Actually, leachate management is one of the biggest costs of running a facility like this.”
Sep 3

August 2024 10 posts

UK researchers find Alzheimer's-like brain changes in long COVID patients uknow.uky.edu · “According to Jiang, "the slowing and abnormality of intrinsic brain activity in COVID-19 patients resemble those seen in Alzheimer’s and related dementias."”
Aug 30
Finding a therapist who takes your insurance can be nearly impossible. Here's why npr.org · “The way to look at mental health care from an insurance perspective is: I don’t want to attract those people. I am never going to make money on them.”
Aug 25
NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth Without Crew nasa.gov · “Wilmore and Williams will continue their work formally as part of the Expedition 71/72 crew through February 2025. They will fly home aboard a Dragon spacecraft with two other crew members assigned to the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission.”
Aug 24
Unbundling Profile: MIT Libraries sparcopen.org · “Since the cancellation, MIT Libraries estimates annual savings at more than 80% of its original spend. This move saves MIT approximately $2 million each year.”
Aug 20
The brain simulates actions and their consequences during REM sleep biorxiv.org · “Strikingly, these motor commands, despite not being executed, shift the internal representation of direction as if the animal had turned.”
Aug 18
NASA and Rocket Lab aim to prove we can go to Mars for 1/10 the price techcrunch.com · “Instead of spending $550 million on a mission into deep space, NASA set a goal to spend just one-tenth of that and gave each SIMPLEx mission a $55 million price cap, excluding launch.”
Aug 16
NASA Investigation Finds Boeing Hindering Americans' Return to Moon flyingmag.com · “Yet the space agency has neglected to punish Boeing financially for these flaws, arguing that doing so would run contrary to the terms of its contract.”
Aug 12
Caltech Team Develops First Noninvasive Method to Continually Measure True Blood Pressure caltech.edu · “Our method broadens access to hospital-grade monitoring of blood pressure and cardiac health metrics.”
Aug 10
How Base 3 Computing Beats Binary quantamagazine.org · “It turns out that ternary is the most economical of all possible integer bases for representing big numbers.”
Aug 9
Boeing takes another $125M hit thanks to Starliner theregister.com · “The losses incurred by Boeing thanks to Starliner have comfortably breezed past $1 billion, and will likely surpass $1.6 billion before long.”
Aug 3

July 2024 10 posts

AI achieves silver-medal standard solving International Mathematical Olympiad problems deepmind.google · “Our systems solved one problem within minutes and took up to three days to solve the others.”
Jul 25
Scientists Discover a New Hormone that Can Build Strong Bones ucsf.edu · “In some female mice who lacked all estrogen or were very old, CCN3 was able to more than double bone mass.”
Jul 22
Want to spot a deepfake? Look for the stars in their eyes ras.ac.uk · “It’s important to note that this is not a silver bullet for detecting fake images”
Jul 18
New HIV Prevention Drug Shows 100% Efficacy in Clinical Trial sciencealert.com · “During the randomised phase of the trial none of the 2,134 women who received lenacapavir contracted HIV.”
Jul 11
Scientists Discover a Cause of Lupus and a Possible Way to Reverse It news.feinberg.northwestern.edu · “Up until this point, all therapy for lupus is a blunt instrument. It’s broad immunosuppression,”
Jul 10
Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket powers into space esa.int · “With this first successful launch by Ariane 6, Europe has finally recovered its capacity to access space.”
Jul 10
UChicago Prof. Shirley Meng's Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion creates world's first anode-free sodium solid-state battery: a breakthrough in inexpensive, clean, fast-charging batteries pme.uchicago.edu · “The lithium commonly used for batteries isn’t that common. It makes up about 20 parts per million of the Earth’s crust, compared to sodium, which makes up 20,000 parts per million.”
Jul 6
With Fifth Busy Beaver, Researchers Approach Computation's Limits quantamagazine.org · “They’ve finally verified the true value of a number called BB(5), which quantifies just how busy that fifth beaver is.”
Jul 2
Ants can carry out life-saving amputations on injured nest mates, study shows theguardian.com · “The results revealed that 13 of 17 ants with injuries on their femur or thigh underwent amputation by their nest mates, with their limb severed at the trochanter”
Jul 2
Why Bridges Don't Sink practical.engineering · “In 2004, a bridge pier on the Lee Roy Selmon Expressway in Tampa, Florida sank 11 feet (more than 3 meters) while it was still under construction because of the complicated geology.”
Jul 2

June 2024 12 posts

SpaceX is building a NASA craft to intentionally destroy the International Space Station after retiring cnbc.com · “The National Aeronautics and Space Administration awarded an $843 million contract to SpaceX to build the so-called "U.S. Deorbit Vehicle."”
Jun 27
Singapore doubles down on lab-grown meat as Silicon Valley backs off restofworld.org · “The industry raised just $226 million last year, a steep fall from $922 million in 2022.”
Jun 23
Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary arxiv.org · “This excess word analysis suggests that at least 13.5% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs.”
Jun 22
Astronomers see a massive black hole awaken in real time eso.org · “In late 2019 the previously unremarkable galaxy SDSS1335+0728 suddenly started shining brighter than ever before.”
Jun 19
Nature retracts highly cited 2002 paper that claimed adult stem cells could become any type of cell retractionwatch.com · “Still, it has been cited nearly 4,500 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science – making it by far the most-cited retracted paper ever.”
Jun 18
Fungus breaks down ocean plastic nioz.nl · “In the laboratory, Vaksmaa and her team observed that the breakdown of PE by P. album occurs at a rate of about 0.05 per cent per day.”
Jun 14
Ultrasonic investigations in shopping centres windytan.com · “It’s probably just a misconfiguration that was never fixed because the people working on it couldn’t experientially confirm any issue with it.”
Jun 9
Disaster narrowly avoided as plane clears Bristol Airport runway with just seconds to spare independent.co.uk · “Boeing told investigators looking into the incident that they were aware of a “long history of nuisance disconnects during takeoff mode engagements”.”
Jun 8
South Pole Water Infrastructure brr.fyi · “There are millions of gallons of raw, untreated wastewater stored in outfalls beneath South Pole Station.”
Jun 8
Boeing's Starliner makes it into orbit at long last theregister.com · “The first non-crewed launch of the spacecraft ended with the capsule being unable to reach the ISS and a near catastrophe during rocket separation.”
Jun 6
Internal messages show how the new head of one of the world’s oldest universities organized a citation cartel english.elpais.com · “Collect everything you have (master’s thesis, final projects, dissertations, etc.) and include in them 20 references from among those that I have attached in the Word document as well as 10 articles from ADCAIJ.”
Jun 2
Getting to grips with an extra thumb cam.ac.uk · “98% of participants were able to successfully manipulate objects using the Third Thumb during the first minute of use, with only 13 participants unable to perform the task.”
Jun 2

May 2024 16 posts

Starlink's disruption of the space industry thespacereview.com · “That would be a big step, to have more than zero in the ‘not bankrupt’ category”
May 30
How the Guinness Brewery Invented the Most Important Statistical Method in Science scientificamerican.com · “The self-taught statistician published his t-test under the pseudonym “Student” because Guinness didn’t want to tip off competitors to its research.”
May 26
Bionic Eye Gets a New Lease on Life spectrum.ieee.org · “Pixium ran out of money last November before the final results of a larger, multiyear pivotal trial in Europe.”
May 24
Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe propublica.org · “Hansen’s bosses never told her that PFOS was toxic.”
May 20
The Lunacy of Artemis idlewords.com · “Each SLS booster is now projected to cost $266 million, or about twice the launch cost of a Falcon Heavy.”
May 19
Seven Dyson Sphere Candidates centauri-dreams.org · “What’s interesting here is that all seven of these are M-class stars, and as the authors note, M-dwarf debris disks are quite rare, with only a few confirmed.”
May 18
Frozen Human Brain Tissue Was Successfully Revived For The First Time bgr.com · “They found that the thawed organoids closely resembled their unfrozen counterparts’ appearance, growth, and function, even after being frozen in MEDY for 18 months.”
May 18
Computer Scientists Invent an Efficient New Way to Count quantamagazine.org · “The new algorithm is astonishingly simple and easy to implement”
May 16
New gel breaks down alcohol in the body ethz.ch · “Thirty minutes after the single dose of alcohol, the prophylactic application of the gel reduced the alcohol level in the mice by 40 percent.”
May 14
Why the CORDIC algorithm lives rent-free in my head github.com · “CORDIC is an algorithm for computing trig functions like sin, cos, tan etc on low powered hardware, without an FPU (i.e. no floating point) or expensive lookup tables.”
May 11
CME impact imminent, Two more earth-directed CMEs spaceweatherlive.com · “That means there are now six, yes six, coronal mass ejections that have a good chance to pass our planet in the days ahead.”
May 10
Deaf girl is cured in world first gene therapy trial independent.co.uk · “Some 24 weeks after surgery, in February this year, tests in Cambridge showed Opal could also hear soft sounds such as a whisper.”
May 9
AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules blog.google · “For the interactions of proteins with other molecule types we see at least a 50% improvement compared with existing prediction methods, and for some important categories of interaction we have doubled prediction accuracy.”
May 8
Multi-Drug Resistant Bacteria Found on ISS Mutating to Become Functionally Distinct nasa.gov · “The strains were able to viably persist in the ISS over time with a significant abundance.”
May 5
Does the American Diabetes Association work for patients or companies? A lawsuit dared to ask theguardian.com · “By settling, the ADA manages to avoid the discovery process, and the potentially embarrassing revelations that might have come with it.”
May 4
Vera Rubin's Primary Mirror Gets its First Reflective Coating universetoday.com · “Next came an incredibly thin layer of silver weighing only 64 grams spread over the 8.4-meter mirror.”
May 4

April 2024 10 posts

Atomic Nucleus Excited with Laser: A Breakthrough after Decades tuwien.at · “Knowing the energy of this transition to within one electron volt is of little use, if you have to hit the right energy with a precision of one millionth of an electron volt in order to detect the transition.”
Apr 29
Cost of developing new drugs may be far lower than industry claims, trial reveals theguardian.com · “The extortionate cost of trials is used to justify high prices of new medicines, but companies do not publish either the topline or a breakdown of their spending.”
Apr 25
Two lifeforms merge in once-in-a-billion-years evolutionary event newatlas.com · “They found that the isolated bacterium can only produce about half of the proteins it needs, relying on the algal host to provide the rest.”
Apr 20
Nestlé adds sugar to infant milk sold in poorer countries, report finds theguardian.com · “Biscuit-flavoured cereals for babies aged six months and older contained 6g of added sugar for every serving in Senegal and South Africa, researchers found. The same product sold in Switzerland has none.”
Apr 19
A single atom layer of gold – LiU researchers create goldene liu.se · “By chance, Lars Hultman found a method that has been used in Japanese forging art for over a hundred years.”
Apr 18
NASA confirms Dragonfly mission to Titan theregister.com · “The total lifecycle cost of the mission is currently $3.35 billion, approximately double the proposed cost.”
Apr 18
50 Years Later, This Apollo-Era Antenna Still Talks to Voyager 2 spectrum.ieee.org · “Today more than 40 percent of all data retrieved by celestial explorers, including Voyagers, New Horizons, and the Mars Curiosity rover, comes through DSS-43.”
Apr 18
A quick post on Chen’s algorithm blog.cryptographyengineering.com · “If Chen’s result can be improved upon, then quantum algorithms could render obsolete an entire generation of “post-quantum” lattice-based schemes, forcing cryptographers and industry back to the drawing board.”
Apr 16
NIST Researchers Use Cellphone Compass to Measure Tiny Concentrations of Compounds Important for Human Health nist.gov · “As the hydrogels enlarged or shrunk, they moved the magnetic particles closer to or farther from the cellphone’s magnetometer, which detected the corresponding changes in the strength of the magnetic field.”
Apr 6
New Seafloor Map Only 25% Done, with 6 Years to Go eos.org · “The grid shows that 24.9% has been mapped to the Seabed 2030 resolution, leaving about 75% to be done over the next 6 years if the project’s goal is to be met.”
Apr 3

March 2024 7 posts

Why don't humans have tails? Scientists find answers in an unlikely place cnn.com · “It must have been something that thousands of other geneticists looked at”
Mar 24
Say Hello to Biodegradable Microplastics today.ucsd.edu · “We had plenty of data to suggest that our material was disappearing in the compost, but this is the first time we’ve measured it at the microparticle level.”
Mar 21
Mars Has an Unexpected Influence on Earth's Oceans and Climate, Repeating Every 2.4 Million Years, Study Finds smithsonianmag.com · “There is only one way to explain them: They are linked to cycles in the interactions of Mars and Earth orbiting the sun.”
Mar 17
Webb & Hubble confirm Universe's expansion rate esa.int · “With measurement errors negated, what remains is the real and exciting possibility that we have misunderstood the Universe”
Mar 11
Tests show high-temperature superconducting magnets are ready for fusion news.mit.edu · “overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40 in one day”
Mar 8
PFAS 'forever chemicals' to officially be removed from food packaging, FDA says livescience.com · “The FDA’s announcement marks the completion of a voluntary phase-out of the materials by U.S. food packaging manufacturers.”
Mar 7
Mathematicians prove Pólya's conjecture for the eigenvalues of a disk, a 70-year-old math problem phys.org · “the researchers show that Pólya’s conjecture is true for the disk, a case considered particularly challenging.”
Mar 2

February 2024 8 posts

The mathematically perfect exoplanet system: a great place to search for alien tech space.com · “The search ultimately did not detect a technological signal”
Feb 28
FDA Approves First Medication to Help Reduce Allergic Reactions to Multiple Foods After Accidental Exposure fda.gov · “Of note, however, 17% of subjects receiving Xolair had no significant change in the amount of peanut protein tolerated (could not tolerate 100 mg or more of peanut protein).”
Feb 26
Generating Medical Errors: GenAI and Erroneous Medical References hai.stanford.edu · “Four out of five models hallucinate a significant proportion of sources by producing invalid URLs.”
Feb 24
Varda Space, Rocket Lab nail first-of-its-kind spacecraft landing in Utah techcrunch.com · “The U.S. Air Force, which operates the reentry site, also denied Varda’s application to land there.”
Feb 23
Stone age wall found at bottom of Baltic Sea 'may be Europe's oldest megastructure' theguardian.com · “Closer inspection of the structure, named the Blinkerwall, revealed about 1,400 smaller stones that appear to have been positioned to connect nearly 300 larger boulders, many of which were too heavy for groups of humans to have moved.”
Feb 12
No data? No problem! Undisclosed tinkering in Excel behind economics paper retractionwatch.com · “New Zealand’s data had been copied from the Netherlands, for example, and the United States’ data from the United Kingdom.”
Feb 11
Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll! scrollprize.org · “as too in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant.”
Feb 5
FDA says 561 deaths tied to recalled Philips sleep apnea machines cbsnews.com · “The FDA said that since April 2021 it has received more than 116,000 medical device reports of foam breaking down in Philips CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machines and BiPAP sleep therapy devices.”
Feb 2

January 2024 9 posts

Starlink's Laser System Is Beaming 42 Million GB of Data Per Day pcmag.com · “SpaceX’s laser system for Starlink is delivering over 42 petabytes of data for customers per day, an engineer revealed today.”
Jan 31
Researchers Approach New Speed Limit for Seminal Problem quantamagazine.org · “It represents the first [major] improvement to ILP solvers in nearly 40 years.”
Jan 30
Scientists document first-ever transmitted Alzheimer's cases, tied to no-longer-used medical procedure statnews.com · “There was something odd about these Alzheimer’s cases.”
Jan 29
After Three Years on Mars, NASA's Ingenuity Helicopter Mission Ends nasa.gov · “The Perseverance rover is currently too far away to attempt to image the helicopter at its final airfield.”
Jan 25
NASA regains contact with mini-helicopter on Mars phys.org · “NASA has lost contact with the helicopter before, including for an agonizing two months last year.”
Jan 21
AlphaGeometry: An Olympiad-level AI system for geometry deepmind.google · “In a benchmarking test of 30 Olympiad geometry problems, AlphaGeometry solved 25 within the standard Olympiad time limit.”
Jan 17
What does the Cerebellum Do Anyway? sarahconstantin.substack.com · “Clearly, the cerebellum does something to control movement, and movement is impaired when it is damaged.”
Jan 7
Possible Meissner effect near room temperature in copper-substituted lead apatite arxiv.org · “Our experiment suggests at room temperature the Meissner effect is possibly present in this material.”
Jan 3
Ants Recognise Infected Wounds and Treat Them uni-wuerzburg.de · “Its secretion contains 112 components, half of which have an antimicrobial or wound-healing effect.”
Jan 3

2023 138 posts

December 2023 11 posts

Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works even better than thought freethink.com · “They’ve now announced that people who received both therapies were 49% less likely to experience recurrence or death a median of three years after treatment compared to people in the Keytruda-only group.”
Dec 26
Post-apocalyptic life in American health care metarationality.com · “The short version is that at least seven experts spent roughly ten full-time days trying to find out a basic fact about my mother’s insurance, and finally failed.”
Dec 25
U.S. medical schools aren't teaching future doctors about 7.4 million of their patients statnews.com · “As of 2023, only 15% of U.S. medical schools have taken advantage of these grants.”
Dec 24
How Two Pharmacists Figured Out That Decongestants Don't Work scientificamerican.com · “We were confident at that point that oral phenylephrine did not work.”
Dec 21
This weed killer is banned in 58 countries. U.S. workers say it's giving them Parkinson's latimes.com · “Despite Marks’ concerns, Syngenta publicized her original findings at an annual meeting of the Society of Neuroscience in 2004, Botham testified.”
Dec 21
New Mind-Reading "BrainGPT" Turns Thoughts Into Text On Screen iflscience.com · “Accuracy measurements using the BLEU algorithm – a way to evaluate the similarity of an original text to a machine-translated output by giving it a score between 0 and 1 – put the new tech at about 0.4.”
Dec 17
NASA working to solve Voyager 1 computer glitch from billions of miles away cnn.com · “As both Voyager probes experience new trials, mission team members have only the original manuals written decades ago to consult”
Dec 14
FunSearch: Making new discoveries in mathematical sciences using Large Language Models deepmind.google · “FunSearch works by pairing a pre-trained LLM, whose goal is to provide creative solutions in the form of computer code, with an automated "evaluator", which guards against hallucinations and incorrect ideas.”
Dec 14
Australia makes world-first decision to ban engineered stone following surge in silicosis cases abc.net.au · “The report found there was no safe level of silica, concluding: "The use of all engineered stone should be prohibited."”
Dec 13
Cicadas Are So Loud, Fiber Optic Cables Can 'Hear' Them wired.com · “Every 1 meter of fiber, more or less, we can turn it into a kind of microphone,” says Ozharar.
Dec 2
Singing to babies is vital to help them learn language, say scientists theguardian.com · “We believe that speech rhythm information is the hidden glue underpinning the development of a well-functioning language system.”
Dec 2

November 2023 16 posts

My $500M Mars Rover Mistake: A Failure Story chrislewicki.com · “I may have just created a $500M piece of scrap.”
Nov 28
FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine agrees Loyal's data supports reasonable expectation of effectiveness for large dog lifespan extension loyal.com · “Once we satisfactorily complete safety and manufacturing sections and other requirements, vets will be able to prescribe LOY-001 to extend the lifespan of large dogs while we complete the confirmatory pivotal lifespan extension study in parallel.”
Nov 28
The first embryos from a mammal have now been grown in space sciencenews.org · “Out of 360 samples, 72 survived the trip, and 17 of those developed into normal blastocysts.”
Nov 24
The Story of Titanium construction-physics.com · “Of the first 6000 pieces fabricated from the beta titanium alloy, 95% were lost.”
Nov 23
U.S. Agency Declares 21 Species Now Extinct pbsnc.org · “The swamps where it lived were converted to farmland, and its trees were cut down for logging.”
Nov 19
Cryptographers Solve Decades-Old Privacy Problem nautil.us · “For now, neither scheme is practically useful: Preprocessing currently helps at the extremes, when the database size balloons toward infinity.”
Nov 18
Smart drugs aren’t so smart after all bps.org.uk · “Those who’d scored above average after taking the placebo tended to fall below average while on one of the drugs.”
Nov 16
Australia’s overuse of antibiotics found to be driving rate of drug-resistant infections theguardian.com · “The reality is we’re giving out a lot of antibiotics when we don’t need to.”
Nov 15
Vehicles with higher, more vertical front ends pose greater risk to pedestrians iihs.org · “Pedestrian crash deaths have risen 80 percent since hitting their low in 2009.”
Nov 14
A truly incredible fact about the number 37 grossack.site · “First it sounded totally unbelievable, since 37 is a tiny number in the grand scheme of things.”
Nov 12
Euclid's first images: the dazzling edge of darkness esa.int · “The image shows 1000 galaxies belonging to the Perseus Cluster, and more than 100 000 additional galaxies further away in the background.”
Nov 7
Dengue rates plunged after release of lab-altered mosquitoes dw.com · “They found that the introduction of the infected mosquitoes into local mosquito populations was “associated with a significant reduction” in dengue of up to 97% in each city compared to ten years prior to the start of the experiment.”
Nov 5
Drunk Grizzlies Keep Getting Hit By Trains In Montana cowboystatedaily.com · “Another idea is to not load the train cars so full, an idea that BNSF does not like.”
Nov 5
Software that supports your body should always respect your freedom fsf.org · “We recommend that you disable automatic operating system updates on the smartphone using the mentioned apps.”
Nov 4
Othello is Solved arxiv.org · “It is computationally proved that perfect play by both players lead to a draw.”
Nov 4
In a surprising finding, light can make water evaporate without heat news.mit.edu · “Under certain conditions, at the interface where water meets air, light can directly bring about evaporation without the need for heat, and it actually does so even more efficiently than heat.”
Nov 2

October 2023 12 posts

You’re Invited to a Colonoscopy! asteriskmag.com · “The 18% reduction in colorectal cancer incidence was statistically significant, while the 10% reduction in colorectal cancer mortality and 1% reduction in overall mortality were not.”
Oct 29
'Not of faculty quality': How Penn mistreated Nobel Prize-winning researcher Katalin Karikó thedp.com · “To Grady, $35,000 spent on Karikó was “$35,000 that could be spent supporting a new scientist who may make a discovery,” Langer added.”
Oct 27
A Third of Chocolate Products Are High in Heavy Metals, CR's Tests Find consumerreports.org · “CR’s scientists measured heavy metal content against California’s standard levels because there are no federal limits for the amount of lead and cadmium most foods can contain, and they believe that California’s standard levels are the most protective available.”
Oct 27
Nanofiche archmission.org · “Nanofiche can also store up to 2,000 analog pages of text at 150 dpi, per square centimeter. For example a 20 x 20 mm nickel Nanofiche sheet can hold up to 8,000 pages of text rendered at 150 dpi.”
Oct 22
Research repository arXiv receives $10M for upgrades news.cornell.edu · “The funding will allow the growing repository with more than 2 million articles to migrate to the cloud and modernize its code to ensure reliability, fault tolerance and accessibility for researchers.”
Oct 19
First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by 21yo computer science student scrollprize.org · “That is until Luke Farritor, a contestant of the Vesuvius Challenge, became the first person in two millennia to see an entire word from within an unopened scroll this August.”
Oct 12
Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started: Evidence from 350,757 flips arxiv.org · “The model asserts that when people flip an ordinary coin, it tends to land on the same side it started – DHM estimated the probability of a same-side outcome to be about 51%.”
Oct 10
At least 1,000 birds died from colliding with one Chicago building in one day theguardian.com · “A 2021 study done in McCormick Place, the same site of Thursday’s bird deaths, found that shutting off half the lights in large buildings can reduce collisions by six to 11 times.”
Oct 7
Desalination system could produce freshwater that is cheaper than tap water news.mit.edu · “The researchers estimate that if the system is scaled up to the size of a small suitcase, it could produce about 4 to 6 liters of drinking water per hour and last several years before requiring replacement parts.”
Oct 6
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023 nobelprize.org · “These seminal results were published in 2005, fifteen years before the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Oct 2
First Blood Test for Dozens of Hereditary Cancers Approved by FDA insideprecisionmedicine.com · “The Invitae Common Hereditary Cancers Panel evaluates a blood sample to identify DNA variants in 47 genes associated with an elevated risk of developing certain types of cancer.”
Oct 2
New discoveries in Göbeklitepe and Karahantepe: A Human statue with a realistic facial expression found in Karahantepe arkeonews.net · “One of the most realistic statue of the era was unearthed, standing at a height of 2.3 meters and featuring a lifelike facial expression in Karahantepe.”
Oct 1

September 2023 7 posts

Inhibition of fatty acid oxidation enables heart regeneration in adult mice nature.com · “We find that disablement of fatty acid oxidation in cardiomyocytes improves resistance to hypoxia and stimulates cardiomyocyte proliferation, allowing heart regeneration after ischaemia–reperfusion injury.”
Sep 28
California workers who cut countertops are dying of an incurable disease news.yahoo.com · “A recent study by UCLA and UCSF physicians found that among dozens of California workers who got silicosis from grinding countertops, nearly a fifth had died. Their median age at death was 46.”
Sep 24
Wifi can read through walls news.ucsb.edu · “In the team’s experiments, three off-the-shelf WiFi transmitters send wireless waves in the area. WiFi receivers are then mounted on an unmanned vehicle that emulates a WiFi receiver grid as it moves.”
Sep 11
Lithium discovery in US volcano could be biggest deposit ever found chemistryworld.com · “An estimated 20 to 40 million tonnes of lithium metal lie within a volcanic crater formed around 16 million years ago.”
Sep 9
CRISPR used to 'reprogram' cancer cells into healthy muscle in the lab livescience.com · “They’re switching from a cell that just wants to make more of itself to cells devoted to contraction.”
Sep 9
Doctors Are Getting Ready to Give Patients a Vaccine That Blocks Fentanyl's Effects futurism.com · “I’ve had a number of physicians, especially anesthesiologists who have sent me an email and say, ‘What are we going to treat patients with in the operating room who’ve had this vaccine?’”
Sep 5
Can an Artificial Kidney Finally Free Patients from Dialysis? ucsf.edu · “More than 500,000 people in the U.S. require dialysis several times a week. Many seek kidney transplants, but there are not enough donors, and only about 20,000 people receive them each year.”
Sep 2

August 2023 11 posts

We Might Have Accidentally Killed the Only Life We Ever Found on Mars Nearly 50 Years Ago daily.jstor.org · “It would be as if an alien spaceship were to find you wandering half-dead in the desert, and your would-be saviors decide, "Humans need water. Let’s put the human in the middle of the ocean to save it!"”
Aug 24
Eye scans detect signs of Parkinson's disease up to seven years before diagnosis moorfields.nhs.uk · “While we are not yet ready to predict whether an individual will develop Parkinson’s, we hope that this method could soon become a pre-screening tool for people at risk of disease.”
Aug 23
Coffee offers performance boost for concrete rmit.edu.au · “Lead author Dr Rajeev Roychand from RMIT University said the team developed a technique to make concrete 30% stronger by turning waste coffee grounds into biochar, using a low-energy process without oxygen at 350 degrees Celsius.”
Aug 23
SpaceX's new Bandwagon program is a big threat to small launch providers techcrunch.com · “Right now, companies must often purchase a dedicated launch from Rocket Lab if they want to position a satellite in MIO.”
Aug 22
Asteroid crater 520km in diameter buried deep in southeast Australia, scientists say australiangeographic.com.au · “The Deniliquin structure, yet to be further tested by drilling, spans up to 520km in diameter.”
Aug 17
Thermodynamic Linear Algebra arxiv.org · “Under reasonable assumptions, we rigorously establish asymptotic speedups for our algorithms, relative to digital methods, that scale linearly in matrix dimension.”
Aug 13
Wendelstein 7-X reaches milestone: Power plasma with gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes ipp.mpg.de · “The energy turnover of 1.3 gigajoule was achieved with an average heating power of 2.7 megawatts, whereby the discharge lasted 480 seconds.”
Aug 11
NASA Mission Update: Voyager 2 Communications Pause jpl.nasa.gov · “With a one-way light time of 18.5 hours for the command to reach Voyager, it took 37 hours for mission controllers to learn whether the command worked.”
Aug 5
IBM and NASA Open Source Largest Geospatial AI Foundation Model on Hugging Face newsroom.ibm.com · “A commercial version of the geospatial model, which is part of IBM watsonx, will be available through the IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite (EIS) later this year.”
Aug 3
Amazon rolls out its virtual health clinic nationwide cnbc.com · “Amazon Clinic doesn’t yet accept insurance, but consumers can use insurance to help pay for medications prescribed through the service. Prescriptions can be filled at any pharmacy, including Amazon’s own online pharmacy, which handles fulfillment and delivery.”
Aug 2
Viral room-temperature superconductor claims spark excitement – and skepticism theconversation.com · “In a video demonstration, the researchers position a piece of LK-99 over a magnet. One edge of the flat disk of LK-99 rises, but the other edge appears to maintain contact with the magnet.”
Aug 1

July 2023 12 posts

Pay dirt for ice core scientists in East Greenland as they reach bedrock news.ku.dk · “The mud, which had not seen the light of day for roughly a million years, was only briefly exposed to sunlight, as white light can damage ice core material.”
Jul 31
Banished to a Remote Idaho Valley, Beavers Created a Lush Wetland e360.yale.edu · “When the Sharps Fire burned through the area in 2018, it left unsinged those parts where beavers had settled.”
Jul 30
Scientists May Have Found Mechanism Behind Cognitive Decline in Aging news.cuanschutz.edu · “Researchers using mouse models found that altering the CaMKII brain protein caused similar cognitive effects as those that happen through normal aging.”
Jul 30
Nebraska study finds billions of nanoplastics released when microwaving containers news.unl.edu · “The fastest way to heat food and drink might also rank as the fastest route to ingesting massive quantities of minuscule plastic particles, says new research from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.”
Jul 21
Accelerator Report: A quench of an LHC inner triplet magnet causes a small leak with major consequences home.cern · “At 1.00 a.m. + 17 seconds on Monday, 17 July, the LHC beams were dumped after only 9 minutes in collision due to a radiofrequency interlock caused by an electrical perturbation.”
Jul 21
Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract at least three papers stanforddaily.com · “Retracting a paper is a rare act, especially for a scientist of Tessier-Lavigne’s stature. A database of retractions shows that only four in every 10,000 papers are retracted.”
Jul 19
This company plans to transplant gene-edited pig hearts into babies next year technologyreview.com · “Two such surgeries have been performed so far. Neither animal survived beyond a matter of days.”
Jul 18
Bad numbers in the "gzip beats BERT" paper? kenschutte.com · “So, if any of the tie-break labels is equal to the test label, it is marked as correct.”
Jul 17
underwater ears everywhere computer.rip · “The first search vessel capable of deep undersea exploration, the ROV Pelagic Odysseus 6k, arrived on the scene on the morning of the 22nd. Just five hours later, Odysseus had located the wreckage.”
Jul 16
A Third of North America's Birds Have Vanished nautil.us · “The hardest hit were grassland birds, down by more than 50 percent, mostly due to the expansion of farms that turn a varied landscape into acres of neat, plowed rows.”
Jul 15
Can Neural Stimulation Zap Addiction? spectrum.ieee.org · “Typically, health insurance doesn’t cover these therapies, so people have to pay the hefty bills themselves, a cost that can reach upward of US $15,000 for an entire course of treatment.”
Jul 12
Matrix Multiplication Using Only Addition arxiv.org · “In many cases of practical interest, only a single addition and a single on-chip copy operation are needed to replace a multiplication.”
Jul 8

June 2023 19 posts

Turmeric's unexpected link to lead poisoning in Bangladesh stanmed.stanford.edu · “At the markets, incidence of adulterated spice plunged from 47% in September 2019, to 5% in the first quarter of 2020, to no detectable lead in 2021.”
Jun 26
On the paper “Exploring the MIT Mathematics and EECS Curriculum Using Large Language Models” people.csail.mit.edu · “In the process of addressing this matter, we discovered that contrary to what Iddo Drori had conveyed to us and to the students collecting data for the project, Iddo did not have permission from all the instructors to collect the assignment and exam questions that made up the dataset that was the subject of the paper.”
Jun 24
FDA Approves First Gene Therapy for Treatment of Certain Patients with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy fda.gov · “A clinical benefit of Elevidys, including improved motor function, has not been established.”
Jun 23
We’ve officially entered a new era of ‘cultivated’ meat production techcrunch.com · “Prior to today, Singapore was the only country allowing sales of cultivated chicken.”
Jun 22
Tempest in a teacup: UChicago physicists make breakthrough in creating turbulence news.uchicago.edu · “For example, if you ask, can I predict what happens next when I poke this region of turbulence? The answer is no. Not even really with a supercomputer.”
Jun 18
Infinite Photorealistic Worlds using Procedural Generation arxiv.org · “Infinigen is entirely procedural: every asset, from shape to texture, is generated from scratch via randomized mathematical rules, using no external source and allowing infinite variation and composition.”
Jun 18
Humans Have Pumped Enough Groundwater to Change the Tilt of the Earth e360.yale.edu · “From 1993 to 2010, they determined, humans redistributed enough water to move the rotational pole roughly 31 inches.”
Jun 17
Common diabetes drug shown to prevent long COVID cidrap.umn.edu · “The cumulative incidence of long COVID by day 300 in those who took a 14-day course of metformin was 6.3% (95% confidence interval [CI], 4.2 to 8.2) compared to 10.4% (7.8 to 12.9) in the placebo group, or 39.4% lower.”
Jun 16
Breakthrough: Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes earth.com · “The cosmic ray intensity and earthquakes correlation is not discernible in location-specific analyses but emerges when global seismic activity is considered.”
Jun 16
Synthetic human embryos created in groundbreaking advance theguardian.com · “However, the work also raises serious ethical and legal issues as the lab-grown entities fall outside current legislation in the UK and most other countries.”
Jun 15
Varda: The Space Drug Factory notboring.co · “The company is executing over $60 million in programs with the DoD, and is on the precipice of finalizing a contract with a top 20 biopharma company for its second mission.”
Jun 13
First mission to 'touch' the sun catches the solar wind cnn.com · “Parker Solar Probe detected highly energetic particles traveling between 10 and 100 times faster than the solar wind, leading the researchers to believe that the fast solar wind is created by the reconnection of magnetic fields.”
Jun 12
RNA editing helps octopuses cope with the cold sciencenews.org · “While heat set off very little editing, octopuses that experienced cool temperatures altered over 20,000 mRNA sites, which changed around a third of the instructions for making proteins.”
Jun 9
NASA spends $45M to seed tech from hundreds of space businesses techcrunch.com · “Each award includes $150,000 for a total investment of $45 million.”
Jun 8
Royal Navy Says Quantum Navigation Test a Success thequantuminsider.com · “Although specific details about the applications of this technology remain undisclosed by the Royal Navy, certain hints suggest potential uses.”
Jun 7
Common eye drops may provide hope for nearsighted kids newatlas.com · “What they didn’t expect was that the 0.01% preparation would be more effective than the 0.02%.”
Jun 6
Scientists Hacked Human Cells to Make Insulin, And It Reversed Diabetes in Mice sciencealert.com · “They were stable upon transplantation for as long as we tracked them (6 months), secreted human insulin and reversed diabetes in mice.”
Jun 5
Lung cancer pill cuts risk of death by half, says 'thrilling' study theguardian.com · “After five years, 88% of patients who took the daily pill after the removal of their tumour were still alive, compared with 78% of patients treated with a placebo.”
Jun 4
Intelligent brains take longer to solve difficult problems bihealth.org · “In personalized brain simulations of the 650 participants, the researchers could determine that brains with reduced functional connectivity literally “jump to conclusions” when making decisions, rather than waiting until upstream brain regions could complete the processing steps needed to solve the problem.”
Jun 3

May 2023 14 posts

CPR's true survival rate is lower than many people think npr.org · “In 2010 a review of 79 studies, involving almost 150,000 patients, found that the overall rate of survival from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest had barely changed in thirty years. It was 7.6%.”
May 29
Profit-Obsessed Private Equity Is Now Dominating the US Hospice System jacobin.com · “As of 2020, over 72 percent of hospices are for-profit and approximately 24 percent are nonprofit. Less than 3 percent are publicly owned.”
May 28
Walking naturally after spinal cord injury using a brain–spine interface nature.com · “The participant regained the ability to walk with crutches overground even when the BSI was switched off.”
May 24
Physicists Create Biggest-Ever Schrödinger's Cat scientificamerican.com · “A sapphire crystal weighing 16 micrograms is the largest object ever to exist in a quantum-mechanical superposition of two vibrational states.”
May 19
Researchers treat depression by reversing brain signals traveling the wrong way med.stanford.edu · “In three-quarters of the participants with depression, however, the typical flow of activity was reversed: The anterior cingulate cortex sent signals to the anterior insula. The more severe the depression, the higher the proportion of signals that traveled the wrong way.”
May 17
Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults With Worse Mental Health jonathanhaidt.substack.com · “the younger the age of getting the first smartphone, the worse the mental health that the young adult reports today.”
May 15
Juice’s RIME antenna breaks free esa.int · “On 12 May RIME was finally jolted into life when the flight control team fired a mechanical device called a ‘non-explosive actuator’ (NEA), located in the jammed bracket. This delivered a shock that moved the pin by a matter of millimetres and allowed the antenna to unfold.”
May 14
'Too greedy': mass walkout at global science journal over 'unethical' fees theguardian.com · “The big scientific publishers keep costs low because academics write up their research – typically funded by charities and the public purse – for free.”
May 7
Large-scale study reveals autoimmune disorders now affect around one in ten gla.ac.uk · “They found that, taken together, these 19 autoimmune diseases studied affect about 10% of the population –13% of women and 7% of men.”
May 7
EU ready to back immediate open access without author fees researchprofessionalnews.com · “Commercial publishers have tended to impose such embargoes to protect their subscription fees.”
May 6
New Alzheimer's drug slows disease by a third bbc.com · “It was mostly mild or asymptomatic despite being detected on brain scans - but 1.6% developed dangerous brain swelling, with two deaths directly attributed to it and a third volunteer dying after such a case.”
May 4
Scientists develop A.I. system focused on turning peoples' thoughts into text cnbc.com · “According to a news release, the trained system produces text that closely or precisely matches the intended meaning of the participant’s original words around half of the time.”
May 2
Michael J. Fox Foundation Announces Significant Breakthrough in Search for Parkinson's Biomarker michaeljfox.org · “The assay accurately diagnosed disease in 99 percent (274 of 278) of people with smell loss and sporadic Parkinson’s (without a known causal genetic mutation).”
May 1
SpaceX to spend about $2 billion on Starship this year, as Elon Musk pushes to reach orbit cnbc.com · “The rocket took off with only 30 of the 33 Raptor engines ignited at the base of the Super Heavy booster.”
May 1

April 2023 9 posts

Study Finds ChatGPT Outperforms Physicians in High-Quality, Empathetic Answers to Patient Questions today.ucsd.edu · “The team randomly sampled 195 exchanges from AskDocs where a verified physician responded to a public question.”
Apr 29
Use of antibiotics in farming 'endangering human immune system' theguardian.com · “We’ve accidentally ended up compromising our own immune system to get fatter chickens.”
Apr 25
Parrots learn to make video calls to chat with other parrots, then develop friendships, Northeastern University researchers say news.northeastern.edu · “Two sickly, elderly male macaws paired together in the study had scarcely seen another macaw in their lives, yet formed a deep bond”
Apr 22
Why the Brain's Connections to the Body Are Crisscrossed quantamagazine.org · “What this shows is that for the nervous system to maintain uncrossed connections, the brain would need to keep flipping one axis of its body maps as the body parts moved, which would be impossibly complex.”
Apr 22
SpaceX's Texas Rocket is Going To Cause A Lot More Damage Than Anyone Thinks blog.esghound.com · “An FWS employee measured a sound intensity reading of 110 decibels (dB) three miles from the launch site during a static fire test conducted in February.”
Apr 16
ESA's Juice lifts off on quest to discover secrets of Jupiter's icy moons esa.int · “An eight-year cruise with four gravity-assist flybys at Earth and Venus will slingshot the spacecraft towards the outer Solar System.”
Apr 14
American IQ Scores Have Rapidly Dropped, Proving the 'Reverse Flynn Effect' popularmechanics.com · “The study, published in the journal Intelligence, used an online, survey-style personality test called the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment Project to analyze nearly 400,000 Americans.”
Apr 10
Do judges give out tougher sentences when hungry? The story behind a study too good to be true inews.co.uk · “If it was really the case that hunger affected our brains this much, “our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45”.”
Apr 8
Synthetic embryos have been implanted into monkey wombs technologyreview.com · “But within 20 days of transfer, the monkey blastoids stopped developing and seemed to come apart, say Liu and colleagues, who published their results in the journal Cell Stem Cell.”
Apr 7

March 2023 9 posts

CDC team studying health impacts of East Palestine train derailment fell ill during investigation cbsnews.com · “Because the investigators’ symptoms improved soon after they left the area, the incident was not reported to the public, the official said, noting that reports of illnesses experienced by CDC personnel on the job wouldn’t ordinarily be disclosed.”
Mar 31
How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them propublica.org · “Over a period of two months last year, Cigna doctors denied over 300,000 requests for payments using this method, spending an average of 1.2 seconds on each case, the documents show.”
Mar 25
The Little-Known Origin Story behind the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics scientificamerican.com · “Yet Wu, who died in 1997, was not mentioned when the 2022 awards were announced.”
Mar 19
Give babies peanut butter to cut allergy by 77%, study says bbc.com · “That is the equivalent of preventing 10,000 out of the roughly 13,000 cases of peanut allergy each year.”
Mar 17
California cancels salmon fishing season cbsnews.com · “Last year, 196,000 adult fish were expected to return to the Sacramento River to spawn but only 60,000 showed up.”
Mar 13
See the First Complete Map of an Insect's Brain smithsonianmag.com · “With 3,016 neurons and 548,000 connections, called synapses, the result is by far the most complex map of a whole brain ever made.”
Mar 11
How does the world's first vaccine for honeybees work? "It's like magic" cbsnews.com · “There is no cure for the disease, and, until now, no vaccine to prevent it.”
Mar 9
Researchers develop blood test for anxiety sciencedaily.com · “Now that the test has been validated by researchers, it is currently being developed for wider use by physicians by MindX Sciences.”
Mar 9
Royal Astronomical Society announces all journals to publish as open access from 2024 ras.ac.uk · “With this move to OA the journals will no longer charge subscription fees and will instead be supported by Article Processing Charges (APCs), with the infrastructure to ensure that authors continue to face no financial barrier to publishing their science in the RAS journals.”
Mar 2

February 2023 9 posts

Met Office says Northern Lights will be visible in England tonight and tomorrow - best places to see them bristolpost.co.uk · “The Aurora Borealis may be visible as far south as central England tonight where skies remain clear.”
Feb 26
Early morning university classes are associated with impaired sleep and academic performance nature.com · “Wi-Fi connection logs in 23,391 students revealed that lecture attendance was about ten percentage points lower for classes at 08:00 compared with later start times.”
Feb 21
Internal review found ‘falsified data’ in Stanford President’s Alzheimer’s research, colleagues allege stanforddaily.com · “When asked whether this was accurate, the scientist whom The Daily confirmed belonged to the research review committee said, “no no no no no no.””
Feb 18
1st UK child to receive gene therapy for fatal genetic disorder is now 'happy and healthy' livescience.com · “Libmeldy is approved for use in the European Union and U.K., although the U.K.’s drug price watchdog initially rejected the therapy due to its hefty list price of £2.8 million ($3.4 million at today’s exchange rates), BBC News reported in 2022.”
Feb 17
Last Flight Out brr.fyi · “This final plane left behind a few dozen souls who will maintain continuity, keep the station going, and conduct critical winter science and logistics activities. If all goes well, the next time we see a plane will be in late October 2023.”
Feb 15
Let Teenagers Sleep scientificamerican.com · “Despite decades of research, thousands of publications and clear science, schools in only a few states and the District of Columbia have pushed their start times to 8:30 A.M. on average, which researchers say is a compromise.”
Feb 13
School Dental Program Prevents 80 Percent of Cavities with One-Time, Non-Invasive Treatment nyu.edu · “A single dose of either topical treatment given in elementary schools prevented roughly 80% of cavities and kept 50% of cavities from worsening when children were seen two years later.”
Feb 12
Scientists discover receptor that blocks COVID-19 infection sydney.edu.au · “This protein, the leucine-rich repeat-containing protein 15 (LRRC15), is an inbuilt receptor that binds the SARS-CoV-2 virus without passing on the infection.”
Feb 11
MDMA and Psilocybin Are Approved as Medicines for the First Time wired.com · “The treatments won’t be covered by health insurance, “so it’s probably initially going to be a therapy for relatively well-off people who have these conditions,” Perkins says.”
Feb 4

January 2023 9 posts

The Cause of Depression Is Probably Not What You Think quantamagazine.org · “They found no convincing evidence that lower levels of serotonin caused or were even associated with depression.”
Jan 26
A woman receives the first-ever successful transplant of a living, 3D-printed ear zmescience.com · “Although the company has not made the technical details of the process to the public, citing proprietary concerns, 3DBio says that federal regulations have already reviewed the trial and the data would be published in a peer-reviewed medical journal upon its completion.”
Jan 18
Scientists steer lightning bolts with lasers for the first time theguardian.com · “Only one strike, on 21 July, happened in clear enough conditions for the researchers to film the path of the lightning from two directions using high speed cameras several kilometres away.”
Jan 17
New killer CRISPR system is unlike any scientists have seen freethink.com · “Once activated, the protein can bind to any genetic material that comes near it, whether its single-stranded RNA, single-stranded DNA, or double-stranded DNA.”
Jan 16
China’s version of Starlink is government-backed, and has global ambitions restofworld.org · “The request, which sought approval for nearly 13,000 satellites on behalf of a Chinese company listed as “GW,” revealed the Chinese space industry’s global vision for a broadband satellite internet network that could stretch worldwide.”
Jan 16
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test Is a Smashing Success eos.org · “That’s a full 33 minutes shorter than its original orbital period, a finding that implied that a substantial amount of ejecta was produced.”
Jan 14
The James Webb Space Telescope Is Finding Too Many Early Galaxies skyandtelescope.org · “Even if only half of Yan’s selection turn out to be nearby galaxies masquerading as distant ones, the latter number would still be unexpectedly large.”
Jan 12
Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable? news.mit.edu · “Previously disregarded as merely evidence of sloppy mixing practices, or poor-quality raw materials, the new study suggests that these tiny lime clasts gave the concrete a previously unrecognized self-healing capability.”
Jan 6
Eating viruses can power growth, reproduction of microorganism news.unl.edu · “The population of Halteria, with nothing to eat but the virus, was growing an average of about 15 times larger over that same timespan.”
Jan 3

2022 154 posts

December 2022 15 posts

What happens when babies are left to cry it out? bbc.com · “When the children were six years old, the researchers found no difference on any measure – negative or positive – between those who were sleep trained and those who weren’t, including in their sleep patterns, behaviour, attachment, or cortisol levels.”
Dec 29
Social media may prevent users from reaping creative rewards of profound boredom bath.ac.uk · “Profound boredom may sound like an overwhelmingly negative concept but, in fact, it can be intensely positive if people are given the chance for undistracted thinking and development.”
Dec 26
Can Doom Run It? An Adding Machine in Doom blog.otterstack.com · “I demonstrate that it is possible to run any bounded computation in Doom, minus constraints on level size.”
Dec 23
Pollution cleanup method destroys toxic "forever chemicals" news.ucr.edu · “The patent-pending process infuses contaminated water with hydrogen, then blasts the water with high-energy, short-wavelength ultraviolet light.”
Dec 19
Doors of McMurdo brr.fyi · “There is a huge amount of snowdrift during the winter, and if the doors opened outward, they would be impossible to open without a lot of digging.”
Dec 15
US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved energy.gov · “LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history to reach this milestone, also known as scientific energy breakeven, meaning it produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it.”
Dec 13
Medieval ship found in Norway's biggest lake sciencenorway.no · “Marine archaeologists believe the ship dates to sometime between 1300 – 1850.”
Dec 12
Splashdown! NASA's Orion Returns to Earth After Historic Moon Mission nasa.gov · “The splashdown of the Orion spacecraft – which occurred 50 years to the day of the Apollo 17 Moon landing – is the crowning achievement of Artemis I.”
Dec 12
The silent struggles of workers with ADHD bbc.com · “But even for people who do have a label for their struggles, a diagnosis isn’t necessarily a fix; many workers with ADHD experience challenges that can inhibit success.”
Dec 12
Base editing: Revolutionary therapy clears girl's incurable cancer bbc.com · “The team at Great Ormond Street used a technology called base editing, which was invented only six years ago.”
Dec 11
What causes Alzheimer's? Scientists are rethinking the answer quantamagazine.org · “Scientists have long held onto the idea that sticky blobs of proteins sitting between brain cells are the cause of Alzheimer’s disease.”
Dec 10
100 Gbps achieved from space to Earth news.mit.edu · “This data rate is more than 1,000 times higher than that of the radio-frequency links traditionally used for satellite communication and the highest ever achieved by a laser link from space to ground.”
Dec 7
It's not Tourette's but a new type of mass sociogenic illness academic.oup.com · “Accordingly, we suggest the more specific term ‘mass social media-induced illness’.”
Dec 6
Neuralink faces federal inquiry after killing 1,500 animals in testing theguardian.com · “The sources characterized that figure as a rough estimate because the company does not keep precise records on the number of animals tested and killed.”
Dec 6
Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought nationalgeographic.com · “Neither the 2017 nor the 2022 meta-analyses examined what is causing the drop in sperm count, but other research suggests environmental and lifestyle factors may be to blame.”
Dec 1

November 2022 13 posts

Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat, FDA Says smithsonianmag.com · “Upside Foods’ lab-grown meat is biologically identical to standard meat, but it doesn’t require killing animals.”
Nov 28
Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information stackoverflow.blog · “Typing notes can be good, but it won’t make it easier to remember what was said later on.”
Nov 23
Is wine fake? asteriskmag.com · “But although wine experts really do know more than you and I, the world of wine is insane.”
Nov 21
Planes are still decades away from displacing most bird jobs guzey.com · “Birds use orders of magnitude less energy to lift the same amount of mass in the air, compared to planes.”
Nov 20
Consider working on genomics claymcleod.dev · “There is a significant gap between how software is currently developed in this space versus how it should be developed.”
Nov 19
The 12-bit rainbow palette iamkate.com · “Yellow is given the highest luminance, as it only looks yellow when bright.”
Nov 18
Things I've noticed while visiting the ICU trevorklee.substack.com · “The ICU is a good place to not die, but a bad place to recover.”
Nov 18
Demystifying Fourier analysis dsego.github.io · “The idea is to multiply the signal with a pure sine wave.”
Nov 17
Myocarditis after Covid vaccination: Research on possible long-term risks begins nbcnews.com · “We don’t understand yet and there’s no good mechanism to explain it.”
Nov 14
What if regular exercise is the best cognitive exercise? blog.vslira.net · “File this under highly speculative.”
Nov 12
NightWare helps disrupt nightmares for those with PTSD apple.com · “Currently, NightWare is prescribed to 400 patients in the US, 98 percent of whom are active-duty military or veterans.”
Nov 8
A requiem for amateur chemistry lcamtuf.substack.com · “Alas, my childhood also marked the final years of amateur chemistry as a socially acceptable pursuit.”
Nov 8
Quantum winter is coming backreaction.blogspot.com · “Unfortunately, I have to inform you that Moore’s law isn’t a law of nature.”
Nov 5

October 2022 18 posts

Our Conscious Experience of the World Is But a Memory, Says New Theory singularityhub.com · “A team from Boston laid out a new theory of consciousness that inextricably ties it to memory.”
Oct 26
How Gamification Affects Software Developers: Cautionary Evidence from a Natural Experiment on GitHub arxiv.org · “Long-running streaks of activity were abandoned and became less common.”
Oct 23
Some people who appear to be in a coma may actually be conscious scientificamerican.com · “As many as 15 to 20 percent of patients who appear to be in a coma or other unresponsive state show these inner signs of awareness when evaluated with advanced brain-imaging methods or sophisticated monitoring of electrical activity.”
Oct 22
A Moonshot for Coral Breeding Was Successful hakaimagazine.com · “In Florida alone, the population is reduced by over 95 percent.”
Oct 22
Starlink signals can be reverse-engineered to work like GPS, whether SpaceX likes it or not technologyreview.com · “We had to start from scratch, building basically a little radio telescope to eavesdrop on their signals.”
Oct 21
Yet another scientific body has debunked bitemark analysis. The courts still won't care. radleybalko.substack.com · “The NIST report is now the fourth major scientific body to find no scientific validity to support these central tenets of bitemark analysis.”
Oct 20
NASA's Webb Takes Star-Filled Portrait of Pillars of Creation nasa.gov · “These are the bright red orbs that typically have diffraction spikes and lie outside one of the dusty pillars.”
Oct 19
Inside the Proton, the 'Most Complicated Thing' Imaginable quantamagazine.org · “Researchers recently discovered that the proton sometimes includes a charm quark and charm antiquark, colossal particles that are each heavier than the proton itself.”
Oct 19
Sound ciechanow.ski · “Invisible and relentless, sound is seemingly just there, traveling through our surroundings to carry beautiful music or annoying noises.”
Oct 18
Seabed 2030: Almost 25% of World's Seafloor Now Mapped hydro-international.com · “The latest GEBCO Grid figure now stands at 23.4%, reflecting an increase of 10.1 million square kilometres of new bathymetric data compared with last year’s figure.”
Oct 17
Jessica Wade made more than 1k Wikipedia bios for unknown women scientists today.com · “Several of her entries were deleted by other Wikimedians, as the most influential contributors and editors are called.”
Oct 16
Alaska snow crab season canceled as officials investigate disappearance of an estimated 1 billion crabs cbsnews.com · “An estimated one billion crabs have mysteriously disappeared in two years, state officials said.”
Oct 14
Teenager Solves Stubborn Riddle About Prime Number Look-Alikes quantamagazine.org · “Then, in November 2021, Granville opened up an email from Larsen, then 17 years old and in his senior year of high school.”
Oct 13
Authors' names have 'astonishing' influence on peer reviewers nature.com · “A Nobel prizewinner is six times more likely than someone less well known to get a thumbs-up for acceptance, finds study.”
Oct 11
William Shatner: My Trip to Space Filled Me With 'Overwhelming Sadness' variety.com · “My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”
Oct 8
AWS doesn't make sense for scientific computing noahlebovic.com · “That means it’s over 10x more expensive to use AWS on-demand instances than your own infrastructure, and still 5x more expensive to use AWS reserved instances.”
Oct 7
Discovering faster matrix multiplication algorithms with reinforcement learning nature.com · “We also adapt the algorithm discovery procedure to finite fields, and improve over Strassen’s two-level algorithm for multiplying 4 × 4 matrices for the first time, to our knowledge, since its inception in 1969.”
Oct 5
LSD-Like Molecules Counter Depression Without the Trip ucsf.edu · “The compounds had been selected from a computational library of 75 million candidates.”
Oct 2

September 2022 9 posts

Many indoor air quality sensor products are a scam halestrom.net · “In other words: they don’t work properly if used in a modern sealed and air-conditioned office.”
Sep 29
Facebook Proven to Negatively Impact Mental Health english.tau.ac.il · “The findings show a rise in the number of students reporting severe depression and anxiety (7% and 20% respectively).”
Sep 22
Lose Weight the Slow and Incredibly Difficult Way nautil.us · “If your goal was to avoid work, you could not have failed more badly.”
Sep 22
New Webb Image Captures Clearest View of Neptune's Rings in Decades nasa.gov · “Webb also captured seven of Neptune’s 14 known moons.”
Sep 21
Python Type Hints are Turing Complete arxiv.org · “We apply Grigore’s algorithm to Python type hints and deduce that they are Turing complete.”
Sep 9
A trillion prices dolthub.com · “I naively thought that insurers would be publishing the prices they negotiated with the 6,000 hospitals in the US.”
Sep 6
Why A4? – The Mathematical Beauty of Paper Size scilogs.spektrum.de · “This is something of a shock, if you ponder it, because rectangles do not normally behave like this.”
Sep 5
Biomanufactured materials are coming tsungxu.com · “Spiber has raised a whopping $640 million in equity and securitization financing.”
Sep 4
Cannabis legalization decreases the stock market value of major pharmaceutical firms news.unm.edu · “The current study concludes that cannabis acts as a new competitor in drug markets.”
Sep 2

August 2022 14 posts

Why is WebMD so awful? blog.tjcx.me · “So why hasn’t any of this innovation made online health information even slightly better?”
Aug 30
Why are D-sharp and E-flat considered to be two different notes ethanhein.com · “12-TET is convenient for instrument builders and piano tuners, but it makes harmony sound grey and mushy.”
Aug 28
We don't know how the universe began, and we will never know backreaction.blogspot.com · “The Big Bang is the simplest explanation we know, and that is probably wrong, and that’s it.”
Aug 27
Orcas Are Breaking Rudders Off Boats in Europe smithsonianmag.com · “The animals have started approaching sailboats, sometimes striking the rudders and even breaking them off.”
Aug 25
Visual Sum of Cubes x.st · “Doubling the pyramid didn’t work, so maybe we can cut it in half instead!”
Aug 20
"Quantum-Safe" Crypto Hacked by 10-Year-Old PC spectrum.ieee.org · “SIKE is the second NIST PQC candidate to get broken this year.”
Aug 19
How to build bigger biceps: A little exercise each day boosts muscles more than one big weekly workout studyfinds.org · “The control group doing six contractions a week did not see any change in muscle strength or muscle thickness.”
Aug 16
Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · “These findings are significant in the context of society’s increasing reliance on GPS.”
Aug 14
Three peer-reviewed papers highlight scientific results of National Ignition Facility record yield shot llnl.gov · “The other main changes were improved capsule quality and a smaller fuel fill tube.”
Aug 14
It's raining PFAS: even in Antarctica and on the Tibetan plateau rainwater is unsafe to drink su.se · “Based on the latest U.S. guidelines for PFOA in drinking water, rainwater everywhere would be judged unsafe to drink.”
Aug 13
Why aren't smart people happier? experimentalhistory.substack.com · “All that progress didn’t make us a bit happier.”
Aug 10
The Case of the Mysterious Holes on the Seafloor oceanexplorer.noaa.gov · “A look at the sediment upon recovery revealed no clues as to what formed the holes.”
Aug 7
The Scottish Highlands, the Appalachians, and the Atlas are the same mountain range vividmaps.com · “It was similar to the present Himalayas at its highest elevation during the beginning of the Permian period.”
Aug 6
MIT invents $4 solar desalination device freethink.com · “Those wicks are difficult to clean, and over time, the salt accumulation means they have to be replaced.”
Aug 3

July 2022 11 posts

MIT engineers develop stickers that can see inside the body news.mit.edu · “The current design requires connecting the stickers to instruments that translate the reflected sound waves into images.”
Jul 30
AlphaFold reveals the structure of the protein universe deepmind.com · “Determining the 3D structure of a protein used to take many months or years, it now takes seconds.”
Jul 28
Two weeks in, the Webb Space Telescope is reshaping astronomy quantamagazine.org · “They missed out on being first by 13 seconds, "which was pretty funny," said Pascale.”
Jul 25
We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed blog.readwise.io · “After analyzing data from 2,074 testers, we found no evidence that Bionic Reading has any positive effect on reading speed.”
Jul 19
Deepest infrared image of universe nasa.gov · “Webb’s image is approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, a tiny sliver of the vast universe.”
Jul 11
I should have loved biology jsomers.net · “The textbooks wrung out the questing.”
Jul 9
I analyzed hospital price lists so you didn't have to dolthub.com · “Hospitals are willing to spend $1M just to avoid publishing these things.”
Jul 7
He dropped out to become a poet, now he's won a Fields Medal quantamagazine.org · “June Huh wasn’t interested in mathematics until a chance encounter during his sixth year of college.”
Jul 5
Large Hadron Collider discovers three new exotic particles home.cern · “Only time and more studies of exotic hadrons will tell if these particles are one, the other or both.”
Jul 5
I can't believe that I can prove that it can sort blog.adacore.com · “Proof requires us to understand why it works.”
Jul 4
Found: The 'holy grail of catalysis', turning methane into methanol phys.org · “Excess methane is commonly burned off, or flared, to reduce its environmental impact.”
Jul 1

June 2022 10 posts

Whatever happened to the Bee Apocalypse? backreaction.blogspot.com · “It’s the wild bees that are in danger.”
Jun 25
The Brain Has a 'Low-Power Mode' That Blunts Our Senses quantamagazine.org · “Because the neurons in low-power mode processed visual signals less precisely, the food-restricted mice performed worse on a challenging visual task.”
Jun 19
How Parents' Trauma Leaves Biological Traces in Children scientificamerican.com · “Now it looked like trauma could leave a trace in offspring even before they are born.”
Jun 18
Record-Breaking Voyager Spacecraft Begin to Power Down scientificamerican.com · “Over the past three years NASA has shut down heaters and other nonessential components, eking out the spacecrafts’ remaining energy stores to extend their unprecedented journeys to about 2030.”
Jun 17
New CRISPR-based map ties every human gene to its function news.mit.edu · “The data from this project, published online June 9 in Cell, ties each gene to its job in the cell, and is the culmination of years of collaboration on the single-cell sequencing method Perturb-seq.”
Jun 10
You need to know what right-half-plane zeros are jbconsulting.substack.com · “The danger of the right-half-plane zero is that it lures you into reacting to it, but that is precisely the wrong thing to do.”
Jun 10
Researchers Achieve 'Absurdly Fast' Algorithm for Network Flow quantamagazine.org · “Maximum flow has been studied since the 1950s, when it was formulated to study the Soviet railway system.”
Jun 8
Graduate Student's Side Project Proves Prime Number Conjecture quantamagazine.org · “Since each prime number can only be divided by 1 and itself, the set of all prime numbers is one example of a primitive set.”
Jun 6
LSD microdosing does not appear to improve mood or cognitive ability, according to new placebo-controlled study psypost.org · “A new randomized controlled study of LSD microdosing has failed to find evidence that the psychedelic practice results in improvements to mood or cognition.”
Jun 5
How to Make the Universe Think for Us quantamagazine.org · “That the device often succeeds beggars belief, even to its designers.”
Jun 1

May 2022 14 posts

Ancient Earth: What did Earth look like X million years ago? dinosaurpictures.org · “Use the ← and → keys or drag the timeline to travel through time”
May 26
Bugs Are Evolving to Eat Plastic, Study Finds e360.yale.edu · “The research scanned more than 200 million genes found in DNA samples taken from the environment and found 30,000 different enzymes that could degrade 10 different types of plastic.”
May 24
Is Sunscreen the New Margarine? outsideonline.com · “Over the 20 years of the study, sun avoiders were twice as likely to die as sun worshippers.”
May 22
This "amateur" programmer fought cancer with 50 Nvidia Geforce 1080Ti howardchen.substack.com · “Furthermore, the accuracy of tumor identification has reached 90%.”
May 20
Is an unknown, extraordinarily ancient civilisation buried under eastern Turkey? spectator.co.uk · “Put it another way: it is estimated to be 11-13,000 years old.”
May 20
Plastic-eating enzyme could eliminate billions of tons of landfill waste news.utexas.edu · “It makes up 12% of all global waste.”
May 18
Taking a Break from Social Media Makes You Happier and Less Anxious calnewport.com · “The researchers gathered 154 volunteers with a mean age of 29.6 years old.”
May 17
The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence while controlling for genetic differences in cognition and socioeconomic background nature.com · “After two years, gaming positively impacted intelligence (standardized β = + 0.17), but socializing had no effect.”
May 17
Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives nature.com · “Results of Exp.1 showed that household cats paid attention to the monitor for longer in the incongruent condition, suggesting an expectancy violation effect; however, café cats did not.”
May 16
Astronomers Reveal First Image of the Black Hole at the Heart of Our Galaxy public.nrao.edu · “This result provides overwhelming evidence that the object is indeed a black hole and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the center of most galaxies.”
May 12
How mindfulness can make you a darker person bbc.com · “By quelling our feelings of guilt, it seems, the common meditation technique discourages us from making amends for our mistakes.”
May 8
Monsanto’s Ghostwriting to Influence Science and Media disinformationchronicle.substack.com · “Monsanto ghostwrote research and essays to promote the safety of the pesticide glyphosate.”
May 8
How many radioactive bananas would you need to power a house? what-if.xkcd.com · “A banana contains about 100 calories of food energy, and if you incinerate whole bananas as fuel, it would only take about 10 bunches per day to keep your house running.”
May 6
We think this cool study we found is flawed. Help us reproduce it pudding.cool · “This filtering decision was the difference between results that lead to intriguing headlines, and those that produce no trend and no paper.”
May 1

April 2022 19 posts

Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people npr.org · “Researchers say there’s growing evidence that nature has a powerful effect on us, improving both our physical and psychological health.”
Apr 30
Limb lengthening surgery is becoming more popular buzzfeednews.com · “Before the $75,000 procedure he had in January, he was about 5'7”."
Apr 29
New links found between musical training and cognitive ability neurosciencenews.com · “A direct causal link between musical training and general cognitive faculties, however, seems unlikely.”
Apr 28
Elegant six-page proof reveals the emergence of random structure quantamagazine.org · “When the mathematicians Jeff Kahn and Gil Kalai first posed their “expectation threshold” conjecture in 2006, they didn’t believe it themselves.”
Apr 26
3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work openculture.com · “Over the 280-day period covered by this 3,200-year-old ostracon, common excuses for absence include “brewing beer” and “his wife was bleeding.””
Apr 26
I stopped working on black hole information loss backreaction.blogspot.com · “But because you can’t solve this problem with mathematics alone, and experiments are not possible, not now and probably not in the next 10000 years.”
Apr 23
Hiring discrimination: a problem for men in female-dominated occupations journals.plos.org · “Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations.”
Apr 22
Repulsive Curves cs.cmu.edu · “Curves play a fundamental role across computer graphics, physical simulation, and mathematical visualization, yet most tools for curve design do nothing to prevent crossings or self-intersections.”
Apr 22
US Navy wirelessly beams 1.6 kW of power a kilometer using microwaves newatlas.com · “In what it describes as the most significant demonstration of its kind in half a century, the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) beamed 1.6 kW of power over a kilometer (3,280 ft) using a microwave beam at the US Army Research Field in Maryland.”
Apr 22
I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation” andersource.dev · “Again, my main point is that there’s nothing inherently flawed with the analysis and plots presented in the original paper.”
Apr 21
Mental speed is high until age sixty nature.com · “Slowing of mental speed was observed only after approximately age 60.”
Apr 18
100 People with rare cancers who attended same NJ high school demand answers foxnews.com · “By April 11, he had heard from more than 100 former Colonia High School attendees who had been diagnosed with rare tumors and cancers.”
Apr 16
Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy news.mit.edu · “Another study failed to show improvements in hearing compared to the placebo group, but the company attributes that result to flaws in the design of the trial.”
Apr 15
5-min breathing workout lowers blood pressure as much as exercise, drugs (2021) colorado.edu · “IMST can be done in five minutes in your own home while you watch TV.”
Apr 14
A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as a steam turbine news.mit.edu · “On average, steam turbines reliably convert about 35 percent of a heat source into electricity, with about 60 percent representing the highest efficiency of any heat engine to date.”
Apr 13
How Intelligent Are Cats? (2004) messybeast.com · “Cats sat down and washed.”
Apr 10
The existence of true one-way functions depends on Kolmogorov complexity quantamagazine.org · “If they do not, cryptographers have shown, then secure cryptography is impossible.”
Apr 6
What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists (2016) aeon.co · “My clients know so little about current research in physics, they aren’t even aware they’re in a foreign country.”
Apr 4
The human genome is, at long last, complete rockefeller.edu · “But even after 20 years of upgrades, eight percent of our genome still remained unsequenced and unstudied.”
Apr 2

March 2022 12 posts

Turn your phone into a space monitoring tool esa.int · “Leave it by your window each night with your satnav positioning turned on and your phone will record small variations in satellite signals, gathering data for machine learning analysis of meteorology and space weather patterns.”
Mar 31
The Uselessness of Phenylephrine science.org · “It is found (according to the paper linked above) in 261 different OTC products, and it is a useless bait-and-switch on the consumer in every one of them.”
Mar 30
But life had other plans danlebrero.com · “Given that my wife didn’t recall talking with any angel lately, the simple explanation was that she was already pregnant when she went through the surgery.”
Mar 23
Angus Wallace: In-flight surgery with a coat-hanger and silverware en.wikipedia.org · “They sterilised their equipment in cognac, and began surgery by making an incision in the patient’s chest, but with no surgical clamps available, Wong had to hold the incision open with a knife and fork while Wallace inserted the catheter.”
Mar 17
I am the healthiest person I know, and I got cancer! seema.page · “Even though I had no symptoms, I decided to go meet an oncologist who did a biopsy, followed by a PET scan which confirmed that the lump was cancerous and was localized to the breasts.”
Mar 8
Lead Exposure in Last Century Shrank IQ Scores of Half of Americans today.duke.edu · “A new study calculates that exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood stole a collective 824 million IQ points from more than 170 million Americans alive today, about half the population of the United States.”
Mar 8
So You Want to Study Mathematics susanrigetti.com · “I think it is the purest and most beautiful of all the intellectual disciplines.”
Mar 7
Mathematically Correct Breakfast: How to Slice a Bagel into Two Linked Halves georgehart.com · “It is not hard to cut a bagel into two equal halves which are linked like two links of a chain.”
Mar 6
I'm not convinced by the new lab leak debunking slowboring.com · “I haven’t written about lab leak theory since because the boring truth is that we don’t know where Covid-19 came from, we probably aren’t going to find out, and very little of consequence actually hinges on the answer.”
Mar 5
A regular expression to check for prime numbers noulakaz.net · “If there is no match, then the number is prime.”
Mar 5
How I See Numbers csun.io · “When doing any sort of mental arithmetic or visualization of quantities, I picture numbers as shapes.”
Mar 3
How Does Perspective Work in Pictures? aaronhertzmann.com · “There is no such thing as correct perspective; all choices of perspective have advantages and disadvantages.”
Mar 2

February 2022 10 posts

Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company lincolnquirk.com · “[Coelux][3] makes a high-end artificial skylight which certainly looks awesome, but it costs upwards of $30k and also takes a lot of headroom in the ceiling.”
Feb 28
America’s most widely consumed cooking oil causes genetic changes in the brain universityofcalifornia.edu · “In all likelihood, it is not healthy for humans.”
Feb 24
Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness sloanreview.mit.edu · “Of the nearly 1 million soldiers in our sample, only 12% received an award of any type during the five years that we ran the study.”
Feb 22
How Relationship Satisfaction Changes Across Your Lifetime greatergood.berkeley.edu · “The researchers found that relationship satisfaction tends to decrease from age 20 to age 40.”
Feb 19
This scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories, and why science.org · “As the athletes’ ran more and more over weeks or months, their metabolic engines cut back elsewhere to make room for the extra exercise costs, Pontzer says.”
Feb 18
The Unreasonable Math of Type 1 Diabetes maori.geek.nz · “Managing T1D is walking on a knifes edge between DKA and Hypoglycemia by balancing blood glucose levels with insulin.”
Feb 17
Accelerating fusion science through learned plasma control deepmind.com · “In a paper published today in Nature, we describe how we can successfully control nuclear fusion plasma by building and running controllers on the Variable Configuration Tokamak (TCV) in Lausanne, Switzerland.”
Feb 17
Why won’t anyone teach me math? dailyprincetonian.com · “This begs the question: what interest does a department have in making it impossible to study?”
Feb 11
Computer Scientists Prove Why Bigger Neural Networks Do Better quantamagazine.org · “In their new proof, the pair show that overparameterization is necessary for a network to be robust.”
Feb 10
Nearly 1,000 mysterious strands revealed in Milky Way’s center news.northwestern.edu · “Now, the new image has exposed 10 times more filaments than previously discovered, enabling Yusef-Zadeh and his team to conduct statistical studies across a broad population of filaments for the first time.”
Feb 1

January 2022 9 posts

Moderna's HIV Vaccine Has Officially Begun Human Trials them.us · “The vaccine builds on technology developed by Moderna during their COVID-19 vaccine production, with the goal of using mRNA to boost HIV immunogens and prevent the virus from disabling B cells, which are essential to fighting disease.”
Jan 31
Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online royalsociety.org · “The report says there is little evidence that calls for major platforms to remove offending content will limit scientific misinformation’s harms and warns such measures could even drive it to harder-to-address corners of the internet and exacerbate feelings of distrust in authorities.”
Jan 30
No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation world-heart-federation.org · “The evidence is clear: any level of alcohol consumption can lead to loss of healthy life.”
Jan 20
GPS ciechanow.ski · “It’s fascinating how much complexity and ingenuity is hidden behind the simple act of observing one’s location in a mapping app on a smartphone.”
Jan 18
Statistical Rethinking (2022 Edition) github.com · “The unfortunate truth about data is that nothing much can be done with it, until we say what caused it.”
Jan 16
Engine Cooling - Why Rocket Engines Don't Melt everydayastronaut.com · “Engines need to reach this temperature in order to function correctly, but how can they survive this?”
Jan 13
Comprehensive Mask Testing armbrustusa.com · “There are hundreds of different brands making a lot of claims, that’s why we’re testing the filtration capabilities of every mask in our laboratory to see how they measure up.”
Jan 10
NASA's Webb Telescope Reaches Major Milestone as Mirror Unfolds nasa.gov · “The two wings of Webb’s primary mirror had been folded to fit inside the nose cone of an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket prior to launch.”
Jan 8
Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64 thecentersquare.com · “OneAmerica is a $100 billion insurance company that has had its headquarters in Indianapolis since 1877.”
Jan 2

2021 138 posts

December 2021 7 posts

Experimental depression treatment is nearly 80% effective in controlled study med.stanford.edu · “Neither the researcher administering the procedure nor the participant knew whether the participant was receiving real treatment.”
Dec 30
Sequencing your DNA with a USB dongle and open source code stackoverflow.blog · “Today, for about a thousand dollars, you can purchase a nanopore sequencer as a peripheral that connects to any computer via USB.”
Dec 26
A new coefficient of correlation arxiv.org · “No assumptions are needed on the distributions of the variables.”
Dec 25
Sleep technique used by Salvador Dalí really works livescience.com · “The researchers found that the participants who spent at least 15 seconds in the N1 stage had an 83% chance of discovering the hidden rule, compared with a 30% chance for those who remained awake.”
Dec 10
How a Kalman filter works, in pictures bzarg.com · “Surprisingly few software engineers and scientists seem to know about it, and that makes me sad because it is such a general and powerful tool for combining information in the presence of uncertainty.”
Dec 7
NASA Returns Hubble to Full Science Operations nasa.gov · “Hubble has been operating now for over 31 years, collecting ground-breaking science observations that have changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.”
Dec 7
Supersonic Projectile Exceeds Engineers Dreams: The Supersonic Trebuchet hackaday.com · “How about a whip-cracking, sonic-booming speed in excess of 450 meters per second!”
Dec 1

November 2021 15 posts

Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people? A Statistician's Perspective covid-datascience.com · “English adults under 60 who have watched the 1984 Ghostbusters movie are dying at twice the rate of people who have watched the 2021 Ghostbusters move the same age.”
Nov 28
Researchers' novel mind-body program outperforms other forms of treatment for chronic back pain bidmc.org · “Donnino and colleagues enrolled 35 participants, 18 to 67 years old with chronic back pain that lacked a clear physical origin.”
Nov 27
Soviet Rocket Engines everydayastronaut.com · “This article aims to summarize the background of well-known and not so well-known Soviet rocket engines, the history of their development, their main characteristics, and the rockets they flew on.”
Nov 27
Einstein Foundation to present the inaugural €500,000 Award for Promoting Quality in Research idw-online.de · “Paul Ginsparg is the founder of the preprint server arXiv.org, the first platform to exchange scientific discoveries among scientists immediately, openly and globally without review- and paywall restrictions.”
Nov 26
The World's Deadliest Thing the-angry-chef.com · “Just over two-hundred years later, that same substance would become the most valuable in the world, spawning a multi-billion-dollar industry.”
Nov 22
Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law following LSE report findings lse.ac.uk · “The review drew on over 300 existing scientific studies to evaluate evidence of sentience in cephalopods (including octopuses, squid and cuttlefish) and decapods (including crabs, lobsters and crayfish).”
Nov 22
Wolves make roadways safer, generating large economic returns to predator conservation pnas.org · “We show that, for the average county, wolf entry reduced DVCs by 24%, yielding an economic benefit that is 63 times greater than the costs of verified wolf predation on livestock.”
Nov 21
Bill of the Month: Critically ill woman skips ER after spouse's costly stitches npr.org · “In August, his wife, DeeAnn, feared going to the same emergency room where he was treated, delaying her diagnosis of Rocky Mountain spotted fever.”
Nov 20
How to Grow Sodium Chloride Crystals at Home crystalverse.com · “Many tutorials online make it look far easier than it actually is.”
Nov 17
Space debris forces astronauts on space station to take shelter in return ships space.com · “Price noted that the anti-satellite test created more than 1,500 pieces of orbital debris large enough to track, in addition to “hundreds of thousands of pieces of smaller orbital debris.””
Nov 15
These Mighty Shorebirds Keep Breaking Flight Records, And You Can Follow Along audubon.org · “Bar-tailed Godwits regularly travel more than 7,000 miles non-stop.”
Nov 15
How Not To Sort By Average Rating evanmiller.org · “Fortunately, the math for this was worked out in 1927 by Edwin B. Wilson.”
Nov 12
The Room of the Slaves: The Latest Discovery at Civita Giuliana pompeiisites.org · “While two of them are about 1.7 metres long, one bed measures just 1.4 metres, and may therefore have belonged to a young man or child.”
Nov 6
Organ transplant patients (maybe) don't get dementia. Here's why. trevorklee.com · “As you can see, dementia is almost absent in the calcineurin inhibitor group.”
Nov 3
Curves and Surfaces ciechanow.ski · “From fonts to animated movies, curves and surfaces constitute fundamental building blocks of many geometrical designs.”
Nov 2

October 2021 12 posts

It's hard to overstate what a scam academic and scientific publishing is pluralistic.net · “It’s run by an oligopoly of wildly profitable companies that coerce academics into working for free for them, and then sell the product of their labors back to the academics’ employers (often public institutions) for eye-popping sums.”
Oct 31
Female African Elephants Are Evolving Without Tusks Due to Ivory Poaching theswaddle.com · “Researchers found the number of tuskless female elephants in Mozambique increased by almost double over 30 years.”
Oct 27
Giant, free index to world's research papers released online nature.com · “Catalogue of billions of phrases from 107 million papers could ease computerized searching of the literature.”
Oct 27
Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021 nature.com · “Here we provide evidence that the Vikings were present in Newfoundland in ad 1021.”
Oct 20
FDA moves to allow hearing aids to be sold over the counter npr.org · “People with mild or moderate hearing loss could soon be able to buy hearing aids without a medical exam or special fitting, under a new rule being proposed by the Food and Drug Administration.”
Oct 19
Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as 'ignition' triggered in a lab imperial.ac.uk · “This has produced more energy than any previous inertial confinement fusion experiment, and proves ignition is possible, paving the way for reactions that produce more energy than they need to get started.”
Oct 12
Woman rocked awake by meteorite chunk crashing into her bedroom cbc.ca · “A charcoal-grey chunk of rock roughly the size of a melon had plummeted from space, tearing through Hamilton’s roof before coming to rest on her floral pillowcase, inches from where her head had been moments earlier.”
Oct 12
The American Bumblebee Has Nearly Vanished From Eight States smithsonianmag.com · “The bumblebee species have declined by 99 percent in New York.”
Oct 9
Real-world data show that filters clean COVID-causing virus from air nature.com · “The results suggest that air filters could be used to reduce the risk of patients and medical staff contracting SARS-CoV-2 in hospitals, the study’s authors say.”
Oct 9
The most counterintuitive facts in all of mathematics, computer science, and physics axisofordinary.substack.com · “Knowing just slightly more about the value of your car than a potential buyer can make it impossible to sell it”
Oct 5
Is this the simplest (and most surprising) sorting algorithm ever? arxiv.org · “It may look like it is obviously wrong, but we prove that it is in fact correct.”
Oct 5
A world first: Ocean drone captures video from inside a hurricane noaa.gov · “SD1045 is battling 50 foot waves and winds of over 120 mph to collect critical scientific data and, in the process, is giving us a completely new view of one of earth’s most destructive forces.”
Oct 1

September 2021 13 posts

What John von Neumann really did at Los Alamos 3quarksdaily.com · “He visited as a consultant a few times a year.”
Sep 27
The physics anomaly no one talks about: What’s up with those neutrinos? backreaction.blogspot.com · “That’s a 20 years old anomaly in neutrino physics which has been above the discovery threshold since 2018, but chances are you’ve never even heard of it.”
Sep 19
Life-Size Camel Sculptures in Saudi Arabia Are Older Than Stonehenge, Pyramids of Giza smithsonianmag.com · “Now, a new study suggests that this proposed timeframe was off by as much as 6,000 years.”
Sep 17
Leaded Gas Was a Known Poison the Day It Was Invented smithsonianmag.com · “It couldn’t be patented and GM couldn’t control its production.”
Sep 12
Fossil Fuel Capitalism Is Cutting Our Lives Short tribunemag.co.uk · “Air pollution is killing people around the world on average 2.2 years early, according to a new report.”
Sep 12
A Single Laser Fired Through a Keyhole Can Expose Everything Inside a Room gizmodo.com · “But researchers at the Stanford Computational Imaging Lab have expanded on a technique called non-line-of-sight imaging so that just a single point of laser light entering a room can be used to see what physical objects might be inside.”
Sep 9
New Math Book Rescues Landmark Topology Proof quantamagazine.org · “Today, few mathematicians understand what he did, and those who do are aging out of the field.”
Sep 9
MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy news.mit.edu · “That successful demonstration helps resolve the greatest uncertainty in the quest to build the world’s first fusion power plant that can produce more power than it consumes, according to the project’s leaders at MIT and startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS).”
Sep 8
Dogs distinguish human intentional and unintentional action nature.com · “Dogs clearly distinguished in their spontaneous behaviour between unwilling- and unable-conditions.”
Sep 5
200 Years Ago, Faraday Invented the Electric Motor spectrum.ieee.org · “Within a week of publication, Humphry Davy dealt his mentee a devastating blow by accusing Faraday of plagiarism.”
Sep 4
Melatonin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know slatestarcodex.com · “Using it as a pure hypnotic – a sleeping pill – is like using an AK-47 as a club to bash your enemies’ heads in.”
Sep 4
Experiments on a $50 DIY air purifier you can make in 30s dynomight.net · “If you’re in a hurry, this post says that if you strap two HEPA filters to a box fan, it will clear the air of basically all the particles we can measure, and it will do it faster than a commercial filter that costs twice as much.”
Sep 2
The Red Warning Light on Richard Branson’s Space Flight newyorker.com · “Aborting at that moment, however, would have dashed Branson’s hopes of beating his rival Bezos, whose flight was scheduled for later in the month, into space.”
Sep 1

August 2021 5 posts

FDA Approves First COVID-19 Vaccine fda.gov · “Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first COVID-19 vaccine.”
Aug 23
Finally, a Shot to Prevent Lyme Disease Could Be on Its Way outsideonline.com · “Lyme is treatable, and most people who are infected recover after a month of antibiotics if the disease is caught early.”
Aug 17
This Sweet White Flower Is Actually A Sneaky Carnivore, Scientists Discover npr.org · “A pretty little white flower that grows near urban centers of the Pacific Northwest turns out to be a killer.”
Aug 9
Why Thousands Of American Parents Are Sending Their Kids To 'Russian Math' wbur.org · “With 22,000 students at latest count, the school is the giant among Russian math programs, boasting 15 branches in Massachusetts, where it began, and 40 in total across the country.”
Aug 9
Space Station Incident Demands Independent Investigation spectrum.ieee.org · “How close the ISS had come to disaster is still an open question.”
Aug 8

July 2021 17 posts

New exotic matter particle, a tetraquark, discovered at CERN phys.org · “It is the longest-lived exotic matter particle ever discovered, and the first to contain two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks.”
Jul 30
Orbiter is now open source orbiter-forum.com · “I am still hoping to work on future enhancements of Orbiter, but I can’t make any promises or commitments.”
Jul 28
Naval Architecture ciechanow.ski · “When I first heard the term naval architecture, I thought it was the artistic practice of designing beautiful boats.”
Jul 27
Eyes wide shut: How newborn mammals dream the world they're entering news.yale.edu · “A new Yale study suggests that, in a sense, mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are even born.”
Jul 26
Please, enough with the dead butterflies! emilydamstra.com · “In the photo of a dead, pinned butterfly below, note that the trailing edge of the forewings (blue line) is perpendicular to the body’s axis (red line).”
Jul 25
Electromagnetism is a property of spacetime itself, study finds sciencex.com · “So what is the mutual relationship of electromagnetism and gravitation?”
Jul 24
Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise? blogs.bmj.com · “But about 20% of the time, said Ben Mol, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Monash Health, they would be wrong.”
Jul 19
The Alexander: Why did you build such a long piano? alexanderpiano.nz · “After finding a safe tension I tuned it to the lowest A on a piano by moving rocks along the wire.”
Jul 16
Focusing on Blue calebkruse.com · “One of my favorites is that the color blue is always out of focus for the human eye.”
Jul 16
How Many Numbers Exist? Infinity Proof Moves Math Closer to an Answer. quantamagazine.org · “For 50 years, mathematicians have believed that the total number of real numbers is unknowable.”
Jul 15
CASP14: what Google DeepMind's AlphaFold 2 really achieved, and what it means for protein folding, biology and bioinformatics blopig.com · “Their results are so incredibly accurate that many have hailed this code as the solution to the long-standing protein structure prediction problem.”
Jul 10
Compiling Rust is NP-hard niedzejkob.p4.team · “What I noticed, and would like to share with you today, is that the exhaustiveness checking performed by the Rust compiler on match patterns is a superset of the SAT problem.”
Jul 8
Psilocybin repairs 'brains cells damaged by depression' leafie.co.uk · “They found increases in the number of dendritic spines and in their size within 24 hours of administration of psilocybin.”
Jul 7
A New Kind of Information-Coding Seen in the Human Brain quantamagazine.org · “For the first time, Jacobs and two coauthors spied neurons in the human brain encoding spatial information through the timing, rather than rate, of their firing.”
Jul 7
Poisson's Equation mattferraro.dev · “We use Laplace’s equation to model any physical phenomenon where a scalar field is allowed to relax over time and we’re only interested in the final state.”
Jul 6
Soviet Venus Images mentallandscape.com · “The only existing images from the surface were returned from four of their landing craft.”
Jul 4
Simple, solar-powered water desalination news.mit.edu · “In this way, the team’s demonstration device can achieve an overall efficiency of 385 percent in converting the energy of sunlight into the energy of water evaporation.”
Jul 2

June 2021 9 posts

Challenges in the Diagnosis of Magnesium Status ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · “It is currently estimated that 60% of adults do not achieve the average dietary intake (ADI) and 45% of Americans are magnesium deficient, a condition associated with disease states like hypertension, diabetes, and neurological disorders, to name a few.”
Jun 27
Cuba's vaccine rivals BioNTech-Pfizer, Moderna dw.com · “Cuba’s health authorities said this week the domestically produced Abdala vaccine has proven to be 92% effective against the coronavirus in clinical trials.”
Jun 27
He Inherited A Devastating Disease. A CRISPR Gene-Editing Breakthrough Stopped It npr.org · “On Saturday, researchers reported the first data indicating that the experimental treatment worked, causing levels of the destructive protein to plummet in Doherty’s body and the bodies of five other patients treated with the approach.”
Jun 26
Blood test that finds 50 types of cancer is accurate enough to be rolled out theguardian.com · “It correctly identified when cancer was present in 51.5% of cases, across all stages of the disease, and wrongly detected cancer in only 0.5% of cases.”
Jun 25
2014 UN271: A possible dwarf planet from the Oort Cloud on a tour through the Solar System groups.io · “This new object, 2014 UN271, is not just unusual, but radically exceptional among all known bodies in the Solar System to date.”
Jun 20
Myths Debunked: Why Wide Tires Are NOT Slower renehersecycles.com · “There was no doubt that the narrowest tires were slower than slightly wider ones.”
Jun 14
'I was completely inside': Lobster diver swallowed by humpback whale off Provincetown capecodtimes.com · “He estimated he was in the whale for 30 to 40 seconds before the whale finally surfaced.”
Jun 11
Linus Torvalds on mRNA Vaccines lore.kernel.org · “The half-life of mRNA is a few hours.”
Jun 10
Scientists develop ‘cheap and easy’ method to extract lithium from seawater mining.com · “According to the researchers, the cell will probably need $5 of electricity to extract 1 kilogram of lithium from seawater.”
Jun 6

May 2021 7 posts

The most expensive number in engineering surjan.substack.com · “By my estimation, a single number cost $1.5 billion on the Space Shuttle.”
May 31
Space Debris Has Hit And Damaged The International Space Station sciencealert.com · “A piece of space debris too small to be tracked has hit and damaged part of the International Space Station - namely, the Canadarm2 robotic arm.”
May 31
Trials begin on lozenge that rebuilds tooth enamel dental.washington.edu · “Each lozenge deposits several micrometers of new enamel on the teeth via the peptide, which is engineered to bind to the damaged enamel to repair it while not affecting the mouth’s soft tissue.”
May 29
Immediate skin-to-skin contact with unstable newborns improves chances of survival medlifestyle.news · “In newborns with a very low birth weight, continuous skin-to-skin contact immediately after delivery, even before the baby has been stabilized, can lower mortality by 25%.”
May 27
Collusion Rings Threaten the Integrity of Computer Science Research m-cacm.acm.org · “I want to alert the community to a growing problem that attacks the fundamental assumptions that the review process has depended upon.”
May 26
A New Replication Crisis: Research that is Less Likely to be True is Cited More ucsdnews.ucsd.edu · “Papers in leading psychology, economic and science journals that fail to replicate and therefore are less likely to be true are often the most cited papers in academic research, according to a new study by the University of California San Diego’s Rady School of Management.”
May 22
China lands its Zhurong rover on Mars bbc.com · “Only the Americans have really mastered landing on Mars until now.”
May 15

April 2021 15 posts

Internal Combustion Engine ciechanow.ski · “The invention of the internal combustion engine in the 19th century has revolutionized transportation over land, water, and air.”
Apr 30
Flu Has Disappeared for More Than a Year scientificamerican.com · “Since then, cases have stayed remarkably low.”
Apr 29
Apollo 11 Astronaut Michael Collins Dies npr.org · “Unlike Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, he never walked on the moon.”
Apr 28
Better air quality is the easiest way not to die dynomight.net · “While most things that clearly improve health are well known, one is insanely underrated: Fixing your air.”
Apr 28
Pfizer is testing a pill that, if successful, could become first-ever home cure for COVID-19 montrealgazette.com · “Up to 60 volunteers, all clean-living adults aged between 18 and 60, are being given the first pill specifically designed to stop Covid-19.”
Apr 26
Feynman's Nobel Ambition asc.ohio-state.edu · “Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics.”
Apr 25
Earth Restored tobyord.com · “It wasn’t that Earth itself was any less beautiful, but that there were no photographs which did justice to that beauty.”
Apr 24
Great Malaria Vaccine News blogs.sciencemag.org · “A year-long trial in Burkina Faso has shown 77% efficacy, which is by far the record, and which opens the way to potentially relieving a nearly incalculable burden of disease and human suffering.”
Apr 23
Time flies in Google Earth’s biggest update in years blog.google · “With Timelapse in Google Earth, 24 million satellite photos from the past 37 years have been compiled into an interactive 4D experience.”
Apr 15
High quality audio makes you sound smarter tips.ariyh.com · “People rated a physicist’s talk as 19.3% better when they listened to it in high (vs low) audio quality.”
Apr 15
Particle mystery deepens, as physicists confirm that the muon is more magnetic than predicted sciencemag.org · “That’s nowhere near physicists’ standard for claiming a discovery: five times the total uncertainty.”
Apr 7
Novel HIV vaccine approach shows promise in "landmark" trial europeanpharmaceuticalreview.com · “According to the organisations, the vaccine successfully stimulated the production of the rare immune cells needed to generate antibodies against HIV in 97 percent of participants.”
Apr 4
How Doctors Die saturdayeveningpost.com · “Many people think of CPR as a reliable lifesaver when, in fact, the results are usually poor.”
Apr 3
Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors guzey.com · “The WHO never declared a sleep loss epidemic throughout industrialized nations.”
Apr 3
Latest EmDrive tests at Dresden University shows "impossible Engine" does not develop any thrust grenzwissenschaft-aktuell.de · “Our measurements refute all EmDrive claims by at least 3 orders of magnitude.”
Apr 1

March 2021 10 posts

Jump in cancer diagnoses at 65 implies patients wait for Medicare, according to Stanford study med.stanford.edu · “A quick exploratory analysis of their own practices showed a twofold increase in lung cancer surgeries in 65-year-old patients compared with 64-year-olds.”
Mar 31
Assemblies of putative SARS-CoV2-spike-encoding mRNA sequences for vaccines BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 github.com · “Despite their ubiquity, sequences are not always available for such RNAs.”
Mar 29
Milky Way, 12 years, 1250 hours of exposures and 125 x 22 degrees of sky astroanarchy.blogspot.com · “Total exposure time used is around 1250 hours between 2009 and 2021.”
Mar 17
Brain's 'wiring insulation' is one of the major factors of age-related brain deterioration port.ac.uk · “This new study found that the cells that drive myelin repair become less efficient as we age and identified a key gene that is most affected by ageing, which reduces the cells ability to replace lost myelin.”
Mar 16
Reprojecting the Perseverance landing footage onto satellite imagery matthewearl.github.io · “One thing that I found remarkable was the self-similarity of the martian terrain.”
Mar 14
Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts news.harvard.edu · “Despite that, she said, none have completely escaped the body’s post-vaccination immune responses.”
Mar 13
Remembering Allan McDonald: He Refused To Approve Challenger Launch, Exposed Cover-Up text.npr.org · “Refuse to sign, and he’d risk his job, his career and the good life he’d built for his wife and four children.”
Mar 7
Burned house horizon en.wikipedia.org · “Although there have been some attempts to try to replicate the results of these ancient settlement burnings, no modern experiment has yet managed to successfully reproduce the conditions that would leave behind the type of evidence that is found in these burned Neolithic sites, had the structures burned under normal conditions.”
Mar 6
'Hovering ship' photographed off Cornish coast by walker bbc.co.uk · “Images of what appears to be a hovering ship have been captured as the result of a rare optical illusion off the coast of England.”
Mar 5
Mars: Nasa's Perseverance rover sends stunning images bbc.com · “The picture was stitched together on Earth from 142 individual images.”
Mar 3

February 2021 12 posts

The Mars Helicopter is Online and Getting Ready to Fly universetoday.com · “Earth is the only planet in the solar system with aircraft capable of sustained flight.”
Feb 28
We haven't seen a quarter of known bee species since the 1990s nationalgeographic.com · “Bees in the rare Melittidae family, which provide us with blueberries, cranberries, and orchids, have plummeted by as much as 41 percent.”
Feb 22
A dishonest, indifferent, and toxic culture of the University of Florida huixiangvoice.medium.com · “The review process for his ISCA-2019 paper was broken, and most of the reviewers of the paper are “friends” of his advisor Dr. Tao Li.”
Feb 21
Iceberger joshdata.me · “Icebergs are less dense than water, so they always float with about 10% of their mass above the water.”
Feb 20
Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day righto.com · “Doing one round of SHA-256 by hand took me 16 minutes, 45 seconds.”
Feb 15
Half Doses of Moderna Produce Neutralizing Antibodies marginalrevolution.com · “As I wrote earlier, halving the dose is equivalent to instantly doubling the output of every Moderna factory.”
Feb 14
50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat npr.org · “The result was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, with no disclosure of the sugar industry funding.”
Feb 13
How Our Brutal Science System Almost Cost Us A Pioneer Of mRNA Vaccines wbur.org · “She tried again and again to win grants, and each time, her applications were rejected.”
Feb 13
Self-Organising Textures distill.pub · “A system of individual agents running the same learned local rule can solve surprisingly complex tasks.”
Feb 12
Scientists develop transparent wood that is stronger and lighter than glass cbc.ca · “The new technique is so cheap and easy it could literally be done in a backyard.”
Feb 7
How to lower the price of plant-based meat us14.campaign-archive.com · “The average price for meat alternatives sold in US grocers’ meat departments last year was $9.87/lb, twice the average price of beef ($4.82/lb), and fourfold the average price of chicken ($2.33/lb).”
Feb 6
Making Vaccine lesswrong.com · “All of the materials and equipment to make the vaccine cost us about $1000.”
Feb 4

January 2021 16 posts

Regular afternoon naps linked to improved cognitive function sciencefocus.com · “The study, published in online journal General Psychiatry, examined the sleep patterns of 2,214 healthy people aged 60 and over in several large cities in China, including Beijing and Shanghai.”
Jan 30
I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go? crystalprisonzone.blogspot.com · “To test whether science is indeed self-correcting, I tried reporting this misconduct via several mechanisms of scientific self-correction.”
Jan 27
Social media damages teenagers' mental health, report says bbc.com · “Heavy social media use was linked to negative wellbeing and self-esteem, regardless of a young person’s mental state, with more girls experiencing feelings of depression and hopelessness.”
Jan 27
Incredible time-lapse shows a single cell transforming into a salamander nationalgeographic.com · “Amazingly, photographer and filmmaker Jan van IJken has captured these first fleeting moments.”
Jan 25
The PGM-index pgm.di.unipi.it · “It is the first learned index with provably optimal time and space complexity guarantees.”
Jan 25
Lack of sleep, stress can lead to symptoms resembling concussion news.osu.edu · “In the national study, between 11% and 27% of healthy college athletes with no history of a recent concussion reported combinations of symptoms that met criteria for post-concussion syndrome (PCS) as defined by an international classification system.”
Jan 24
Forever Chemicals Are Widespread in U.S. Drinking Water scientificamerican.com · “Even when the researchers shifted their analysis to a higher level of 10 ppt, they still found some 18 million to 80 million Americans to be exposed.”
Jan 24
Crystal close up u-tokyo.ac.jp · “The observations confirm theoretical predictions about how salt crystals form and could inform general theories about the way in which crystal formation produces different ordered structures from an otherwise disordered chemical mixture.”
Jan 22
One hull crack located in ISS, another one suspected tass.com · “He underscored that air loss due to the crack are insignificant.”
Jan 22
The World's Oldest Story? Astronomers Say Global Myths About 'Seven Sisters' Stars May Reach Back 100,000 Years singularityhub.com · “After studying the motion of the stars very closely, we believe these stories may date back 100,000 years to a time when the constellation looked quite different.”
Jan 17
The First Blue Pigment Discovered in 200 Years Is Finally Commercially Available. Here's Why It Already Has a Loyal Following news.artnet.com · “The store sells the paint for $179.40 for just 40 ML.”
Jan 17
Chemistry of Cast Iron Seasoning: A Science-Based How-To sherylcanter.com · “The seasoning on cast iron is formed by fat polymerization, fat polymerization is maximized with a drying oil, and flaxseed oil is the only drying oil that’s edible.”
Jan 10
Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine appears effective against mutation in new coronavirus variants, study suggests cbc.ca · “The study by Pfizer and scientists from the University of Texas Medical Branch, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, indicated the vaccine was effective in neutralizing virus with the so-called N501Y mutation of the spike protein.”
Jan 9
How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus whyy.org · “According to Chuong, this protein actually came from an ancient retrovirus, the most famous of which is HIV.”
Jan 6
Philly scientist behind COVID vaccine tech was demoted by UPenn, yet she persisted billypenn.com · “When she was unable to find funding, Penn demoted her, taking her off the track to full professorship.”
Jan 3
Shooting High-Res Thermal Photos of Iceland to Show Nature at Work petapixel.com · “Since I wanted to image wide-angle landscapes in high resolution, and my thermal camera’s field of view was only about 24 degrees, I had to put together a DIY rig to panoramically scan the scene.”
Jan 2