Topic
science
- Organized knowledge
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
- Humongous Fungus
In LibertyRPF's latest newsletter, he makes brief mention of the "Humongous fungus", an Armillaria ostoyae fungus that covers roughly 2,385 acres of Oregon forest, and weighs an estimated 35,000 tons. When you read en…
- The Two Enlightenments
Differentiating two different variants of The Enlightenment:
- Physics
Kármán vortex streets in nature.
- Map Of Human Metabolic Pathways
Map of humanmetabolic pathways. (via @burny_tech)
- Hot Dogs and Process Replication
Stuart Buck with a fascinating piece on the seemingly simple but deceivingly hard process of replicating studies. Two labs were collaborating on a breast cancer study, and ran into surprising challenges getting the sa…
- Illustrations By Naturalist Ernst Haeckel
Illustrations by naturalistErnst Haeckel. From his collection Kunstformen der Natur.
- The Two Enlightenments
We learn about "The Enlightenment" as a singular entity, a historical age associated with rationality, scientific inquiry, humanism, and liberty. The Enlightenment and scientific revolution were defining moments that…
- Why Evolution Has No Goal
Jason Fried recently wrote that we should teach iteration as a subject, or technique at least, in schools. Another subject wildly undertaught is evolution. Not just the "creation vs. evolution" Big Picture story of ho…
- Interview with Richard Rhodes, on the Making of the Atomic Bomb
This is a phenomenal interview with Richard Rhodes, author of the legendary The Making of the Atomic Bomb, an expansive history of the Manhattan Project and the development of nuclear weapons technology. Dwarkesh Shah…
- Lessons from the Invention of the Thermometer
This piece from Anton Howes gets at one of the key insights about how innovation works: it doesn't happen through sudden bursts of insight from thin air — it requires the combination of the right simmering ingredients…
- Patrick Collison on Progress Studies
Ezra Klein recently hosted Stripe founder Patrick Collison on his podcast for a deep dive into his thinking on progress studies. Tracking down the origins of what generates progress, and what compels things like subst…
- BigThink's Progress Issue
Online magazine BigThink has just published a full issue dedicated to progress studies. Lots of great stuff here from noteworthy folks like Tyler Cowen, Hannah Ritchie, Kevin Kelly, and many more.
- Portals Into Earth
From John McPhee's Annals of the Former World: Geologists on the whole are inconsistent drivers. When a roadcut presents itself, they tend to lurch and weave. To them, the roadcut is a portal, a fragment of a regional…
- Subterranean Trees of Magma
From the world of geophysics, a massive-scale seismic research project has been happening surrounding the island of Réunion, a shield volcanic dome over an Indian Ocean hotspot. Researchers have been using a stream of…
- Weekend Reading: Liberal Science, Roam42, and JTBD Examples
🧠 In Defense of Being Offensive Jonathan Rauch on pluralism and the necessity of disagreement in the search for truth. His book Kindly Inquisitors was first published in 1993, but is as relevant today as ever. The bo…
- Science: The Endless Frontier
Vannevar Bush's seminal report to President Truman, making the case for government support for foundational scientific research (and pushing to create the NSF). Previously: Process Not Products — on Bush's work with t…
- Why Did It Take So Long to Invent X?
Jason Crawford is maintaining this list on Roots of Progress, an archive of inventions that seemingly could've been uncovered earlier than they were, based on what precursor knowledge would've been required. This one…
- Progress is Not Automatic
One of the key insights coming out of the progress studies movement seems like a simple idea on the surface, but it's an important core thesis: that progress is not an inevitability. We don't see new inventions, innov…
- Science, Innovation, and Longevity
This conversation with José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente on Erik Torenberg's podcast was an expansive cover of more topics than I think I've ever heard discussed on a single podcast. A brief sampling of the subje…
- Weekend Reading: Invading Markets, Sleep Deprivation, and the Observer Effect
🎖️ Commandos, Infantry, and Police Jeff Atwood on Robert X. Cringely's descriptions of three groups of people you need to "attack a market": Whether invading countries or markets, the first wave of troops to see batt…
- Weekend Reading: Dracones, Calendars, and Science 2.0
🐉 Hic Sunt Dracones Adam Elkus with a great essay on the current moment: “Is this as bad as 1968?” is an utterly meaningless question precisely for this underlying reason. People do not invoke 1968 because of the obj…
- The Distribution of Scientific Discoveries
I really enjoyed this post from Jerry Neumann exploring the structure of how technological and scientific progress happens. Referencing the well known work of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, he demonstrates how technolog…
- Funding Models for Science
The topic of funding has been kicking around with the coronavirus. Fastgrants launched a few weeks ago and has already awarded grants to 97 different research proposals. Roots of Progress breaks down various funding m…
- Ken Burns Presents: The Gene
Ken Burns is producing a documentary series adapted from Siddhartha Mukherjee's book The Gene: An Intimate History. It's a history of genetics and the human genome. It was one of my favorite books from 2017. Looking f…
- Wernher von Braun and the Moon Landing
This is a neat clip from Walt Disney's Disneyland "Disneyland") TV series. Wernher von Braun explains the future technology that'll take us to the Moon, in 1955, several years before the Mercury program even began.
- Blood is Thicker Than Water
This article is excerpted from Steve Stewart-Williams's latest book, The Ape that Understood the Universe. On the purposes of altruism and kin selection: The details of Hamilton’s theory are complex, but the basic ide…
- Microgravity Will Change How We Make Everything
Bloomberg has been publishing this video series on future technologies called "Giant Leap." It's well-done and a nice use of YouTube as a medium. This one explores a number of new companies doing R&D in microgravity m…
- Weekend Reading: Figma Multiplayer, Rice vs. Wheat, and Tuft Cells
🕹 How Figma’s Multiplayer Technology Works An interesting technical breakdown on how Figma built their multiplayer tech (the collaboration capability where you can see other users’ mouse cursors and highlights in the…
- A Network of Science
A beautiful visualization project from Nature converts 150 years of scientific papers into a 3-dimensional network diagram, making concrete the network of citations and references linking together the history of disco…
- Weekend Reading: Blot, Hand-Drawn Visualizations, and Megafire Detection
📝 Blot.im Blot is a super-minimal open source blogging system based on plain text files in a folder. It supports markdown, Word docs, images, and HTML — just drag the files into the folder and it generates web pages.…
- Age of Invention
A newsletter from Dr. Anton Howes, a historian studying innovation and the Industrial Revolution. I’m a historian of innovation. I write mostly about the causes of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, focusing on the live…
- Does Invention Come from Deprivation or Plenty?
Another interesting post from Roots of Progress, following up from the previous one, which asked why it took so long to invent the bicycle. This question on invention is an interesting one. My first reaction is to agr…
- The Simple Idea Behind Einstein’s Greatest Discoveries
On symmetry as an underlying property of physics: The relationship that eventually mattered most to Einstein’s legacy was symmetry. Scientists often describe symmetries as changes that don’t really change anything, di…
- The Bacteria Light of the Future
A French startup company called Glowee is working on being able to produce light using bioluminescence: Glowee reinvents light production with technology nature has already created to make lighting more sustainable an…
- Have Clock, Will Travel
NASA has developed a portable atomic clock that would allow deep space probes to navigate on their own. As Geoff Manaugh notes here, when you're traveling in space with no access to a frame of reference, travel time f…
- Watch Karl Friston Explain Free Energy
Neuroscientist Karl Friston is the world's leading authority on brain imaging science and on the forefront of our understanding of how brains actually work. He's the creator of the free energy principle, an idea that…
- Surfing Uncertainty
The predictive processing model is a cognitive framework for modeling how the brain synthesizes information from two channels: The "bottoms up" stream of raw data coming in through our senses for processing The "top d…
- Fermat's Library
This group is building some interesting tools to expose and enable sharing and collaboration on academic papers. We develop software to help illuminate academic papers. Just as Pierre de Fermat scribbled his famous la…
- Process Not Products
In his new book Loonshots, author Safi Bahcall uses the concept of phase transitions to analyze how companies work. When a substance changes phase, like water going from solid to liquid, the same exact substance is fo…
- Weekend Reading: T Cells, Creating Proteins, and SNI Awards
🦠 T is for T Cell After reading The Breakthrough, I've been doing more reading on immunotherapy, how it works, and what the latest science looks like. Another book in my to-read list is An Elegant Defense, a deeper s…
- The Origin and Transmutation of Species
Since The Origin of Species, Darwin’s theory of natural selection has been the foundation of our thinking about the evolution of life. Along the way there have been challengers to the broadness of that theory, and Dav…
- Cargo Cult Science
The physicist Richard Feynman's famous 1974 commencement address on theories that pretend to be scientific: "But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves—of having utter scientific integrity—is, I’m sor…
- Language and Progress
A wide-ranging conversation on linguistics, human scientific advancement, and enlightenment thinking with Steven Pinker and John McWhorter. Linguistics is endlessly fascinating. I might be an outlier, but I absolutely…
- Bits & Genes
As I started The Gene, I was assuming it’d be framed as a history of genetics. There’s a significant amount of history on the discoveries made the last few centuries as scientists gained an understanding of how heredi…
- Underwater Flight
Graham Hawkes has a fascinating approach to undersea research and exploration. Rather than focusing on deep ocean submersibles (which he's built plenty of), his company is currently building underwater airplanes, craf…