If you want to help save US federal web pages and databases, here’s some advice from Naseem Miller: • Save existing websites to the Wayback Machine. The easiest way to do this is by installing the Wayback Machine extension for your browser. The add-ons and extensions are listed on the left-hand panel of the ..read more

Wow! Biologists seem to have discovered an entirely new kind of life form. They’re called ‘obelisks’, and you probably have some in you. They were discovered in 2024—not by somebody actually seeing one, but by analyzing huge amounts of genetic data from the human gut. This search found 29,959 new RNA sequences, similar to each ..read more

I visited an old estate today Whose gardens, much acclaimed throughout the world, Spread out beyond the gated entranceway In scenic splendors gradually unfurled. Bright potted blooms sprung beaming by the drive, While further off, large topiary yews Rose stoutly in the air. The site, alive With summer, traded sunned and shaded views. This composition—classical ..read more

  A farmer with a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage must cross a river by boat. The boat can carry only the farmer and a single item. If left unattended together, the wolf would eat the goat, or the goat would eat the cabbage. How can they cross the river without anything being eaten ..read more

Happy New Year! I recently wrote about how the Parker Solar Probe crossed the Sun’s ‘Alfvén surface’: the surface outside which the outflowing solar wind becomes supersonic. This is already pretty cool—but even better, the ‘sound’ here is not ordinary sound: it consists of vibrations in both the hot electrically conductive plasma of the Sun’s ..read more

Today, December 24th 2024, the Parker Solar Probe got 7 times closer to the Sun than any spacecraft ever has, going faster than any spacecraft ever has—690,000 kilometers per hour. WHEEEEEE!!!!!!! But the newspapers are barely talking about the really cool part: what it’s like down there. The Sun doesn’t have a surface like the ..read more

Some people think medieval astronomers kept adding ‘epicycles’ to the orbits of planets, culminating with the Alfonsine Tables created in 1252. The 1968 Encyclopædia Britannica says: By this time each planet had been provided with from 40 to 60 epicycles to represent after a fashion its complex movement among the stars. But this is complete ..read more

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published a book arguing that the Earth revolves around the Sun: De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. This is sometimes painted as a sudden triumph of rationality over the foolish yet long-standing belief that the Sun and all the planets revolve around the Earth. As usual, this triumphalist narrative is oversimplified. In the ..read more

The Eighth International Conference on Applied Category Theory (https://easychair.org/cfp/ACT2025) will take place at the University of Florida on June 2-6, 2025. The conference will be preceded by the Adjoint School on May 26-30, 2025. This conference follows previous events at Oxford (2024, 2019), University of Maryland (2023), Strathclyde (2022), Cambridge (2021), MIT (2020), and Leiden ..read more

101 captains 101 starship captains, bored with life in the Federation, decide to arrange their starships in a line, equally spaced, and let them fall straight into an enormous spherically symmetrical black hole—one right after the other. What does the 50th captain see, the moment their starship crosses the event horizon? (Suppose there’s no accretion ..read more