Why eclipses are important

A journey from the Halting Problem and Turing machines to hypercomputation, physical computation, and the question of whether reality can compute beyond Turing.

Soddy’s hexlet consists of a ring of six spheres, tangent to each other consecutively around the ring, and another ring of three consecutively-tangent spheres, so that all the spheres in the first…

Wildfires are no longer just seasonal anomalies, they are increasingly frequent, destructive, and unpredictable global events. By the time a traditional satellite pass registers a thermal anomaly, a…

For the next two weeks or so, my article “Targeting TDP-43 in ALS: Regulatory hurdles, trial design deficiencies, and the causal evidence gap for CTx1000″ is available for reading and…

In the range of sizes of nuclear reactors that are needed for a true nuclear renaissance they will come in three sizes. To use visual metaphors, size one, the microreactors at 1-15 MW, are no bigger…

Many prestigious scientific venues have suffered from papers containing hallucinated citations. GPTZero reports finding 100 hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers and 50 hallucinations in…

In the past we have written about disasters and how one can model peoples reactions to them or how one can mine social media or mobility data to explore people's responses to them. In a new paper…

Over the last 2+ weeks, there was only one clear night when I was traveling and away from home. The forecast for this upcoming week is looking bleak for astronomy....

We're used to seeing Earth from the ground level, and it's easy to picture the pale blue dot version as well. Today, we're taking a look at the Goldilocks zone between those two…

contrasting with the “true world” of impact cratering research and publications: 88th Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society 2026 (LPI Contrib. No. 3162)  5189.pdf ABSTRACT and…

Moon Monday #288: Realizations from fundamental physics at the heart of the rocket equation. Paired with memes for fun and poetry for ethics.

[[{“value”:”Terraforming, altering a planet’s atmosphere and surface to make it more Earth-like, has become a staple of science fiction. The benefit of successfully terraforming a…

Terraforming, altering a planet’s atmosphere and surface to make it more Earth-like, has become a staple of science fiction. The benefit of successfully terraforming a planet are huge in that…

Outside my apartment the sidewalks are paved with stone slabs. Some of these slabs are damaged and are marked for replacement with a neon pink X on them. I got curious whether I could use Markov's…

Here's a rather nice little video on Universe 25, a.k.a. the Mouse Utopia : This is something I've come across many times over the years. I'm sure I've read at least one long read on it, though I'm…

This is my first of a series of articles on one of the most fascinating concepts: the Normal distribution. You may know it by the more colloquial term “bell curve”. Normal Distribution Many things…

This post contains remaining parts of my DFG Heisenberg grant final report, by now long submitted and accepted by the DFG. I hope it will be of use, in particular to future DFG grant candidates. The…

这份笔记按化学感知、视觉、颜色、疼痛、温度、触觉、振动与声音，整理书中最值得继续追问的科学问题，并连接已经展开的独立文章。

在一间 4°C 的人工冬眠室里，人穿着短袖会立刻搓手取暖。十三纹地松鼠（thirteenlined ground squirrel）却蜷成一团，体温也降到约 4°C。它夏季每秒跳动五次以上的心脏，此时一分钟只跳五次。

One of my more strongly held mathematical opinions is that results which appear to be surprising or paradoxical (or just overly complex) are in fact bad results, and are often indicators of places…

Two important essays on AI in drug discovery landed in August. Both are worth your time. Both have the right intuitions. And one of them is subtly framing the wrong problem, in my opinion. The first…

Does crossing fields make your paper more disruptive, or just harder?

Otakar Borůvka was a Czech mathematician who is best known for his work in graph theory. Once, his friend Jindřich Saxel, an employee of the West Moravian Power Company, asked him for help optimizing…

Messier 33, also known as the Triangulum Galaxy, is one of our closest galactic neighbours. Located approximately 2.7 million light-years away in the ...

It happened again. A machine has solved a conjecture in linear algebra. it was a beautiful problem, now reduced to junk after letting Chat GPT run through it for 16 hours. Like for an other beautiful…

I'm excited to be heading to Billund on September 29th for a panel debate at [AFTRYK Festival](https://www.aftrykfestival.dk), billed as Denmark's first cross-disciplinary festival for students and…

I was recently asked to review a paper that piqued my curiosity. From the abstract it sounded as if it was a secondary analysis of a dataset that I had deposited in a repository. But the described…

Saloni Dattani: Every disease is a policy failure. A good overview of how far we’ve come in treating many diseases, but also a thoroughly depressing perspective and one that I can’t…

Do cells take joy in tidying? Absolutely! But how can they tell where the messes are? Any household knows that without cleaning and disposal, nothing else is possible. Things pile up, messes…

In case you weren't aware, in addition to the OMB proposed rule changes which just concluded their public comment period, the NSF has put forward proposed changes in their proposal procedures for…

Exploring Kendall's $\tau$ For one reason or another, I've been working with Kendall's $\tau$ lately. This post explores a little bit of my excitement with the statistic and some possible extensions.…

More meteors, more video processing.

Iron-rich, marble-sized concretions, formed through interaction with water over millions of years, weather out of the Navajo Sandstone formation in southern Utah. During searches for evidence of…

The Center for Open Science has announced that from November 16, 2026, no new projects can be created on the Open Science Framework. After February 19 all projects will become read-only, and…

There have been a lot of comparisons on social media with the drought of 1976. And there also seems to be a common topic of people denying that climate change is a factor in the current heatwave, as…

I used to be scared about climate change; but then I read Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario. Now I think that the world will be lucky to reach four degrees. Annie Jacobsen’s…

Recently, an El Nino event was declared due to what has occurred to oceanic waters off the west coast of South America. Generally, an El Nino event reduces rainfall across much of Australia,…

A short poem about the recent heatwave and subsequent fires in the UK