标签：#Science

The lab will beam back data to train AI models to predict how proteins behind age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s and certain cancers behave.

Tilt a CD or DVD under a desk lamp and a band of color sweeps across its surface. The disc is not painted; it is a spiral of microscopic pits, packed so tightly that they act on light the way a finely ruled scientific instrument does. Each wavelength of white light leaves the surface at its own angle, and your eye sees the result fanned out as a rainbow. That is a diffraction grating at work. The same principle that decorates a CD is the engine inside spectrometers that identify chemical elements, tune lasers, and read the composition of distant stars. This article explains how a grating spreads light, how to compute the angles, and where the analysis goes wrong. Why this calculation matters A prism also splits white light, but a grating does it with far more control and far more precision. Because the spreading depends on a countable number — the spacing between lines — a grating can be designed to send a chosen wavelength to a chosen angle. That predictability is what makes it the heart of the spectrometer. Spectroscopy underpins a remarkable range of work. Astronomers read a star's chemistry and velocity from the dark lines in its spectrum. Chemists identify unknown compounds by the wavelengths they absorb. Telecommunications engineers use gratings to combine and separate the many wavelengths sharing a single optical fiber. In every case the first task is the same: given the grating and the light, predict the angle at which each wavelength emerges. Get that wrong and a spectral line lands on the wrong detector pixel, and the measurement is meaningless. The core formula A diffraction grating is a surface ruled with a large number of equally spaced, parallel lines. When light passes through or reflects off it, each line acts as a source of secondary waves. Those waves interfere, and they reinforce each other only in specific directions — the directions where waves from neighboring lines arrive exactly in step. The condition for that reinforcement is the grating equ

The industry is described as a "dual-track" race. On one side are incumbents (Big Tech) with massive infrastructure and deep pockets. On the other is a wave of nimble startups specializing in specific engineering, error-correction, and simulation challenges. The sector is currently transitioning beyond the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era toward fault-tolerant systems and commercial quantum advantage—the point where quantum machines reliably outperform classical supercomputers for useful tasks. These companies are building the foundational cloud-accessible platforms and hardware: Amazon Braket (AWS) IBM Google Quantum AI Microsoft NVIDIA These players are driving innovation in specific qubit modalities or niches: Superconducting Qubits: Rigetti Computing, IQM, and Atlantic Quantum. Trapped Ion: IonQ, Quantinuum, and Alpine Quantum Technologies. Neutral Atom: QuEra, PASQAL, and Atom Computing. Photonic: Xanadu, PsiQuantum, and Quandela. Silicon/CMOS: Diraq and Silicon Quantum Computing. Error Correction: Riverlane and Q-CTRL are focused on the "noise" problem, helping make unstable qubits behave predictably. Software & Algorithms: Classiq (design automation) and Multiverse Computing (finance/optimization applications). Quantum-Safe Cybersecurity: PQShield and evolutionQ are developing cryptographic solutions to protect data against future quantum threats.

Its issues with current nuclear safety standards are termed semantic, not physical.

Bullshit is cheap but truth is expensive. Anyone with half a brain cell can post wild misinformation that goes mega viral, which wastes the time and expertise of highly trained people who feel an obligation to inform others of the truth. Today I want you to meet one of those highly-trained people, Dr. Zachary Rubin, […]

It will take several weeks for the Link spacecraft to rendezvous with NASA's Swift observatory.

It will take several weeks for the Link spacecraft to rendezvous with NASA's Swift observatory.

Holes in socks have become a curious sight at this year’s World Cup. The reasons why are a weird mix of biomechanics, perception, and player habits.

A new study suggests that when our star becomes unstable in 5 billion years or so, Earth may avoid being engulfed by its fiery demise.

Notes: Prototype : a line that promises to a compiler that a certain function exists somewhere in the server or harddisk or files so it doesn't throw an error. In C, it is done with copying the declaration line of a function and adding a semicolon at the end of it. When we download / setup a specific programming language we download: the specific version of the language's compiler for your operating system and CPU the version of machine code of standard functions that the creator of the language has written that is fine tuned for our operating system and CPU the header files that has Only the prototype of the standard functions (aka functions like printf that are created by the creator of C) We need these in the compilation process: Pre-processing: compiler changing the header files calling line (#include line) with actual prototypes that are inside the header files and creates a temporary file with .i extension (temporary cause it gets deleted in the next step) that contains the prototype at the very top instead of #include line and your source code below compilation: compiler changes the entire contents of the .I file into assembly code (code written in assembly language). Here is why the specific version of compiler is important because every CPU has specific assembly language commands that are unique to it. Therefore when we setup a language we download specific assembly instructions for our own operating system and it comes handy in this step. Syntax check also happens in this step and the .I file also gets deleted. Now there comes a a.out file that we can actually see listed in our file explorer (but we only see the a.out file after the very end of compilation process but it does exist by this stage) Assembling: compiler changes assembly code (a.out file) to machine code (aka 0's and 1's). linking: compiler links your machine code and the machine code FOR the standard functions (because till now it ONLY has the prototypes of the function written in Binary, not

A study based on 47 million galaxies found that the cosmic web retains patterns on enormous scales, which could force a reevaluation of a pillar of cosmology.

A friend messaged me a photo of a sealed booster box last month with one question: "worth it?" He'd already decided, really. The chase card in that set was all over his feed, so the box felt like a good deal. I asked him to send me the pull rates instead of the hype, and we spent twenty minutes turning "worth it?" into something we could actually compute. That exercise is a small, self-contained data problem. It's also a good example of how a clean-looking model can hand you a confident number that doesn't survive contact with reality. If you like building little estimators, this one is worth doing carefully, because the interesting part isn't the formula. It's everything the formula assumes. The formula is the easy part Expected value of a box is a weighted sum. Each card you can pull has a probability and a market value, and you multiply the two across every slot the box gives you. That's it. Undergrad probability. Here's a stripped-down version for a hypothetical set. I'm using made-up numbers so nobody mistakes this for real pull data — the point is the shape of the computation, not the specific set. # One "hit slot" in a box: probabilities cover the full outcome space. # Values are illustrative market estimates in USD. hit_table = [ { " name " : " Alt-art chase " , " p " : 0.0125 , " value " : 180.00 }, { " name " : " Secret rare " , " p " : 0.030 , " value " : 45.00 }, { " name " : " Full-art rare " , " p " : 0.100 , " value " : 8.00 }, { " name " : " Standard hit " , " p " : 0.400 , " value " : 0.55 }, { " name " : " No notable hit " , " p " : 0.4575 , " value " : 0.06 }, ] assert abs ( sum ( row [ " p " ] for row in hit_table ) - 1.0 ) < 1e-9 ev_per_slot = sum ( row [ " p " ] * row [ " value " ] for row in hit_table ) hit_slots_per_box = 36 # e.g. one meaningful slot per pack ev_box = ev_per_slot * hit_slots_per_box print ( f " EV per slot: $ { ev_per_slot : . 2 f } " ) # $4.65 print ( f " EV per box: $ { ev_box : . 2 f } " ) # $167.31 The box costs $150 sea

Most developers use Git every day and understand almost none of it. That's not an insult, it's just the reality of how most people learn tools. You pick up the commands that get you through the day, you memorize the ones that fix the situations you keep breaking, and you build a working mental model that is almost entirely wrong at the mechanical level. The mental model most people carry looks something like this: Git tracks changes to files. When you commit, it saves a snapshot of what changed. Branches are pointers to different lines of work. That's roughly correct at a surface level, but it skips over the actual machinery in a way that leaves you confused every time something unexpected happens. Why does rebasing rewrite history? Why are commits immutable? Why does detached HEAD state exist? Why can you lose work in ways that feel impossible if Git is just tracking changes? The answers are all in the object model, and the object model is surprisingly simple once you sit with it. Git is a content-addressable filesystem Before any of the version control concepts, Git is a key-value store. You put content in, you get a hash back. You use that hash later to retrieve the content. That's the entire foundation, and everything else is built on top of it. The hash Git uses is SHA-1, producing a 40-character hexadecimal string. When you run git hash-object on a file, Git takes the content, prepends a small header describing the object type and size, and runs SHA-1 over the whole thing. The resulting hash is both the key and the identity of that content. Two files with identical content will always produce the same hash. A file whose content changes even slightly will produce a completely different hash. This is the first thing that breaks people's mental models. In most storage systems, identity is location: a file is "that file" because it lives at that path. In Git's object store, identity is content. The path a file lives at is separate metadata, not the file's identity

Chemicals from accidents that injured or killed people increased by nearly 50 percent in recent years.

Wildfire survivors call fire-prediction markets “morally reprehensible” and worry they could increase the risk of arson.

The heat of the Hadean may have come from impacts as well as the interior.

A large-scale clinical trial has shown that even long-term consumption of DHA—an omega-3 fatty acid found in abundance in oily fish—may not lead to improvements in cognitive function.

A new study has succeeded in mapping, on a global scale, the fungal network that supports plant life and helps regulate our planet’s climate.

Every big social network locks audience data behind auth walls and anti-bot systems. Bluesky went the other way. The AT Protocol is open by design, so public profile data (bios, follower counts, full follower and following lists) is queryable through a documented API without logging in. The whole surface is basically two endpoints: GET https://api.bsky.app/xrpc/app.bsky.actor.getProfile?actor=HANDLE GET https://api.bsky.app/xrpc/app.bsky.graph.getFollowers?actor=HANDLE&limit=100 There's also getProfiles for batching 25 handles per call. Follower lists paginate with a normal cursor , which still works on the graph endpoints. Search is a different story, cursor pagination 403s there now, but that's a topic for another post. For one-off lookups, curl is honestly all you need. Where it gets tedious Bulk. Thousands of profiles, follower exports that run into six figures, weekly snapshots for tracking. Pagination, rate-limit backoff, and stitching the pages together is boring code that has to run reliably. I packaged that part as an Apify actor: Bluesky Profile Scraper . Paste handles or profile URLs, optionally turn on follower/following export, and you get JSON or CSV back with a sourceProfile field linking each follower record to the profile it belongs to. $2 per 1,000 records, runs on a schedule if you want snapshots over time. What people use this for Vetting an influencer's real audience before paying them. Exporting who follows a competitor and what their bios say. Charting follower growth from weekly runs. And enrichment: find who's talking about you with a mentions monitor , then profile those authors to see their actual reach. Bluesky is the only major network right now where any of this is straightforward and stable. Worth using while it lasts.

Introduction I used to think "connecting to a database" was one skill. Turns out it's two: connecting to a database chilling quietly on your own laptop, and connecting to one living in the cloud, behind a login, in this case, an SSL certificate that will not let you in until you treat it with respect. This week I did both. Same tool (Power BI), same dataset, two very different vibes. Grab a coffee, here's the full walkthrough local PostgreSQL first, then Aiven's cloud version, side by side, screenshots and all. Part 1: Local PostgreSQL → Power BI Step 1 : Create a schema Nothing fancy, just giving my table a home: CREATE SCHEMA powerbi ; Step 2 : Import the dataset Right-click the new schema → Import Data in DBeaver, point it at your CSV, and let the wizard do its thing. Step 3 : Check the table landed properly A quick peek at the columns to make sure nothing got mangled on the way in. Step 4 : Connect Power BI In Power BI Desktop: Get Data → Database → PostgreSQL database. In the Server field, type localhost (or 127.0.0.1 ) and your database name. localhost Choose Import , hit OK, and log in with your local username and password. Click Load . That's it. That's the whole local experience. Part 2: Aiven PostgreSQL (Cloud) → Power BI Now for the part that actually taught me something. Step 1 : Grab your connection details Everything you need lives on Aiven's Overview page: Host, Port, Database name, User, SSL mode. Your service URI will look something like this (don't worry, this isn't a real password, Aiven masks it in the console): postgres : // avnadmin : •••••••• @ pg - xxxxxxxx - yourproject . c . aivencloud . com : 22016 / defaultdb ? sslmode = require Step 2 : Import the dataset into Aiven Same DBeaver wizard as before, just pointed at the Aiven connection instead of local. CREATE SCHEMA powerbi ; Step 3 : Aiven's certificate. Download the CA cert from the Overview page: Now here's the part that actually tripped me up: Power BI's PostgreSQL connector doesn't ha