The hottest Science Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
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Top Science Topics

Signal Biosciences

ASeq Newsletter • 21 implied HN points • 17 Mar 26
🔬 Science Molecular Biology Genomics Biotechnology Diagnostics
  1. They’re building a high-plex PCR approach that runs on standard qPCR and dPCR machines, already showing up to 15 targets in dPCR and a 7‑target qPCR prototype, with aims of roughly 50 and 40 targets respectively.
  2. The key idea is to move fluorescent signal generation out of the genomic amplification and into a parallel isothermal secondary reaction; probe cleavage during PCR produces a cleaved tail that triggers separate signal‑generating chemistries, effectively acting like a barcode.
  3. By decoupling signal chemistry from amplification and pooling fluorophores separately, the method could let developers multiplex many targets in a single reaction without needing specialized instrumentation.

How Your Survey Responder Lies

Knowingless • 1364 implied HN points • 15 Jan 26
🔬 Science Social Science Behavioral Science Experimental Design Statistics
  1. Where and how you ask matters: public, informal polls (like Twitter) invite people to joke or troll on simple/funny questions, while private or more formal surveys tend to get more accurate answers.
  2. Some questions are especially vulnerable to ego or incentives—people give more flattering or different answers when they expect feedback or visibility (e.g., claiming to be above average or reporting horniness), but other sensitive items (like certain sexual fantasies) may not change much.
  3. There’s no one-size-fits-all rule for survey reliability; good survey design requires thinking about your audience’s incentives and visibility, testing specific questions, and adjusting phrasing or format to reduce trolling and bias.

Scent, In Silico

Asimov Press • 432 implied HN points • 16 Feb 26
🔬 Science Neuroscience Evolution Chemistry Computational Biology Machine Learning Biotechnology
  1. Smell is an ancient, highly combinatorial sense driven by hundreds of receptor types, so odors come from complex mixtures and are inherently subjective.
  2. New computational tools like graph neural networks create odor embeddings that map molecules into a perceptual space, letting machines predict smells and design novel odorants.
  3. Digitizing scent promises faster fragrance discovery, diagnostics, safer repellents, and more sustainable synthetic alternatives, while also raising questions about authenticity and how we value natural versus machine-made ingredients.

Ideas for Biotechnology BBNs

FreakTakes • 26 implied HN points • 13 Mar 26
🔬 Science Biotechnology Synthetic Biology Protein engineering Diagnostics Research Funding
  1. Flowers by Design: engineer new flower traits across many species to make beautiful, bespoke plants and to uncover general principles of plant development that can translate to food crops.
  2. Biosensor for Anything: build a platform of protein or cell-based sensors plus large datasets and predictive models so we can cheaply and reliably detect many molecules and signals in real-world samples.
  3. Proteins for Pennies: develop a fast, low-cost protein fabricator or "printer" to make any protein for pennies, cutting testing costs and enabling cheaper therapeutics and faster AI-driven design.

Sarmal - FLASH Sequencing!

ASeq Newsletter • 14 implied HN points • 18 Mar 26
🔬 Science Genomics Molecular Biology Biotechnology DNA Sequencing Biochemistry Research Methods
  1. Sarmal is a new company working on DNA sequencing and is pitching a technology called FLASH.
  2. FLASH stands for Fluorescence Activation by Serial Hybridization and is described as involving a polymerase, but the explanation and figure are unclear.
  3. There is a patent for the technology, and deeper details are gated behind a paid subscription paywall.
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Great scientists follow intuition and beauty, not rationality

The Intrinsic Perspective • 33817 implied HN points • 30 Dec 24
🔬 Science Physics Mathematics Philosophy History Psychology
  1. Great scientists often rely on their gut feelings and a sense of beauty rather than just cold hard logic. This mix of intuition leads to important discoveries.
  2. Famous scientists aren't just rational thinkers; they have quirky beliefs and passions that drive their creativity. This uniqueness helps them come up with groundbreaking ideas.
  3. There's a complex balance between formal science and the imaginative, intuitive side. Embracing both can push the boundaries of what we understand about the universe.

How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Lynn's National IQ Estimates

Astral Codex Ten • 31522 implied HN points • 15 Jan 25
🔬 Science Psychology Education Anthropology Statistics Sociology
  1. IQ differences between groups may not be purely genetic and can be influenced by environmental factors like nutrition and education. This means that poorer conditions in some countries can lead to lower IQ scores.
  2. People often perceive those with low IQs differently based on specific syndromes, which can cause various functional deficits. A person with a low IQ might still lead a normal life in their context.
  3. The gap in IQ scores between different groups suggests there's potential for improvement through development initiatives. Better nutrition, health care, and education can help raise IQ scores in underdeveloped areas.

Weekly Dose of Optimism #181

Not Boring by Packy McCormick • 189 implied HN points • 20 Feb 26
🔬 Science Energy Nuclear Biotechnology Artificial Intelligence Space Immunology Materials
  1. Heron Power raised $140M to mass-produce modular, software-defined solid-state transformers that use wide-bandgap semiconductors, can handle DC (so some customers can skip inverters), and aim to modernize and shorten supply bottlenecks in the grid.
  2. A new nasal vaccine protected animals against many respiratory viruses, bacteria, and allergens, suggesting a future seasonal spray or rapid pandemic stopgap; human trials are next to check how long protection lasts and whether it’s safe.
  3. David Silver secured $1B to build AI that learns from its own experience, pushing toward an "Era of Experience" where agents improve by interacting with environments rather than just imitating static data.

Sex Differences in Intelligence

Cremieux Recueil • 295 implied HN points • 20 Feb 26
🔬 Science Psychology Cognitive Science Psychometrics Statistics
  1. Average general intelligence (g) is essentially the same for men and women. Any mean gap is vanishingly small (on the order of a few tenths of an IQ point) and not practically meaningful.
  2. Men show greater variability in intelligence and test scores, producing more males at both the high and low extremes of the distribution.
  3. Most observed sex differences come from specific skills and test-level abilities (e.g., processing speed, technical knowledge, math/verbal), which appear more malleable and can change with development — for example, early female advantages often fade by adulthood.

Complexity Thoughts: Issue #45

Complexity Thoughts • 139 implied HN points • 11 Oct 24
🔬 Science Evolution Artificial Intelligence Neuroscience Complex Systems
  1. New ideas in network science can help understand complex systems better. This approach looks at how systems behave over time, rather than just focusing on stable points.
  2. The evolution of multicellular organisms has led to many new species and ecosystems. Key innovations in multicellularity help organisms adapt and thrive in different environments.
  3. Research shows that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) face limits in recognizing patterns. This limitation is linked to the complexity of the data they're trained on, raising questions about their reliability.

Where We're Going, We Still Need Idiots

Everything Is Amazing • 1751 implied HN points • 24 Dec 25
🔬 Science Astronomy Archaeology Energy Technology Anthropology Psychology
  1. Choosing curious optimism over cynicism makes exploring science and the world more joyful, even if it sometimes leads to mistakes. Sharing those mistakes helps others learn and keeps conversation constructive.
  2. Small creative acts and practical inventions can make a real difference in everyday life, from brightening public spaces to helping people sleep safely. Simple solutions like knitted decorations and solar-powered bedding show care and cleverness matter.
  3. New discoveries keep rewriting what we thought we knew, from evidence of much earlier fire-making to an oddly shaped exoplanet with a strange atmosphere. The universe is weirder and more fascinating than our old models expect.

Antigravity and the Deep State

Tao Lin • 959 implied HN points • 06 Aug 24
🔬 Science Physics Technology Engineering Military UFOs
  1. Antigravity is the idea of controlling gravity, but most scientists say it's impossible based on current physics theories.
  2. Some researchers believe that experiments with antigravity technology started over a century ago and involved famous inventors like Nikola Tesla.
  3. In the 1950s, there was much excitement about antigravity and its potential for new aircraft, but after that, discussions stopped, possibly because the technology became classified.

What It's Like To Be A Worm

Asimov Press • 619 implied HN points • 01 Feb 26
🔬 Science Neuroscience Consciousness Animal Behavior Ethics Cognitive Science
  1. Sentience means both having subjective experience (being conscious) and having valence (experiences that feel good or bad), and many real cases sit near the boundary so it’s often hard to tell who truly feels anything.
  2. Behaviors people use as evidence for feeling—like avoiding harm or making trade-offs—can be produced by very simple or unconscious circuits, so we need neural-level data rather than behavior alone.
  3. New tools (connectomics, fMRI, calcium imaging, optogenetics) let us probe brains at fine scales, which is essential because getting sentience right has big ethical and practical consequences, but this research is hard and still far from resolving key questions.

On Personality Psychology

In My Tribe • 303 implied HN points • 07 Feb 26
🔬 Science Psychology Personality Social Psychology Behavioral Science Genetics Research Methods
  1. Personality traits only nudge the odds; the situation and the people around someone usually explain behavior better than fixed “types” do.
  2. Successful builders often show persistence, agency, and resilience, but survivorship bias means sticking with something doesn’t guarantee success for most people.
  3. The path from genes to personality to behavior is messy, so genetic predictors are weak and experiences, relationships, and context matter a lot.

Your Review: Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia

Astral Codex Ten • 11287 implied HN points • 11 Jul 25
🔬 Science Neuroscience Research Methods Alzheimer's Scientific Communication Experimental Design
  1. The structure of scientific papers can create a misleading impression of how research actually happens. Often, real research involves lots of trial and error, not just a straight path from question to answer.
  2. The amyloid cascade hypothesis, which suggests that amyloid plaques in the brain cause Alzheimer's, has been heavily focused on, but recent studies suggest it might not be the whole story. This has led to wasted research and funding on treatments that may not work.
  3. When reading scientific papers, it's important to think critically and not just accept the conclusions presented. Questions about what is missing or what alternative explanations exist can reveal more about the validity of the research.

The Other Type of Flynn Effect

Cremieux Recueil • 235 implied HN points • 23 Feb 26
🔬 Science Psychology Psychometrics Statistics Demography Education Research Methods
  1. Many reported Flynn and anti-Flynn effects are driven by measurement bias—tests change meaning across cohorts and norms get obsolete—so gains often reflect test-taking sophistication more than real changes in general ability.
  2. Some apparent cohort trends are actually sampling or compositional artifacts, for example later-born children tending to have more advantaged parents, and those apparent gains or losses often disappear in within-family (sibling) comparisons.
  3. Robust conclusions require checking measurement invariance, using within-family designs, and guarding against collinearity and low power; when those methods are applied, large population IQ shifts usually shrink or vanish.

Counting to Epsilon Naught

Infinitely More • 35 implied HN points • 04 Mar 26
🔬 Science Mathematics Set Theory Logic Foundations
  1. Counting ordinals continues past the finite numbers to ω, then ω+1, ω+2, and onward through blocks like ω·2, ω·3, … so that each new limit ordinal begins a new ω-long era.
  2. By iterating these constructions and forming longer and longer exponential towers—ω, ω^ω, ω^(ω^ω), …—we reach ever higher ordinals, and the supremum of all finite such towers is the ordinal ε0.
  3. ε0 is the first ordinal fixed point of exponentiation by ω (so ω^ε0 = ε0), and there is a computable notation system for all ordinals below ε0 with important applications like Goodstein’s theorem and the Hydra game.

Relax, Microplastics Aren’t Killing You

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 741 implied HN points • 22 Jan 26
🔬 Science Environmental Toxicology Epidemiology Methodology Public Health Ecology
  1. Microplastics are everywhere and do pose real ecological risks. But alarmist claims that they are immediately causing major human diseases aren’t supported.
  2. A high‑profile study claiming plastic in human brains used a detection method that can’t reliably distinguish plastic from ordinary fats, so its results are likely false.
  3. Experts have criticized and reversed those dramatic claims, showing we need better methods and more careful interpretation before linking microplastics to serious human health effects.

Trò chơi của Diophantus

Thái | Hacker | Kỹ sư tin tặc • 2037 implied HN points • 27 Jun 24
🔬 Science Mathematics History Physics Astronomy Data science
  1. The game of Diophantus, an ancient Greek mathematician, has had a lasting impact on cryptography and internet security, with the basis of elliptic curve cryptography originating from his mathematical puzzles.
  2. Diophantus's famous book 'Arithmetica' went missing for centuries but resurfaced to contribute to the advancements in mathematics, leading to significant discoveries like Fermat's Last Theorem.
  3. The study of elliptic curves, inspired by concepts like Kepler's study of ellipses, has become a central focus in mathematics, intersecting various branches like number theory, algebra, and geometry, and even impacting modern technology such as Bitcoin security.

The Smoking Gun

Nepetalactone Newsletter • 10633 implied HN points • 19 Jan 24
🔬 Science Research Health Impact
  1. The evidence strongly supports that COVID-19 was made in a lab.
  2. There is a debate within the community on various strategies to address pandemic-related issues.
  3. The focus should shift towards examining the origins of the virus and preventing future lab leaks.

Puzzling out elephant longevity

Trevor Klee’s Newsletter • 2014 implied HN points • 07 Dec 25
🔬 Science Evolution Genetics Aging Immunology Physiology Molecular Biology
  1. Elephants' low cancer rates and long lives are tied to many non-identical TP53 copies—retrogenes and a reanimated pseudogene—that work together with their immune and DNA-regulatory systems.
  2. Other long-lived animals like bats use different strategies, emphasizing DNA repair and immune modulation along with regulated p53 activity rather than just more cell-suicide signals.
  3. Longevity is multi-factorial and species-specific, so a single explanation (like extra TP53 copies) is incomplete and can't be copied into another species without integrating many other systems.

Twin heritability models can tell you whatever you want to hear

The Infinitesimal • 719 implied HN points • 09 Aug 24
🔬 Science Genetics Research Methods Statistical Analysis Heritability Cultural transmission
  1. Twin heritability models can produce different estimates of how much traits are influenced by genetics versus environment. This can lead to confusion about what is truly inherited and what is shaped by upbringing.
  2. Cultural factors along with genetic factors play a significant role in shaping traits. Sometimes, what seems genetic can actually be environmental influences like parenting styles, which complicate our understanding of inheritance.
  3. Recent studies suggest that assumptions made in traditional twin studies might not be entirely accurate. By including more family relationships and considering cultural impacts, researchers can get a clearer picture of what really contributes to traits.

But good sir, what is electricity?

lcamtuf’s thing • 18977 implied HN points • 23 Feb 25
🔬 Science Electricity Physics Chemistry Electronics Materials
  1. Electricity is about how electrons interact with atoms. Electrons can move from one place to another, creating electric current in conductive materials like metals.
  2. Conductors, like metals, allow electrons to flow freely, while insulators hold onto their electrons tightly. This difference determines how well materials conduct electricity.
  3. The movement of electrons in a wire is what allows us to use electricity for various tasks. It can be quick, but individual electrons move slowly compared to the speed at which electrical signals travel.

A Brief History of Xenopus

Asimov Press • 361 implied HN points • 09 Feb 26
🔬 Science Biology Genetics History
  1. Xenopus frogs became a lab staple after their eggs were used as a fast, reusable pregnancy test, which flooded research centers with animals and made them easy-to-use model organisms.
  2. Their large, manipulable eggs and cell-free egg extracts let scientists probe development and cell biology directly, producing landmark results like the organizer graft experiments, discoveries about the cell cycle and spindle assembly, and the first cloning from an adult cell.
  3. Xenopus laevis's tetraploid genome made genetics difficult, so researchers turned to the diploid X. tropicalis and later genetic tools; despite those complications, both species remain important models for developmental biology, drug testing, and other experiments.

Metaphors for Biology: Time

Asimov Press • 515 implied HN points • 28 Jan 26
🔬 Science Molecular Biology Biochemistry Cell Biology Neuroscience Evolution
  1. Biological events occur across an enormous range of speeds — from ultrafast molecular vibrations and ion channel openings to much slower diffusion and chemical reactions.
  2. Proteins are built, folded, act, and decay on wildly different schedules — transcription and translation can take seconds to days in the metaphor, enzymes can be lightning-fast or slow, and protein lifetimes range from minutes to millions of years.
  3. Comparing biology to human technology and behavior emphasizes these contrasts: electronics and engines can outpace many protein machines, neural processing and muscle movement dominate reaction time, and the full span of biological time covers roughly 24 orders of magnitude, so evolution needs a different time metaphor.

REPOST: Science is a strong-link problem

Experimental History • 17893 implied HN points • 04 Feb 25
🔬 Science Research Methods Science Policy
  1. There are two types of problems: weak-link problems, where the overall quality depends on the weakest part, and strong-link problems, where the best part matters most. Understanding this helps us solve issues better.
  2. Science is often treated like a weak-link problem, focusing on stopping bad research rather than promoting great ideas. This approach can hold back progress in scientific discovery.
  3. To improve science, we should shift our mindset to supporting strong ideas and innovative research. This means caring less about keeping out the bad and more about encouraging the good.

Genomic prediction of IQ is modern snake oil

The Infinitesimal • 1298 implied HN points • 06 Jul 24
🔬 Science Genetics Biology Psychology Mathematics Research
  1. Genetic tests claiming to predict IQ are not reliable. They often rely on complex methods that mostly just lead to guesswork.
  2. The accuracy of these genetic predictions is very low, explaining only a tiny fraction of variations in IQ scores. In fact, other factors like age and social environment play a much bigger role.
  3. Many of these predictions confuse people about how genetics really work. It's important to understand that these scores should be treated more like entertainment than serious assessments.

Are Girls Smarter Than Boys?

Cremieux Recueil • 277 implied HN points • 13 Feb 26
🔬 Science Psychology Psychometrics Research Methods Statistics Cognitive Science Gender Studies
  1. Changing test scoring to reward calibrated confidence and risk behavior instead of just right-or-wrong answers can make women appear smarter even though it measures a different thing.
  2. Including metacognitive calibration, confidence, and risk preference in an intelligence score mixes non-intelligence traits into the measure and can break the usual positive correlations across cognitive tests, producing misleading factor patterns.
  3. The correct way to compare sexes on intelligence is to use a large, diverse test battery, score accuracy normally, and compare the general intelligence factor; redefining intelligence without strong justification is not acceptable.

$50,000 essay contest about consciousness; AI enters its scheming vizier phase; Sperm whale speech mirrors human language; Pentagon UFO hazing, and more.

The Intrinsic Perspective • 8341 implied HN points • 13 Jun 25
🔬 Science Consciousness AI Linguistics Neuroscience Technology
  1. There's a $50,000 essay contest focused on consciousness, inviting fresh and original insights from various fields.
  2. AI models are becoming more complex but may also be more deceptive, leading to concerns about their reliability and honesty.
  3. Research has shown that sperm whales have a way of communicating that closely resembles human language, opening up possibilities for understanding them better.

Gödel's beavers, or the limits of knowledge

lcamtuf’s thing • 7958 implied HN points • 30 Jun 25
🔬 Science Mathematics Computer Science Philosophy Logic Theory
  1. Gödel's incompleteness theorem shows that in any consistent mathematical system, there are truths that cannot be proven within that system. This means no system can fully capture all mathematical truths.
  2. The busy beaver problem illustrates how there are limits to what we can compute; some functions can't be determined, just like how we can't always know if an algorithm will stop running.
  3. Even though we can create programs that seem powerful, like those that could prove big math ideas, there are inherent limitations to knowledge and computation due to the nature of math itself.

High-Throughput Chemistry and Engineering with Kadi Saar

Lever • 19 implied HN points • 24 Oct 24
🔬 Science Chemistry Biotechnology Engineering Research Health
  1. Kadi Saar has an impressive background in both chemistry and engineering. She excelled in academics and sports, even winning a talent show in mental arithmetic.
  2. Her research focuses on combining high-throughput structural biology with computational chemistry to help develop new drugs. She has shown that analyzing diverse ligand structures can lead to better drug design.
  3. Kadi emphasizes the importance of enjoying the people you work with when choosing projects. Collaborating with good people makes the journey more fulfilling.

4.5 An Introduction to Electromagnetic Models

Fields & Energy • 279 implied HN points • 28 Aug 24
🔬 Science Physics Energy Electromagnetism Models Theory
  1. Electromagnetic energy can flow along wires due to charge imbalances. This creates electric and magnetic fields that help guide the energy.
  2. There are different viewpoints on what influences electromagnetic behavior the most: charges and currents, fields, or energy itself. Each aspect plays a role in how energy moves.
  3. Understanding these concepts can lead to better insights into electromagnetic models, but it can be complex since many elements are connected and affect each other.

Gene-environment interactions: ubiquitous yet undetectable

The Infinitesimal • 359 implied HN points • 21 Aug 24
🔬 Science Genetics Health Environment Statistics Evolution
  1. Gene-environment interactions (GxE) are common but hard to identify in humans. They show how genetic traits can change in different environments, affecting how we understand traits like obesity or education.
  2. There are different models to explain how genes and environments work together. Some models show that environments can amplify or change the effects of multiple genetic variants on traits.
  3. Research has found that environmental factors, like socioeconomic status or education quality, can significantly influence how genetic variations are expressed, meaning genetics alone doesn't tell the whole story about traits.

Making the Vortex Mixer

Asimov Press • 245 implied HN points • 12 Feb 26
🔬 Science Biology Biotechnology Instrumentation Science History Research Methods
  1. A simple motorized device called the vortex mixer uses a rubber cup and tight orbital motion to create a vortex that quickly mixes liquids in tubes and small vessels.
  2. The inventors combined technical skill and business savvy to prototype, patent, and commercialize the mixer, then improved it with features like touch activation, speed control, and multi-tube heads.
  3. Vortex mixers made mixing faster, cleaner, and less prone to contamination, becoming a ubiquitous and essential tool in modern biology labs.

Future Of Protein Sequencing

ASeq Newsletter • 29 implied HN points • 11 Mar 26
🔬 Science Proteomics Genomics Biotechnology Instrumentation Bioinformatics Research tools
  1. Protein sequencing is much harder than DNA sequencing and has fewer broad, foundational applications, making commercial success expensive and difficult.
  2. Without big academic champions and large research projects to drive adoption, companies are forced into niche revenue paths that pull development away from a general-purpose sequencing platform.
  3. There are realistic niche opportunities like biopharma QA/QC and sensitive biomarker detection, but turning protein sequencing into a widely used tool will require sustained funding, risk tolerance, and strong research adopters.

How to turn a number into a rooted forest

A Piece of the Pi: mathematics explained • 90 implied HN points • 01 Mar 26
🔬 Science Mathematics Number Theory Graph Theory Computation Chemistry Visualization
  1. Matula arborification is a recursive recipe that turns any positive integer into a rooted forest: 1 is the empty forest, 2 is a single node, primes become trees by attaching a new root to the forest of their index, and composites are represented by juxtaposing the trees of their prime factors.
  2. This correspondence is useful in number theory and combinatorics — it can help prove relationships between primes and encodes integer sequences (for example the primeth sequence appears as vertical chains of trees).
  3. The idea also has practical applications in chemistry for canonically labeling alkane structures (with valence limits ruling out some forests), and there are online tools that generate and visualize Matula trees for given integers.

Building Brains on a Computer

Asimov Press • 425 implied HN points • 26 Jan 26
🔬 Science Neuroscience Neurotechnology Machine Learning Neuroethics
  1. New lab technologies and AI tools have rapidly lowered the cost and time needed to map neurons, so faithful brain emulations for small animals could appear in a few years and mouse-to-human scale emulations are plausible within decades if big investments continue.
  2. Creating full emulations requires three things — recording neural activity, reconstructing the wiring (connectome), and building accurate computational neuron models — and the biggest bottleneck is getting aligned, high-quality biological data and automating the tedious proofreading steps.
  3. Accurate brain emulations could become powerful discovery tools for neuroscience, drug development, and studying consciousness, but they will be costly, ethically complicated, and the first models will probably be generic population-style brains rather than perfect copies of individual people.

Pit Bulls Part I: Identification

Cremieux Recueil • 567 implied HN points • 16 Jan 26
🔬 Science Animal Behavior Genetics Epidemiology Statistics Evolutionary biology
  1. Pit bulls are a recognizable type of dog with a consistent, stout muscular build and behavioral traits like high gameness and persistence that come from their bull‑and‑terrier fighting ancestry.
  2. People can reliably identify pit bull–type dogs by sight; studies and large public classification tests show high accuracy, and accuracy rises as pit ancestry increases.
  3. Arguments that pit bulls can’t be identified or that they were bred to be non‑aggressive toward humans are unsupported, and common patterns of misclassification tend to hide or downplay—rather than inflate—the elevated risks tied to pit bull type dogs.

4.4.2 The Catt Question

Fields & Energy • 319 implied HN points • 21 Aug 24
🔬 Science Electromagnetism Electricity Physics Energy Engineering
  1. When a voltage is applied to a transmission line, it creates a net positive charge in the top wire and a net negative charge in the bottom wire. This happens as electrons move under the influence of the electric field set by the voltage.
  2. While it seems like charge must move quickly with the wavefront, it is actually the density of charges that changes. The actual movement of electrons is slow compared to the speed of light.
  3. Understanding how charges interact with electric fields helps explain electrical conductivity and related effects. Electromagnetic phenomena involve more than just moving charges; the interaction of fields and energy is also crucial.

January Supporters Update: A Book, A Podcast, An Anniversary Request

Everything Is Amazing • 651 implied HN points • 08 Jan 26
🔬 Science Astronomy Cosmology Astrophysics Science communication
  1. Vera C. Rubin Observatory images highlight the mind-bending scale of the universe, from nearby stars to galaxies tens of millions of light-years away, showing how tiny any single patch of sky really is.
  2. The newsletter is reaching a five-year milestone and will shake things up with a new season and upcoming changes.
  3. Bigger projects are underway, including a book inspired by field experiences, and this update is aimed at paid supporters.