Public domain scientific paper by year Updated 2025-07-16
Here we list public domain academic papers. They must be public domain in the country of origin, not just the US, which had generally less stringent timings with the 95 year after publication rule rather than life + 70, which often ends up being publication + 110/120. Once these are reached, they may be upload to Wikimedia Commons!
- 2018
- Max Planck's works in Germany (1947 + 70)
- 2026
- Albert Einstein's works in Germany (1955 + 70)
- 2031:
- Max von Laue's works in Germany (1960 + 70)
- 1912: Interferenz-Erscheinungen bei Röntgenstrahlen (Interference phenomena in X-rays). Scan: archive.org/details/sitzungsberichte1912knig/page/n393/mode/2up. Clean upload: archive.org/details/interferenz-erscheinungen-bei-rontgenstrahlen
- Max von Laue's works in Germany (1960 + 70)
- 2032:
- 2042
- 1927: www.nature.com/articles/119558a0 The Scattering of Electrons by a Single Crystal of Nickel. (1971 + 70), Germer's death. Scan: archive.org/details/sim_nature-uk_1927-04-16_119_2998/page/554/mode/2up. Clean upload: archive.org/details/the-scattering-of-electrons-by-a-single-crystal-of-nickel. The Davisson-Germer experiment!
- 2049
- 1922 Stern-Gerlach experiment papers such as The experimental proof of directional quantization in the magnetic field. Stern died in 1969, Gerlach died in 1979, so 1979 + 70
- 2056
- 1961 Experimental Evidence for Quantized Flux in Superconducting Cylinders. Published in the US, so 1961 + 95.
Public transport Updated 2025-07-16
Publish or perish Updated 2025-07-16
Punched card Updated 2025-07-16
Using Punch Cards by Bubbles Whiting (2016)
Source. Interview at the The Centre for Computing History. Proxima Centauri Updated 2025-07-16
It is so close that we can notice its proper motion, and its distance to us will vary significantly across a few tens of thousands of years!
P versus NP problem Updated 2025-07-16
Interesting because of the Cook-Levin theorem: if only a single NP-complete problem were in P, then all NP-complete problems would also be P!
We all know the answer for this: either false or independent.
Projective elliptic geometry Updated 2025-07-16
Each elliptic space can be modelled with a real projective space. The best thing is to just start thinking about the real projective plane.
Projective plane Updated 2025-07-16
Projective space Updated 2025-07-16
The definition is to take the vector space, remove the zero element, and identify all elements that lie on the same line, i.e.
The most important initial example to study is the real projective plane.
ProofWiki Updated 2025-07-16
MediaWiki-based.
This appears to be the creator: github.com/externl "Joe George".
ProtonMail asks for login every time in the browser Updated 2025-07-16
It is fucking annoying!
- www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/pn21dn/have_to_log_in_every_time_i_restart_the_browser/
- www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/6qwm9w/automatic_login_to_protonmail_from_browser/
- protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/945460-general-ideas/suggestions/48228635-mail-proton-me-should-automatically-login-to-last
Not just on browser close. Whenever Ciro Santilli pastes proton.me/ on the browser bar and click enter. Chromium 123.
More precisely: pasting mail.proton.me on the browser bar redirects to account.proton.me/switch each time. From there, selecting different accounts leads to different mail.proton.me/u/<UID>/inbox, e.g. mail.proton.me/u/41/inbox is my main one. If I paste mail.proton.me/u/41/inbox on the browser, then it works directly.
PsiQuantum founding myth Updated 2025-07-16
Jeremy O'Brien told his peers that he had the best tech, and that he should get it all.
Some well connected peers from well known universities did not agree however, and also bid for the money, and won.
Jeremy was defeated. And pissed.
Makes for a reasonable the old man lost his horse.
www.ft.com/content/afc27836-9383-11e9-aea1-2b1d33ac3271 British quantum computing experts leave for Silicon Valley talks a little bit about them leaving, but nothing too juicy. They were called PsiQ previously apparently.More interestingly, the article mentions that this was party advised by early investor Hermann Hauser, who is known to be preoccupied about UK's ability to create companies. Of course, European Tower of Babel.
The departure of some of the UK’s leading experts in a potentially revolutionary new field of technology will raise fresh concerns over the country’s ability to develop industrial champions in the sector.
Psychology Updated 2025-07-16
How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it PCR Updated 2025-07-16
More generic PCR information at: Section "Polymerase chain reaction".
Because it is considered the less interesting step, and because it takes quite some time, this step was done by the event organizers between the two event days, so participants did not get to take many photos.
PCR protocols are very standard it seems, all that biologists need to know to reproduce is the time and temperature of each step.
This process used a Marshal Scientific MJ Research PTC-200 Thermal Cycler:
We added PCR primers for regions that surround the 16S DNA. The primers are just bought from a vendor, and we used well known regions are called 27F and 1492R. Here is a paper that analyzes other choices: academic.oup.com/femsle/article/221/2/299/630719 (archive) "Evaluation of primers and PCR conditions for the analysis of 16S rRNA genes from a natural environment" by Yuichi Hongoh, Hiroe Yuzawa, Moriya Ohkuma, Toshiaki Kudo (2003)
One cool thing about the PCR is that we can also add a known barcode at the end of each primer as shown at Code 1. "PCR diagram".
This means that we bought a few different versions of our 27F/1492R primers, each with a different small DNA tag attached directly to them in addition to the matching sequence.
This way, we were able to:
- use a different barcode for samples collected from different locations. This means we
- did PCR separately for each one of them
- for each PCR run, used a different set of primers, each with a different tag
- the primer is still able to attach, and then the tag just gets amplified with the rest of everything!
- sequence them all in one go
- then just from the sequencing output the barcode to determine where each sequence came from!
Input: Bacterial DNA (a little bit)
... --- 27S --- 16S --- 1492R --- ...
|||
|||
vvv
Output: PCR output (a lot of)
Barcode --- 27S --- 16S --- 1492RCode 1.
PCR diagram
. Finally, after purification, we used the Qiagen QIAquick PCR Purification Kit protocol to purify the generated from unwanted PCR byproducts.
Performing arts Updated 2025-09-09
How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it Fisher Scientific UVP LM-26E Benchtop 2UV Transilluminator Updated 2025-07-16
www.bidspotter.com/en-us/auction-catalogues/bscsur/catalogue-id-bscsur10011/lot-c6605b41-1a14-40e5-a255-a5c5000866e0 (archive) Cannot exact same product on official website, but here is a similar one: www.fishersci.co.uk/shop/products/lm-26-2uv-transilluminator/12382038 (archive).
How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it Experiment background Updated 2025-07-16
PuntSeq is a side project led by a few University of Cambridge PhDs that aims to determine which bacteria are present in the River Cam.
In July 2019, the PuntSeq team got together with the awesome Cambridge Biomakespace, an awesome biology makerspace open to all, to create a two day science outreach activity showing their procedures.
The data collected in this experiment, together with other collection sessions done by the organizers actually led to a publication on eLife: elifesciences.org/articles/61504 "Freshwater monitoring by nanopore sequencing" by Lara Urban et al. (2021), so it is awesome to see that were are actual being part of "real science".
Ciro knows nothing about biology, but since he is very curious about it, he jumped at this opportunity, and decided to document things as well as his limited knowledge would allow.
All participants chipped in some money to help cover the experiment's costs. Ciro suspects that this activity was done partially to help crowdfund the experiment, but it was a worthy investment!
The impressions you get from the experiment as a software engineer will be:
- OMG, this is so labour intensive, why haven't they automated this
- OMG, this is frightening, all the 8 hours of work I've just done are present in that tiny plastic tube
- Amazing! Look at that apparatus! And the bio people are like: I've used this a million times, it's cheap and every lab has one, just work faster and don't break you piece of junk!
How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it Conclusions Updated 2025-07-16
- against all odds, the experiment worked and we got DNA out of the water, despite a bunch of non-bio newbs actively messing with random parts of the experiment
- PuntSeq and Biomakespace people, and all those tho do scientific outreach, are awesome!
- biology is hard
- creating insanely media rich articles like this is also hard, but the following helped enormously:
- Wikimedia Commons to store large media files out of Git
- Asciidoctor extensions to easily include those media files. The lessons learnt in this article were then an important motivation for Ciro's OurBigBook Markup, to which this article was later migrated.
- Nomacs to give Google Photos photos meaningful names and to edit people's faces out of pictures ;-)
- some scientific Wikipedia pages may or may not have been edited with better pictures during the course of writing this article
How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it Bioinformatics Updated 2025-07-16
Because Ciro's a software engineer, and he's done enough staring in computers for a lifetime already, and he believes in the power of Git, he didn't pay much attention to this part ;-)
According to the eLife paper, the code appears to have been uploaded to: github.com/d-j-k/puntseq. TODO at least mention the key algorithms used more precisely.
Ciro can however see that it does present interesting problems!
Because it was necessary to wait for 2 days to get our data, the workshop first reused sample data from previous collections done earlier in the year to illustrate the software.
First there is some signal processing/machine learning required to do the base calling, which is not trivial in the Oxford Nanopore, since neighbouring bases can affect the signal of each other. This is mostly handled by Oxford Nanopore itself, or by hardcore programmers in the field however.
After the base calling was done, the data was analyzed using computer programs that match the sequenced 16S sequences to a database of known sequenced species.
This is of course not just a simple direct string matching problem, since like any in experiment, the DNA reads have some errors, so the program has to find the best match even though it is not exact.
The PuntSeq team would later upload the data to well known open databases so that it will be preserved forever! When ready, a link to the data would be uploaded to: www.puntseq.co.uk/data
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