Brightest-Ever Space Explosion Reveals Possib...

There’s no scientific consensus about what makes living things so different from inorganic material. Some scientists cite replication or metabolism. Others have another answer: Living organisms are different because they do stuff — for reasons. On this episode of The Quanta Podca ...  Show more

You’re carrying around in your head a model of how the world works. Will AI systems need to do the same?The article ‘World Models,’ an Old Idea in AI, Mount a Comeback first appeared on Quanta Magazine. 

EXTREME UNIVERSE! (Hint: It's not the sun)

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It’s been an unusual week for astronomers, with telescopes swivelled off course to observe GRB221009A, the brightest gamma ray burst ever recorded. Gamma ray bursts aren’t unusual, the by-product of some supernovae are recorded weekly. Whilst the afterglow of these bursts usually ...  Show more

Dan shares one of the biggest stories of his career - his discovery of an excess of gamma rays at the center of the Milky Way. Is this a sign of dark matter, or is it something less mysterious?

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00:45 A coronal mass ejection from a distant starResearchers have detected what they say is the strongest evidence yet of a coronal mass ejection (CME) coming from a star other than our Sun. CMEs are massive bursts of fast-moving plasma that can be detected thanks to the characte ...  Show more