The Largest Catalogue of Hydrogen Galaxies Yet Released
A new data release catalogues 156,000 galaxies by their cold hydrogen, roughly five times the previous record, and measures the local universe’s hydrogen density to 0.6 percent.
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Astronomers Watch a Massive Binary Star Being Assembled
Eight years of radio observations have captured a pair of massive young stars mid-formation, on a lopsided orbit with discs pointing in different directions. That rules out the simplest explanation.
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AI Weather Models Move to Hour-by-Hour Forecasts
A new generation of machine learning weather models produces hourly global forecasts at five kilometre resolution, and is being wired directly into consumer products.
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Why AI Labs Are Arguing About Slowing Down
The same month that several labs shipped their largest models yet, senior researchers published arguments for deliberately slowing development. Both things are happening at once, and that is the point.
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How a Battery Actually Works
A battery does not store electrons in a box. It stores two chemicals that want to react, and forces the electrons to take the long way round through your device.
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How Soap Actually Cleans
Soap molecules have a water-loving head and a grease-loving tail. That split personality lets them grab oil with one end and let water carry it away with the other.
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Why AI Hallucinates
Language models are trained to produce plausible text, not true text. Confident errors are not a glitch on top of that design; they are what the design produces when knowledge runs out.
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How Vaccines Work
A vaccine shows your immune system what a pathogen looks like without letting it cause the disease, so that meeting the real thing later is a recognition task instead of a fight from scratch.
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Why the Roman Empire Fell
No single event ended Rome. A state that had already been stretched, debased and divided met a series of shocks it could no longer absorb, and the western half stopped functioning.
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How the Printing Press Changed the World
Moveable type did more than make books cheaper. It changed what could be trusted, what could be checked, and who got to argue about it. Here is what actually shifted.