A trio of AI researchers at Google’s Google DeepMind, working with a colleague from the University of Toronto, report that the AI algorithm Dreamer can learn to self-improve by mastering Minecraft in a short amount of time. In their study published in the journal Nature, Danijar Hafner, Jurgis Pasukonis, Timothy Lillicrap and Jimmy Ba programmed the AI app to play Minecraft without being trained and to achieve an expert level in just nine days.

Over the past several years, computer scientists have learned a lot about how deep learning can be used to train AI applications to conduct seemingly intelligent activities such as answering questions...

University of Warwick astronomers have discovered an extremely rare, high-mass, compact binary star system only ~150 light years away. These two stars are on a collision course to explode as a type 1a supernova, appearing 10 times brighter than the moon in the night sky.

Type 1a supernovae are a special class of cosmic explosion, famously used as “standard candles” to measure distances between Earth and their host galaxies. They occur when a white dwarf (the dense remnant core of a star) accumulates too much mass, is unable to withstand its own gravity, and explodes.

It has long been theoretically predicted that two orbiting white dwarfs are the cause of most type 1a supernova explosions...

Did you know that the camera sensor in your smartphone could help unlock the secrets of antimatter? The AEgIS collaboration, led by Professor Christoph Hugenschmidt’s team from the research neutron source FRM II at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has developed a detector using modified mobile camera sensors to image, in real time, the points where antimatter annihilates with matter.

This new device, described in a paper published in Science Advances, can pinpoint antiproton annihilations with a resolution of about 0.6 micrometers, a 35-fold improvement over previous real-time methods.

AEgIS and other experiments at CERN’s Antimatter Factory, such as ALPHA and GBAR, are on a mission to measure the free-fall of antihydrogen within Earth’s gravitational field with high pr...

Follow-up research on a 2023 image of the Sagittarius ...