The Big Ring in the Sky is 9.2 billion light-years from Earth. It has a diameter of about 1.3 billion light-years, and a circumference of about 4 billion light-years. If we could step outside and see it directly, the diameter of the Big Ring would need about 15 full moons to cover it.

It is the second ultra-large structure discovered by University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) Ph.D. student Alexia Lopez who, two years ago, also discovered the Giant Arc in the Sky. Remarkably, the Big Ring and the Giant Arc, which is 3...

What is the universe made of? This question has driven astronomers for hundreds of years.

For the past quarter of a century, scientists have believed “normal” stuff like atoms and molecules that make up you, me, Earth, and nearly everything we can see only accounts for 5% of the universe. Another 25% is “dark matter”, an unknown substance we can’t see but which we can detect through how it affects normal matter via gravity.

The remaining 70% of the cosmos is made of “dark energy”. Discovered in 1998, this is an unknown form of energy believed to be making the universe expand at an ever-increasing rate.

In a new study soon to be published in the Astronom...

People with long COVID have dysfunctional immune cells that show signs of chronic inflammation and faulty movement into organs, among other unusual activity, according to a new study by scientists at Gladstone Institutes and UC San Francisco (UCSF).

The team analyzed immune cells and hundreds of different immune molecules in the blood of 43 people with and without long COVID...

A new, potentially revolutionary artificial intelligence framework called “Blackout Diffusion” generates images from a completely empty picture, meaning that, unlike other generative diffusion models, the machine-learning algorithm does not require initiating a “random seed” to get started.

Blackout Diffusion, presented at the recent International Conference on Machine Learning, generates samples that are comparable to the current diffusion models, such as DALL-E or Midjourney but require fewer computational resources than these models.

“Generative modeling is bringing in the next industrial revolution with its capability to assist many tasks, such as generation of software code, legal documents, and even art,” said Javier Santos, an AI researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory a...