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While you won’t see a trace of this exoplanet or alien life, it’s easy to spot the red dwarf star that warms its surface.

You may never come face to face with your favorite rock star, but you can attend their concerts or listen to a music recording. Celestial bodies can be like that. Amateurs can’t see black holes, exoplanets, and accretion disks, but we can detect their presence by how they interact with their surroundings. At the very least we can picture them in our mind’s eye.

For example, a likely exoplanet orbits the 1st-magnitude star Pollux in the Gemini twins. It even has a name — Thestias. At public events, I point to Pollux and explain that a planet twice as massive as Jupiter orbits the red giant every 590 days. When it comes to novae, including the woefully-behind-schedule T Cor Bor, it’s fun to imagine the “single” star as a pair of tightly orbiting suns. One pilfers hydrogen from the other until enough material accumulates on the thief’s surface to detonate in a brilliant thermonuclear explosion. Voilà — a nova!

What if the galaxy isn’t empty—but locked in a silent Cold War between ancient alien empires? This episode explores the Dark Forest Theory, Interdiction Bubbles, and what it means if our galaxy is shaped by dormant, watchful civilizations playing a long game of survival and subtle dominance.

Watch my exclusive video Antimatter Propulsion: Harnessing the Power of Annihilation — https://nebula.tv/videos/isaacarthur–… Nebula using my link for 40% off an annual subscription: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur Get a Lifetime Membership to Nebula for only $300: https://go.nebula.tv/lifetime?ref=isa… Use the link gift.nebula.tv/isaacarthur to give a year of Nebula to a friend for just $30. Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net Join Nebula: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur Support us on Patreon: / isaacarthur Support us on Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/isaac-a… Facebook Group: / 1,583,992,725,237,264 Reddit: / isaacarthur Twitter: / isaac_a_arthur on Twitter and RT our future content. SFIA Discord Server: / discord Credits: The Alien Cold War: Silent Competition Among Dormant Empires In A Dark Galaxy Episode 497; May 1, 2025 Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur Edited by: Donagh Broderick Graphics: Darth Biomech, Jeremy Jozwik, Ken York YD Visual, LegionTech Studios, Sergio Botero Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator Markus Junnikkala, “A Fleet Behind the Moon” Phase Shift, “Forest Night” Kai Engel, “Endless Story About Sun and Moon” Chris Zabriskie, “Unfoldment, Revealment”, “A New Day in a New Sector”, “Cylinder One” Taras Harkavyi, “Alpha and…” Stellardrone, “Red Giant”, “Billions and Billions“
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Credits:
The Alien Cold War: Silent Competition Among Dormant Empires In A Dark Galaxy.
Episode 497; May 1, 2025
Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur.
Edited by: Donagh Broderick.
Graphics: Darth Biomech, Jeremy Jozwik, Ken York YD Visual, LegionTech Studios, Sergio Botero.
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images.
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator.
Markus Junnikkala, \

In recent years, computer scientists have created various highly performing machine learning tools to generate texts, images, videos, songs and other content. Most of these computational models are designed to create content based on text-based instructions provided by users.

Researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology recently introduced AudioX, a model that can generate high quality audio and music tracks using texts, video footage, images, music and audio recordings as inputs. Their model, introduced in a paper published on the arXiv preprint server, relies on a diffusion transformer, an advanced machine learning algorithm that leverages the so-called transformer architecture to generate content by progressively de-noising the input data it receives.

“Our research stems from a fundamental question in artificial intelligence: how can intelligent systems achieve unified cross-modal understanding and generation?” Wei Xue, the corresponding author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “Human creation is a seamlessly integrated process, where information from different sensory channels is naturally fused by the brain. Traditional systems have often relied on specialized models, failing to capture and fuse these intrinsic connections between modalities.”

It can be hard to hear a signal 100 miles away—so what does it take to build a beacon loud enough to be heard 100,000 light years away? In this episode, we explore galactic beacons: powerful transmissions that may teach, warn, or outlast the minds that made them.

Watch my exclusive video The End of Science https://nebula.tv/videos/isaacarthur–… Nebula using my link for 40% off an annual subscription: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur Get a Lifetime Membership to Nebula for only $300: https://go.nebula.tv/lifetime?ref=isa… Use the link gift.nebula.tv/isaacarthur to give a year of Nebula to a friend for just $30. Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net Join Nebula: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur Support us on Patreon: / isaacarthur Support us on Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/isaac-a… Facebook Group: / 1,583,992,725,237,264 Reddit: / isaacarthur Twitter: / isaac_a_arthur on Twitter and RT our future content. SFIA Discord Server: / discord Credits: Galactic Beacons Episode 440b; April 1, 2024 Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur Graphics: Darth Biomech, Jeremy Jozwik, Ken York YD Visual, Sergio Botero Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator.
Get Nebula using my link for 40% off an annual subscription: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur.
Get a Lifetime Membership to Nebula for only $300: https://go.nebula.tv/lifetime?ref=isa
Use the link gift.nebula.tv/isaacarthur to give a year of Nebula to a friend for just $30.

Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net.
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Credits:
Galactic Beacons.
Episode 440b; April 1, 2024
Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur.
Graphics: Darth Biomech, Jeremy Jozwik, Ken York YD Visual, Sergio Botero.
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images.
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator

The AI revolution, which has begun to transform our lives over the past three years, is built on a fundamental linguistic principle that lies at the base of large language models such as ChatGPT. Words in a natural language are not strung together in random patterns; rather, there is a statistical structure that allows the model to guess the next word based on what came before. Yet these models overlook a crucial dimension of human communication: content that is not conveyed by words.

In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Prof. Elisha Moses’s lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science reveal that the melody of speech in spontaneous conversations in English functions as a distinct language, with a “vocabulary” of hundreds of basic melodies and even rules of syntax that can be used to predict the next melody in the sequence. The study lays the foundation for an artificial intelligence that will understand language beyond words.

The melody, or music, of speech, referred to by the linguistic term “,” encompasses variations in pitch (intonation), loudness (for example, for emphasis), tempo and sound quality (such as a whisper or creaky voice). This form of expression predates words in evolution: Recent studies reveal that both chimpanzees and whales incorporate complex prosodic structures in their communication.

Paper link : https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction.
00:49 Breaking the Classical Wall – What the Game Revealed.
02:32 Entanglement at Scale – Knots, Topology, and Robust Design.
03:51 Implications – A New Era of Quantum Machines.
07:37 Outro.
07:47 Enjoy.

MUSIC TITLE : Starlight Harmonies.

MUSIC LINK : https://pixabay.com/music/pulses-starlight-harmonies-185900/

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