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Why strings? What are they made of? How did physicists even come up with this bizarre idea? And whatâs all this nonsense of extra dimensions?
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For more information about Stanfordâs graduate programs, visit: https://online.stanford.edu/graduate-educationApril
April 9, 2026
This seminar covers:
âą How world models are increasingly moving away from reconstruction and toward prediction in latent space.
âą Two recent JEPA-based approaches that illustrate this shift from complementary angles.
Follow along with the seminar schedule. Visit: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs25/
Guest Speakers: Hazel Nam & Lucas Maes (Brown University)
Instructors:
âą Steven Feng, Stanford Computer Science PhD student and NSERC PGS-D scholar.
âą Karan P. Singh, Electrical Engineering PhD student and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Stanford Translational AI Lab.
âą Michael C. Frank, Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology Director, Symbolic Systems Program.
âą Christopher Manning, Thomas M. Siebel Professor in Machine Learning, Professor of Linguistics and of Computer Science, Co-Founder and Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI)
Welcome back to the Bureau of The Unexplained! đœđ Where we dive into all things weird and unexplained.
Right now, as you sit watching this video, you are hurtling through space. The Milky Way galaxy, along with roughly 100,000 of our neighboring galaxies, is being dragged at millions of miles per hour toward a mysterious, terrifying gravitational anomaly. Scientists call it⊠The Great Attractor.
For decades, astronomers had no idea what it was. Why? Because it sits directly behind the \.
A new study by a team at Tohoku University, published in Chemical Engineering Journal, has shown that more isnât always better when it comes to nanoscale chemical reactions. One might think that giving reactants completely unrestricted access to a speed-boosting catalyst would be the fastest way to drive a chemical reaction. Instead, it was shown that hollow nanoreactors can work more efficiently when transport into the reaction space is slightly restricted.
A nanoreactor is a porous shell that surrounds an inner space containing catalytically active nanoparticles. The inner space where reactions occur provides a special environment which opens the door for unique and highly useful chemical reactions. Finding ways to optimize reactions in these confined spaces could help to produce a myriad of everyday products more efficiently, and at a lower price.
While it might seem like flooding this inner space would get things done the fastest, researchers found that the key to optimization involved holding back a little.
A powerful tsunami seen from space is overturning what scientists thought they knew about how these waves travel.
#QuantumMechanics #SimulationHypothesis.
Is reality actually real? In this mind-bending 29-minute exploration, theoretical physicist Richard Feynman takes you on a deep dive into quantum mechanics, the double-slit experiment, and the most unsettling discoveries in the history of science â discoveries that suggest the solid, physical world you experience every day may be far less \.
Chinese astronomers report the discovery of DESI-HVS1, which may be an old metal-poor hypervelocity star of galactic center origin. The finding, based on the data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and ESAâs Gaia satellite, was detailed in a research paper published April 23 on the arXiv pre-print server.
WASHINGTON â The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded contracts to three companies to study concepts for a lunar mission to search for water ice in very low orbits.
DARPA announced last year the Lunar Assay via Small Satellite Orbiter (LASSO) program. LASSO would demonstrate the ability to operate in a very low orbit around the moon while searching for locations on the moon that contain water ice at concentrations greater than 5%.
The mission, the agency stated, would test âsustained and advanced maneuverabilityâ needed to maintain that low orbit, with applications elsewhere in cislunar space. The scientific data from the mission would support both NASA and commercial efforts to use lunar resources.
The concept of spacetime, first described in Einsteinâs theory of general relativity, has since been widely studied by many physicists worldwide. Spacetime is described mathematically as a four-dimensional (4D) continuum in which physical events occur, which merges three-dimensional (3D) space, with one-dimensional (1D) time.
This 4D continuum is known to continuously evolve following complex and intricate patterns that are governed by Einsteinâs field equations; mathematical equations that describe how matter and energy shape spacetime. While various past theoretical studies explored the evolution of spacetime, identifying patterns that persist during its evolution has proved challenging so far.
Researchers at Adolfo Ibåñez University in Chile and Columbia University set out to explore the evolution of spacetime using ideas rooted in nonlinear electrodynamics, an area of physics that studies the behavior of electric and magnetic fields in complex materials.