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Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Reddit has made it clear that it’s an ad-first business. Today, it expanded on that practice with a new ad format that looks to sell things to Reddit users. Simultaneously, Reddit has marketers who are interested in pushing products to users through seemingly legitimate accounts.

In a blog post today, Reddit announced that its Dynamic Product Ads are entering public beta globally. The ad format uses "shopping signals," aka discussions with people looking to try a product or brand, machine learning, and advertiser product catalogs in order to post relevant ads. Reddit shared an image in the blog post that shows ads, including with products and pricing, that seem to relate to a posted question. User responses to the Reddit post appear under the ad.

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  A somewhat blurry depiction of the new type of ads Reddit is testing. [credit: Reddit ]

Reddit's Dynamic Product Ads can automatically show users ads "based on the products they’ve previously engaged with on the advertiser’s site" and/or "based on what people engage with on Reddit or advertiser sites," per the blog.

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  The Polestar Phone. Someday it will unlock your Polestar car. [credit: Polestar ]

Polestar, the Volvo offshoot EV company, has made a smartphone. It's called, predictably, the Polestar Phone, and it's only available in China. There have been a lot of car-brand smartphones out there (it's often Lamborghini), but usually, these are licensing deals that the car company ignores. Polestar seems to be proud of this phone, though, making it a bit more involved than the usual car-brand licensing deal. Just look at the new navigation drawer on the polestar.cn site, which has four main items: "Polestar 2", "Polestar 3", "Polestar 4" and now "Polestar Phone."

Why would a niche EV brand make a phone? Maybe all that work on the Android Automotive OS made Polestar's engineers really enthusiastic about Android device development. The website, through machine translation, promises the phone was "jointly designed by the Polestar global design team and the Xingji Meizu team in Gothenburg, Sweden, and is decorated with Swedish gold details that symbolize high performance." "Decorated" is probably the best way you could describe Polestar's contributions to this phone since it seems to be a bog standard Meizu 21 Pro with some Polestar branding. It does look beautiful, with a no-nonsense minimal rectangular design and all-screen front, but the same can be said for the Meizu phone this is based on.

So, how exactly is the Polestar Phone related to a Polestar car? Well, both run Android and have all-electric power systems. The phone has a slightly smaller battery than the EV, at only 5,050 mAh (that's something like 18 Wh) compared to the 100 kWh battery of something like a Polestar 4. The car also has the phone beat on-screen size, with the phone packing a pocketable 120 Hz 6.79-inch, 3192×1368 OLED, and the Polestars all sporting big tablet screens.

Enlarge / M82, the site of what's likely to be a giant flare from a magnetar. (credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team)

Gamma rays are a broad category of high-energy photons, including everything with more energy than an X-ray. While they are often created by processes like radioactive decay, few astronomical events produce them in sufficient quantities that they can be detected when the radiation originates in another galaxy.

That said, the list is larger than one, which means detecting gamma rays doesn't mean we know what event produced them. At lower energies, they can be produced in the areas around black holes and by neutron stars. Supernovae can also produce a sudden burst of gamma rays, as can the merger of compact objects like neutron stars.

And then there are magnetars. These are neutron stars that, at least temporarily, have extreme magnetic fields—over 10¹² times stronger than the Sun's magnetic field. Magnetars can experience flares and even giant flares where they send out copious amounts of energy, including gamma rays. These can be difficult to distinguish from gamma-ray bursts generated by the merger of compact objects, so the only confirmed magnetar giant bursts have happened in our own galaxy or its satellites. Until now, apparently.