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Using high-density Neuropixels probes during surgery, researchers at Baylor monitored individual hippocampal neurons while patients were under general anesthesia. When the team played audio to the unconscious patients, these cells still distinguished unexpected tones from repeating ones, sorted words into grammatical categories like nouns and verbs, and showed activity that anticipated what word would follow in a sentence. The basic machinery of predictive coding appears to continue running even when subjective awareness is suppressed.

We usually treat predictive language processing as something requiring conscious attention, but this indicates the brain handles structural prediction as a low-level background task. That said, the data comes from a small cohort of epilepsy surgery patients, and registering the statistical patterns of incoming speech is a very long way from comprehension.

more: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261015003440.htm

my other side: ivo.blogspot.com

Satellite imagery from NOAA-21 captured atmospheric gravity waves radiating outward into the stratosphere and mesosphere from Hurricane Simon. Intense updrafts near the storm eyewall, driven by the release of latent heat, displace the surrounding air and trigger ripples where gravity acts as the restoring force. The waves registered as subtle brightness fluctuations in airglow, a faint natural luminescence in the upper atmosphere picked up by the satellite's day-night band.

Direct observations like this are rare because high-altitude winds usually shear the ripples apart before they climb high enough, and stray moonlight easily washes out the faint airglow. It is a striking demonstration of how deeply a hurricane couples the ocean surface to the upper atmosphere, though capturing the phenomenon remains an observational stroke of luck rather than a reliable diagnostic tool.

more: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261015073207.htm

my other side: ivo.blogspot.com

A nuclear forensic analysis of surviving uranium cubes from Germany's 1945 B-VIII experimental reactor shows the project was nowhere near criticality. Reconstructing the core from the physical artifacts and archival notes, researchers calculated that the reactor would have required roughly twice as much uranium and more than double the heavy water Germany had available. Werner Heisenberg insisted after the war that the pile needed only a modest addition of fuel to achieve a self-sustaining chain reaction, but the actual deficit was insurmountable.

Postwar accounts by the German researchers often framed the effort as a near-success thwarted mainly by Allied sabotage, a narrative that helped protect their scientific reputations. Reconstructing a dismantled reactor from two surviving cubes and wartime paperwork involves some modeling assumptions, but the scale of the missing inventory makes it clear that German physicists were fundamentally blocked by logistics rather than timing.

more: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261015073218.htm

my other side: ivo.blogspot.com