Researchers have discovered that the human brain can continue performing advanced language tasks even when a person is fully unconscious under general anesthesia. The findings, published in Nature, challenge long held assumptions about the relationship between consciousness and cognition.

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South Africa is likely to face significant weather-related risks over the coming months after major international climate agencies confirmed that an El Niño weather phenomenon has developed. This is the feedback from Investec Chief Economist Annabel Bishop, who noted that several of the world’s leading climate monitoring organisations have now confirmed the return of El Niño. El Niño is a weather pattern often associated with drought in southern Africa and can have serious consequences for agriculture, food prices, inflation, and economic growth. The latest report from the NOAA Climate Prediction Centre concluded that El Niño conditions are present, and that equatorial sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are above average across the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. The International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) reported that El Niño conditions are strengthening and show a steady upward trend that continues to intensify. The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has also warned that El Niño conditions are set to influence global temperature and rainfall patterns, increasing the risk of extreme weather. Bishop explained that changing rainfall patterns linked to El Niño can have severe consequences worldwide. While some regions experience prolonged drought, others face excessive rainfall and flooding.

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In a new study in The Astrophysical Journal, a team of Yale astronomers reports on a dwarf galaxy located 67 million light-years from Earth — called NGC 1052-DF9 — that appears to have formed in a straight line with nine other galaxies. Two of those other galaxies, DF2 and DF4, were previously shown to lack dark matter — an invisible, theorized material that gives shape to the universe and is thought by most astronomers to be essential to galaxy formation.

Liberty and ICEYE, the world leader in sovereign intelligence from space, announced the launch of a pioneering building-level parametric wildfire insurance solution. As wildfires increase in frequency and severity, impacting communities and driving significant economic losses, the need for faster, more responsive risk solutions has never been greater. Liberty’s remotely sensed parametric property wildfire solution enables a rapid response providing immediate access to liquidity when it is needed most. The solution is initially available in the US and Australia, where wildfire exposure is particularly high, but targeted to expand together with ICEYE’s product scope expansion. At the core of the solution is ICEYE’s global constellation of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites, which provides continuous monitoring of wildfire-affected areas. These satellites capture high-resolution imagery through smoke, at night, and in all weather conditions, ensuring reliable and uninterrupted data collection. Following a wildfire event, SAR imagery is combined with detailed property footprint data and advanced automated machine learning algorithms to deliver an objective, building-level damage assessment. Each insured property is classified against predefined criteria as either “destroyed” or “undamaged,” with results that could be delivered within hours.

Origin Wukong, China’s independently developed series of superconducting quantum computers, has completed more than 1 million computing tasks, according to a statement from the Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Quantum Computing Chips and the Anhui Quantum Computing Engineering Research Center in Hefei. The milestone is special as it also demonstrates the post-quantum cryptography (PQC) protection framework, which will be a must for quantum computers of the future.

Astronomers using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa have discovered the most distant hydroxyl megamaser ever detected, opening a new radio astronomy frontier. A hydroxyl megamaser is a natural space laser, and this one is located in a violently merging galaxy more than 8 billion light-years away. Illustration of the distant galaxy 8 billion light-years away (red), magnified by an unrelated foreground disk galaxy, resulting in a red ring. Splitting up the radio light into different colours, as a prism does, reveals the hydroxyl gigamaser (top-right rainbow-coloured line). Credit: Inter-University Institute for Data-Intensive Astronomy (IDIA)

The Opportunity rover found small spherules of hematite, which would require liquid water to form. Credit: NASA/JPL-Calthech/Cornell/USGS

Starcloud announced plans to launch its second spacecraft later this year equipped with custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) to perform the first actual Bitcoin mining operations in space. On March 7, 2026, Starcloud's CEO, Philip Johnston, officially confirmed the initiative following an interview with HyperChange. The upcoming Starcloud-2 satellite, which is scheduled for a Falcon 9 launch in the latter half of this year, is being designed as a hybrid configuration carrying both a high-performance GPU cluster and custom Bitcoin mining ASICs. #sovereignty #bitcoin #nostr

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