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A Tiny Region Deep Inside Your Brain Helps Decide What You Remember

Scientists have discovered that a small brain region best known for processing emotions plays a surprisingly broad role in determining which experiences become lasting memories.

The brain records countless sights and experiences every day, yet only a fraction become lasting memories. Scientists have now identified a pattern of neural activity that helps predict what will be remembered, pointing to a much broader role for a brain region traditionally associated with emotions and fear.

The discovery, made by researchers at Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University and published in Nature Neuroscience, centers on the amygdala, a walnut-sized structure deep within the temporal lobe. The findings suggest that specialized neurons in this region help determine which new experiences are selected for long-term memory storage.

Scientists Develop a Groundbreaking Rechargeable Battery That Runs on Vitamin B12

The same vitamin found in everyday foods could eventually help store surplus renewable electricity, after an experimental zinc-air battery using B12 completed up to 250 recharge cycles.

The search for safer, more sustainable batteries is leading scientists to some unexpected places, including the chemistry of vitamins. Researchers at the University of Córdoba in Spain have found that vitamin B12, a nutrient essential to human health, can also help power a rechargeable battery. Their experimental design completed up to 250 charge and discharge cycles, opening another possibility for future energy storage technology.

The researchers developed a zinc-air battery, which generates electricity through chemical reactions involving zinc and oxygen from the surrounding air. Unlike conventional batteries that store all their reactive materials internally, zinc-air batteries draw oxygen from the environment. This makes them lighter and gives them high energy density, meaning they can store substantial energy relative to their weight. They are already used in small devices such as hearing aids.

Your Brain Chemistry Could Change How You Understand Language

A single word can overturn your understanding of a sentence, and your brain chemistry may shape how hard you work to make sense of it again.

Even a single word can change the meaning of an entire sentence, forcing the brain to rethink what it just read. But how efficiently the brain handles these grammatical surprises may depend partly on its chemistry.

A study published in PNAS found that increasing dopamine and noradrenaline (catecholamines) strengthened a brain response associated with untangling ambiguous grammar. Researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI-PL) in Nijmegen observed the largest effects in healthy adults with lower baseline working memory capacity.

More Than a Billion Years of Earth’s History Is Missing — Scientists May Finally Know Why

Earth’s rocks are missing more than a billion years of history in some places, and the slow rise and fall of continents may explain how those chapters disappeared.

A study led by University of Wollongong (UOW) PhD candidate Santosh Dhungana suggests that the slow rise and fall of continents helped create the Great Unconformity, a vast gap in Earth’s geological record. Published in Nature, the research links this missing history to currents of hot rock in the mantle that moved continents vertically over hundreds of millions of years.

Normally, rock layers preserve a sequence of events, with younger deposits accumulating above older ones. At the Great Unconformity, that sequence jumps: sedimentary rocks from around the beginning of the Cambrian period, roughly 540 million years ago, rest directly on much older crystalline rocks, including granite more than a billion years old.

Police arrest 354 suspects in dark web cybercrime crackdown

Authorities arrested 354 suspects in a joint international operation targeting vendors and buyers on the Archetyp, Nemesis, Tor2Door, Bohemia, and Kingdom dark web marketplaces.

Codenamed ‘Operation TorNado,’ this law enforcement action ran from May 2025 to October 2026 and involved agencies from 14 countries.

“Additionally, law enforcement targeted vendors and buyers active on forums, single-vendor shops, and encrypted messaging services. National authorities conducted independent investigations with Europol’s support, including cross-checks via SIENA and forensic analysis,” Europol said.

Massive Microsoft 365 outage disrupts Outlook, Teams, Copilot worldwide

Microsoft is investigating a widespread outage affecting multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Copilot, as users report connectivity problems worldwide.

BleepingComputer has received numerous reports from users experiencing problems accessing Microsoft’s services, including complaints that Outlook is down.

According to Downdetector, which tracks user-submitted outage reports, complaints surged Thursday afternoon across numerous Microsoft services, including Outlook, Microsoft 365, Teams, Copilot, Azure, OneDrive, and the Microsoft Store.

Apache HTTP Server patches critical HTTP/2 remote code execution flaw

A critical vulnerability in the HTTP/2 module of Apache HTTP Server could be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to obtain remote code execution (RCE).

The Apache Software Foundation has fixed the issue, now tracked as CVE-2026–119618, but a significant number of servers are vulnerable and reachable over the public internet.

Discovered by Anthropic’s OSS Scanner and Google Cloud’s Vulnerability Research teams, the vulnerability is a race condition in the mod_http2 module that can corrupt heap memory.