No wire. Yet the song on your phone reaches your ear perfectly. Hereâs every step of what actually happens. Your phone stores audio as digital numbers, around 44,100 samples per second. Sending all of that directly over Bluetooth would require too much bandwidth, so a codec like SBC, AAC or aptX compresses it first. It uses psychoacoustic techniques to remove sounds you can barely hear and sounds masked by louder ones, reducing the data while keeping the audio perceptually similar. Now the phoneâs Bluetooth chip converts these compressed 0s and 1s into radio signals through modulation. The signal is transmitted around 2.4 GHz toward your earbuds. But WiFi and other devices use the same band, so interference is a problem. Bluetooth handles this using Frequency Hopping. It rapidly switches between different frequencies in a synchronized sequence. If one frequency has interference, the next hop can avoid it. The earbud receives the radio signal, decodes it back into 0s and 1s, and decompresses the audio back into digital numbers. But the speaker canât work with numbers directly. It needs an analog voltage. Thatâs where the DAC, Digital to Analog Converter, comes in. Itâs essentially the reverse of the ADC from the voice recording reel. The DAC converts those digital samples back into a continuously varying voltage. That voltage drives the speaker. A voice coil sits inside a magnetic field created by a permanent magnet. When current flows through the coil, electromagnetic forces move it back and forth. The attached diaphragm moves with it, pushing air and creating pressure waves that travel to your ear. Same physics as a microphone, but in reverse. The microphone converts sound into electricity. The speaker converts electricity back into sound. Codec. Modulation. Frequency hopping. DAC. Voice coil. Phone to ear. No wire.
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Shadow AI Governance Gap Is Costing Breaches $670K Extra
IBMâs 2026 Cost of a Data Breach research found that incidents involving unsanctioned AI tools more than doubled year over year to 43% of AI-related breaches.
Those incidents carry a real premium: roughly $670,000 extra on average.
Worse, 68% of breached organizations had no policy in place to manage or detect shadow AI.
Banning tools doesnât close the gap. When companies block consumer AI, employees simply move to personal devices and accounts â outside any log a security team can later review.
The only intervention with documented results is a faster, well-provisioned sanctioned alternative. In one case, personal-account AI usage fell from 85% to 11% within a year once the company offered a managed tool good enough that employees stopped routing around it.
This is a speed and product problem, not a compliance memo problem.
Full analysis:
Brain metastases: Fractionated radiosurgery reduces recurrence after surgery
ROCHESTER, Minn. â Mayo Clinic researchers led a multicenter study that found dividing radiation into several treatments, known as fractionated stereotactic radiosurgery, reduced the risk of cancer returning after surgery for brain metastases and was associated with improved survival compared with delivering radiation in a single treatment.
The findings are being presented today at the 2026 American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) Annual Meeting in Boston.
Brain metastases, also called metastatic brain tumors, are cancerous tumors that spread to the brain from elsewhere in the body. Radiation therapy is a standard treatment after surgery, but researchers note that about 30% to 40% of patients experience cancer recurrence at the surgical site despite treatment with single fraction radiosurgery.
A patient-derived organoid platform for predominantly posterior fossa adult ependymoma: histopathologic preservation, culture-associated transcriptomic remodeling, and in vivo tumorigenicity â Journal of Neuro-Oncology
Well-characterized patient-derived models of adult ependymoma (EPN) remain limited. We established a patient-derived organoid (PDO) platform from adult EPN and evaluated its histopathologic and immunophenotypic characteristics, transcriptomic relationship to parental tumors, and in vivo tumorigenicity.
Fresh surgical specimens from 22 adult patients with EPN were processed for PDO establishment. TumorâPDO fidelity was assessed by histology and immunofluorescence. Three matched tumorâPDO pairs underwent RNA sequencing followed by paired differential-expression, gene-set enrichment, microenvironmental signature, and ESTIMATE analyses. Selected PDO models were further evaluated by subcutaneous and intracranial xenografting.
PDOs were successfully established from 20 of 22 specimens (90.9%). Established PDOs broadly retained parental tumor morphology and expression of major ependymoma-associated and neural/progenitor markers. Selected morphologic and immunophenotypic features remained detectable during prolonged culture. Transcriptomic profiling of three matched tumorâPDO pairs demonstrated high global expression similarity (Pearson r = 0.84â0.88) together with substantial culture-associated remodeling. Endothelial signatures and ESTIMATE-derived stromal scores were reduced in all three PDOs, whereas other immune and stromal signatures showed patient-specific changes. Paired transcriptomic analysis further identified enrichment of ribosome/translation and oxidative-phosphorylation programs in PDOs, accompanied by reduced cilia-and axoneme-associated programs. Selected PDO-derived models demonstrated tumorigenic capacity in subcutaneous and intracranial settings.
Infection-Driven Cancers Account for a Growing Proportion of the Global Cancer Burden
Experts predict that by 2050 the global cancer burden will include 35 million new cancer cases. More recent 2024 statistics estimate 20 million new cancer cases. These numbers predict significant increases in cancer cases, and the accompanying social and economic costs, over the next two decades.
Increasing efforts on cancer prevention could prove a highly effective response to the growing cancer burden and the subsequent negative impacts associated with cancer diagnosis and treatment. To help guide prevention strategies, a team of researchers set out better to understand the impact of infection on the cancer burden. Because infectious agents represent a preventable cause of cancer, understanding the magnitude of cases related to prior infections could have a major impact on developing targeted and effective prevention strategies.
The results, recently published in The Lancet Oncology, demonstrate that one in eight cancer cases stems from infection.
How Long Would It Take a Starship to Reach Andromeda at Every Warp Speed?
How long would it actually take a Starfleet starship to travel from Earth to the Andromeda Galaxy?
Andromeda is roughly 2.5 million light-years from Earth â an almost unimaginable distance. But what happens when we apply Star Trekâs TNG-era warp scale to that journey?
In this video, we travel from Warp 1 all the way to Warp 9.999, calculating approximately how long a starship would need to cross the enormous gap between the Milky Way and Andromeda.
At Warp 1, the journey takes around 2.5 million years.
At Warp 9, itâs still roughly 1,650 years.
At Warp 9.9, that falls to around 820 years.
Get Support For Adaptive Sports
Exciting news for anyone considering a Hero Flex, thanks to the Challenged Athletes Foundation (Challenged Athletes Foundation)! đ
CAF exists because health insurance almost never covers sport specific equipment, even when itâs the thing that gets someone back to the sport they love. Sport is deemed a lot of the time ânot medically necessaryâ, but seeing how so many of our users thrive in their sport, weâd like to differ! CAF made supporting disabled athletes their mission and since starting, theyâve awarded over 60,000 grants to athletes across 105 sports.
Applications open today, September 28, and close November 13 at 5pm PT. đŽââïž đïžââïž đŠŸ
If you or someone in your family has a permanent physical disability and wants to get into sports or back to it, itâs worth applying!
You also donât have to do it alone. Your local Open Bionics CPO can book a Hero FLEX consultation and go through the CAF eligibility criteria with you.
Apply here: https://www.challengedathletes.org/caf-athletes/
#HeroFLEX #HeroArmy #Prosthetics #ChallengedAthletesFoundation #AdaptiveSports
