{"id":83671,"date":"2026-10-30T09:50:57","date_gmt":"2026-10-30T01:50:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=83671"},"modified":"2026-10-30T09:50:57","modified_gmt":"2026-10-30T01:50:57","slug":"science-news-october-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=83671","title":{"rendered":"Science News (October 2026)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Just because it&#8217;s Nobel Prize month doesn&#8217;t mean science stops. This month we will deviate a little more from the usual run of announcements in the life sciences to turn to more AI-related news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>However we&#8217;ll start with something more political. This <a href=\"https:\/\/econjwatch.org\/articles\/after-sffa-v-harvard-predictions-that-didnt-come-true\">paper <\/a>revisits predictions that eliminating <strong>race-based admissions<\/strong> at US colleges would substantially reduce enrollment of Black students. It finds that two admissions cycles after the landmark Supreme Court ruling that forced colleges to change their policies, black enrollment has only declined modestly, nowhere near the fifty percent level previously forecast. It may be that colleges have not substantially altered their policies and found other ways to discriminate based on race without explicitly doing so. And yes, I included this because I find the subject of double-think on the subject of race in the US fascinating.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The next article is about AI and is also arguably political. It is now well established that public opinion in the US has turned strongly negative against AI to the point that it may be shifting politics. This <a href=\"https:\/\/news.gallup.com\/poll\/714593\/optimism-globally-widespread-despite-uneven.aspx\">survey <\/a>however that in much of the rest of the world, <strong>AI optimism<\/strong> outweighs pessimism. It is notable that those living in wealthy Western countries tend to be the most worried about AI. By contrast, those in East Asia tend to have more positive attitudes.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>One of the most AI positive countries is Singapore where they are willing to push the envelop on research in directions that feel like science-fiction. This <a href=\"https:\/\/www.techtimes.com\/articles\/324670\/20260817\/worlds-first-brain-cell-server-rack-opens-singapore-neurons-expire-six-months.htm\">article <\/a>talks about a project at the National University of Singapore which is hosting the world&#8217;s first commercial data center deployment of server racks that incorporates <strong>actual brain cells<\/strong>. Each rack uses approximately 800,000 lab-grown human neurons, reprogrammed from adult donor skin or blood cells into induced pluripotent stem cells. The system fires sub-millisecond electrical pulses into the neuron culture that are able to respond, reorganize, and fire back. Being living cells, the neurons live only for about six months at which point they need to be replaced.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Finally here&#8217;s a more pleasant <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discovermagazine.com\/dogs-show-a-surprising-speech-processing-skill-once-thought-unique-to-humans-49727\">article <\/a>about how dogs seemingly share some of our speech processing abilities. We take it for granted but the way speech works means that there is no actual gap in between words. It is our brains that add the gaps as we process the speech and the ability is called <strong>consonant bias<\/strong>. This ability was previously thought to be unique to humans but a team has demonstrated that dogs seem to be able to develop that ability to some extent by using EEG to study how their brains respond to speech with repeating patterns. Dogs are still not as good as humans at it as they are seemingly unable to track vowel patterns.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just because it&#8217;s Nobel Prize month doesn&#8217;t mean science stops. This month we will deviate a little more from the usual run of announcements in the life sciences to turn to more AI-related news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83671"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83754,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83671\/revisions\/83754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}