We’ve probably all seen some old newsreel or documentary from The Before Times where the narrator, using his best Mid-Atlantic accent, described those newfangled computers as “thinking machines,” or better yet, “electronic brains.” It was an apt description, at least considering that the intended audience had no other frame of reference at a time when the most complex machine they were familiar with was a telephone. But what if the whole “brain” thing could be taken more literally? We’ll have to figure that out soon if these computers powered by miniature human brains end up getting any traction.The so-called “organoid bioprocessors” come from a Swiss outfit called FinalSpark, and if you’re picturing little pulsating human brains in petri dishes connected to wires, you’ll have to guess again. The organoids, which are grown from human skin cells that have been reprogrammed into stem cells and then cultured into human neurons, only have about 10,000 cells per blob. That makes them a fraction of a millimeter in diameter, an important limit since they have no blood supply and must absorb nutrients from their culture medium, and even though they have none of the neuronal complexity of a brain, they’re still capable of some interesting stuff. FinalSpark has a live feed to one of its organoid computing cells on the website; the output looks a little like an EEG, which makes sense if you think about it. We’re not sure where this technology is going, aside from playing Pong, but if you put aside the creep-factor, this is pretty neat stuff.We thought once 3I/Atlas, our latest interstellar visitor, ducked behind the Sun on its quick trip through the solar system, that things would quiet down a bit, at least in terms of stories about how it’s an alien space probe or something. Don’t get us wrong, we’d dearly love to have it be a probe sent by another civilization to explore our neck of the galactic woods, and at this point we’d even be fine with it being the vanguard of a Vogon Constructor Fleet. But now the best view of the thing is from Mars, leading to stories about the strange cylindrical thing in the Martian sky. The photo was apparently captured on October 4 by one of the navigation cameras on the Perseverance rover, which alone is a pretty neat trick since those cameras are optimized for looking at the ground. But the image is clearly not of a cylinder floating menacingly over the Martian surface; rather, as Avi Loeb explains, it’s likely a spot of light that’s been smeared into a streak by a long integration time. And it might not even be 3I/Atlas; since the comet would have been near Phobos at the time, it could be a smeared-out picture of the Martian moon.Part of the reason for all this confusion about a simple photograph is the continuing U.S. government shutdown, which has furloughed a lot of the NASA and JPL employees. And not only has the shutdown made it hard to get the straight poop on 3I/Atlas, it’s also responsible for the confusion over the state of the Juno mission. The probe, which has been studying the Jovian system since 2016, was supposed to continue through September 30, 2025; unfortunately, the shutdown started at one minute past midnight the very next day. With no news out of NASA, it’s unclear whether Juno is still in operation, or whether it’s planned intentional deorbit into Jupiter, to prevent contaminating any of the planet’s potentially life-bearing moons, already occurred. That makes it a bit of a Schrödinger’s space probe until NASA can tell us what’s going on.And finally, are we really recommending that you watch a 25-minute video from a channel that specializes in linguistics? Yep, we sure are, because we found Rob Words’ deep dive into the NATO phonetic alphabet really interesting. For those of you not used to listening to the ham bands or public service radio, phonetic alphabets help disambiguate spoken letters from each other. Over a noisy channel, “cee” and “dee” are easily confused, but “Charlie” and “Delta” are easier to distinguish. But as Rob points out, getting to the finished NATO alphabet — spoiler alert, it’s neither NATO nor phonetic — was anything but a smooth road, with plenty of whiskey-tango-foxtrot moments along the way. Enjoy!