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We’ve watched it speed through the solar system using the most powerful telescopes in human history. We’ve studied its light with probes whipping around the sun and robots marooned on Mars. Countless eyes watched it make its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 19 — and yet, for all of this, the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS remains little more than a blur of gas, shrouded in mystery.Since its discovery in early July, 3I/ATLAS has been studied more enthusiastically than practically any other celestial object in recent memory. Still, for all its fame, much remains unknown about it. The comet’s origins, from…
Cybersecurity researchers have revealed details of a new campaign that used a cracked software distribution site as a distribution vector for a new version of a modular stealth loader known as CountLoader. The Cyderes Howler Cell Threat Intelligence team said in its analysis that the campaign “uses CountLoader as the first tool in a multi-stage attack to access, evade, and distribute additional malware families.” CountLoader has been previously documented by both Fortinet and Silent Push, detailing the loader’s ability to push payloads such as Cobalt Strike, AdaptixC2, PureHVNC RAT, Amatera Stealer, and PureMiner. This loader has been detected in the…
In October 2024, news broke that Facebook parent company Meta had cracked an “impossible” problem that had stymied mathematicians for a century.In this case, the solvers weren’t human.An artificial intelligence (AI) model developed by Meta determined whether solutions of the equations governing certain dynamically changing systems — like the swing of a pendulum or the oscillation of a spring — would remain stable, and thus predictable forever. You may like The key to the problem was finding Lyapunov functions, which determine the long-term stability of these systems.Meta’s work made headlines and raised a possibility once considered pure fantasy: that AI…
Every year, TechCrunch looks back at the cybersecurity horror shows of the past 12 months, from the biggest data breaches to hacks that left weeks of chaos, to see what we can learn. This year’s data breaches were unlike anything we’ve seen before. Let’s take a look back at some of the biggest security incidents of 2025. First of all: The US government remained one of the top targets in cyberspace. This year began with a brazen cyber attack on the U.S. Treasury by Chinese hackers, followed by a security flaw in SharePoint that compromised several federal agencies, including the…
OpenAI is in talks to raise up to $100 billion in a funding round that could value the ChatGPT maker as much as $830 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, citing anonymous sources. The company aims to raise funds by the end of the first quarter of next year and may ask sovereign wealth funds to invest in this round, WSJ reported. The Information, which first reported news of the deal, said the funding would give OpenAI a $750 billion price tag. The funding comes as OpenAI pledges to spend trillions of dollars and close deals around the world…
Archaeologists discovered mummified bodies in Sudan and discovered that children as young as 18 months old had their faces tattooed 1,400 years ago in the Nile Valley region. Furthermore, this practice coincided with the introduction of Christianity to the area known as Nubia.”If the tattoo was a symbol of the person’s Christian beliefs, it may have been important for parents to create a permanent way to mark their children as Christian,” says study lead author Anne Austin, an archaeologist at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. Lewis told LiveScience.Austin and colleagues examined 1,048 mummified human remains excavated from three…
Japan has deployed a system that fires laser beams with 100 kilowatts of energy, powerful enough to disable small drones. It was installed on a 6,200 ton (6.3 million kg) warship.The weapon combines 10 lasers (each with a power output of 10 kW) into a single 100 kW beam, providing enough concentrated power to burn through metal surfaces. This is a fiber laser, which produces a beam by amplifying and focusing light as it passes through a solid-state optical fiber doped with rare earth elements. Engineers specifically designed this system to shoot down drones, mortar shells, and other lightweight airborne…
There are few sights in nature as stunning as the night sky in December. Bright stars like Betelgeuse, Capella, Aldebaran, Sirius, and Orion Belt stars will dominate the night sky after dark, but you can follow some unique astronomical phenomena over two weeks from December 20, 2025 to January 4, 2026.As seen from the Northern Hemisphere this year, the crescent moon will curl up in the western sky just before Christmas, then glide past Saturn and the Pleiades star cluster. Meanwhile, Jupiter shines as a bright “Christmas star” in the eastern sky just after sunset.Add in two meteor showers and…
December 19, 2025Ravi LakshmananVulnerability/Network Security WatchGuard has released a fix that addresses a critical security flaw in Fireware OS that was allegedly exploited in a real-world attack. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2025-14733 (CVSS score: 9.3) and is described as a case of an out-of-bounds write impacting the iked process, potentially allowing a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code. “This vulnerability affects both mobile user VPNs that use IKEv2 and branch office VPNs that use IKEv2 that are configured with dynamic gateway peers,” the company said in Thursday’s advisory. “If a Firebox was previously configured with Mobile User VPN…
The UK’s nuclear decommissioning program is at a pivotal moment, with new collaborations and technological advances accelerating progress across the sector. The formal partnership between the UK Atomic Energy Agency (UKAEA) and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), coupled with the breakthrough on plutonium safety at Sellafield, signals a national, concerted effort to tackle the challenges of legacy nuclear power while laying the foundations for future fusion power generation. NDA Group Chief Nuclear Strategy Officer Clive Nixon explained: “NDA Group is at the forefront of nuclear decommissioning. We have one of the most experienced and skilled nuclear workforces in the world…