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A new study could help reveal why some vaccines, such as those for COVID-19 and influenza, are less effective in older people than in younger people, potentially fundamentally changing our understanding of aging.Scientists have traditionally assumed that the decreased vaccine response seen in older adults is due to age-related weakening of the immune system. Many have pointed to sustained, low-grade immune activation (a process called “inflammation”) as one factor in this decline.However, a new study comparing the immune systems of older and younger people did not find that biological markers of inflammation consistently increased with age. Instead, aging appears to…
Three Chinese astronauts were temporarily stranded in space after their return capsule was hit by debris believed to be “space junk” hours before they were scheduled to depart. Officials are investigating exactly what happened, but so far there is no indication of the extent of damage to the spacecraft or when the crew will return to Earth.The trio of Tyco astronauts Wang Jie, Chen Zhongrui, and Chen Dong, collectively known as the Shenzhou 20 crew, have been living at China’s Tiangong Space Station since April 24. They successfully completed a handover period with the Shenzhou 21 crew, which arrived at…
November 5, 2025Ravi LakshmananArtificial Intelligence/Threat Intelligence Google announced Wednesday that it has discovered that an unknown attacker using experimental Visual Basic Script (VB Script) malware called PROMPTFLUX interacts with the company’s Gemini artificial intelligence (AI) model API to create its own source code to improve obfuscation and evasion. “PROMPTFLUX is written in VBScript and interacts with Gemini’s API to request certain VBScript obfuscation and evasion techniques to facilitate ‘just-in-time’ self-modification and likely evade static signature-based detection,” Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said in a report shared with The Hacker News. This new feature is part of the “Thinking Robot” component,…
New photos reveal that a recently discovered comet called ‘The Other ATLAS’ has transformed into a stunning golden ribbon after surviving its approach to the Sun. This journey was what many experts believed would be the comet’s destiny.The comet, called C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), was discovered in May by astronomers with the Asteroid Earth Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), which uses telescopes in Hawaii, Chile and South Africa to scan the night sky for moving objects. This object has been relatively unknown until now, largely because of the recent hype surrounding the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, which was discovered by ATLAS astronomers…
The University of Pennsylvania acknowledged Tuesday that hackers stole the university’s data as part of last week’s data breach, during which alumni and other officials received suspicious emails from official university email addresses. The message from the hacker read, “We have been hacked.” “We love breaking federal laws like FERPA (all your data will be leaked),” the message added. “Please stop giving me money.” Penn initially told TechCrunch that the email was “fraudulent,” but the university has now acknowledged the hackers’ claims that the data was stolen during the breach. “On October 31, Penn discovered that a select group of…
When Nvidia announced its Rubin series of GPUs in March, it also dropped the bombshell that racks with the Ultra version of the chips, scheduled to be released in 2027, could draw up to 600 kilowatts of power. That’s nearly twice as fast as today’s fastest EV chargers. As data center racks become more power-hungry, one of the biggest hurdles becomes finding ways to keep them cool. One startup thinks chunks of metal are the answer. Alloy Enterprises has developed a technology that turns sheets of copper into solid cooling plates for GPUs and peripheral chips, supporting components such as…
The way AI trading is done these days, it appears that AI companies and their investors are copying the Circle of Life. However, it is a cycle of profit and will ensure that the money eventually returns to your coffers. Case in point: SoftBank, which has invested tens of billions of dollars in OpenAI and billions more to build AI data centers and infrastructure, just launched a joint venture with the Japanese maker of ChatGPT to localize and sell the AI company’s enterprise technology to businesses in the country. The first customer of this joint venture will be SoftBank itself.…
The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) announced on Tuesday (4 November) that the Earth will exceed the critical warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels within the next 10 years.To stay below this threshold, the world will need to reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by 55% compared to 2019 levels by 2035. But there is little or no chance of that happening, given the inadequacy of countries’ measures to date, the 2025 Emissions Gap report says.”Given the scale of the reductions needed, the short timeframe for realization, and the difficult political climate, it is very likely that we…
November 5, 2025Ravi LakshmananArtificial intelligence/vulnerabilities Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new vulnerability affecting OpenAI’s ChatGPT artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. This vulnerability could be exploited by an attacker to steal personal information from a user’s memory or chat history without the user’s knowledge. According to Tenable, seven vulnerabilities and attack techniques were discovered in OpenAI’s GPT-4o and GPT-5 models. OpenAI has since addressed some of them. These issues expose AI systems to indirect prompt injection attacks, allowing attackers to manipulate the expected behavior of large language models (LLMs) and cause them to perform unintended or malicious behavior, security researchers Moshe Bernstein…
The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee has published a report called ‘Bleeding to death: the science and technology growth emergency’, warning the government that Britain’s failure to maintain and expand its science and technology enterprises has now reached a crisis point and is causing the UK economy to bleed. The committee warns that without urgent and fundamental reforms, the government risks acting too late to address the UK’s long-standing failure to scale up and preserve the economic benefits of scientific and technological research and development. Lord Mair, chairman of the House of Lords science and technology committee, said:…