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According to a report from the Food and Drug Administration, more than 1,000 personal care products that people use every day may contain chemicals that are permanently toxic. As of 2024, more than 50 PFAS ingredients were found in approximately 1,700 unique personal care products, the report found. This ingredient is added to cosmetics with claims to improve the product’s texture, durability, and water resistance, and to enhance skin smoothness and radiance. This means many Americans may be applying products containing PFAS to their faces, eyes, and skin every day, and sometimes multiple times a day. Why are so many…
NHS clinicians could soon spend more time interacting with patients and less time typing notes, thanks to a new wave of AI note-taking tools. These advanced systems promise to listen to consultations and automatically generate clinical summaries, streamline documentation, and make appointments more efficient. By reducing the administrative burden, doctors and nurses can focus on what matters most: providing quality care. NHS England has launched a new self-certification registry featuring 19 approved suppliers of ambient audio technology – a tool that captures clinician-patient conversations and produces real-time transcriptions and clinical summaries. The registry ensures that suppliers meet rigorous standards for…
January 16, 2026hacker newsPrivacy/Data Protection Lock the door at night. You avoid sketchy calls. You are careful about what you post on social media. But what happens to the information about you that has already been published without your permission? your name. home address. telephone number. past work. Dear family. Old username. Everything is still online and easier to find than you might think. Hidden safety threats online Most people don’t realize that much of their personal life is spent on public websites, data broker platforms, and sketchy directories. These sites not only sell information to marketers, but also make…
January 16, 2026Ravi LakshmananMalware/Cyber Espionage Security experts have revealed details of a new campaign targeting U.S. government and policy actors using politically-themed decoys to deliver a backdoor known as LOTUSLITE. The targeted malware campaign utilizes decoys related to recent geopolitical developments between the United States and Venezuela to distribute a ZIP archive (“US deciding what’s next for Venezuela. zip”) containing a malicious DLL that is launched using DLL sideloading techniques. It is unclear whether this campaign was successful in compromising any of its targets. This activity is believed with some confidence to be the work of a Chinese state-sponsored group…
The University of Birmingham has launched a new facility for the recycling of rare earth magnets, which will help reduce the UK’s dependence on imports of rare earth metals, alloys and magnets. Rare earth magnets are one of the important “critical minerals” that are essential to modern life. They form the core building blocks of technologies such as wind turbines, electric vehicles, medical devices, pumps, robotics, and electronics. Therefore, as the adoption of low-carbon technologies accelerates, the demand for these minerals will only increase. Professor Rachel O’Reilly MBE FRS, Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Birmingham, explained: “The University of…
In a major boost to Europe’s renewable energy ambitions, the European Commission has given the green light to Germany’s €200 million plan to produce and import renewable hydrogen from Canada. This marks another step in Europe’s efforts to strengthen renewable energy supply chains and reduce dependence on fossil fuels. The initiative, approved under EU state aid rules, will support the production of renewable fuels of non-biological origin (RFNBO) in Canada, which will then be imported into Germany and sold across the European Union. The plan is closely aligned with the EU’s Hydrogen Strategy, the Clean Industries Pact and the REPowerEU…
According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), run by the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), global temperatures in 2025 will be just 0.01°C lower than in 2023 and 0.13°C lower than in 2024, still holding the title of the hottest year on record. The release of this data was coordinated with other major climate monitoring organizations, including NASA, NOAA, the Met Office, Berkeley Earth Station, and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and highlighted the broad scientific consensus on the scale and pace of global warming. Underscoring the bleak climate picture painted by the analysis, C3S Director Carlo…
January 16, 2026Ravi LakshmananZero Day/Cyber Espionage Threat actors believed to be aligned with China have been observed targeting critical infrastructure sectors in North America since at least the last year. Cisco Talos, which is tracking this activity under the name UAT-8837, has assessed with medium confidence that this is a Chinese-aligned Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor based on tactical overlap with other campaigns launched by threat actors in the region. The cybersecurity firm noted that based on observed tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and post-breach activity, threat actors are “primarily tasked with gaining initial access to high-value organizations.” “After gaining…
January 16, 2026Ravi LakshmananVulnerabilities / Web Security Cisco on Thursday released a security update for maximum severity security flaws affecting Cisco AsyncOS software for Cisco Secure Email Gateway and Cisco Secure Email and Web Manager. This comes nearly a month after the company disclosed that it had been attacked by a zero-day attack by a Chinese-aligned Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacker codenamed UAT-9686. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-20393 (CVSS score: 10.0), is a remote command execution flaw resulting from insufficient validation of HTTP requests by the spam quarantine. Successful exploitation of this flaw could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary…
The Trump administration signed a high-profile multibillion-dollar trade deal with Taiwan aimed at helping the United States boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Taiwanese semiconductor and high-tech companies have agreed to make $250 billion in direct investments in the U.S. semiconductor industry under a deal announced Thursday by the U.S. Department of Commerce. These investments span “production and innovation” in semiconductors, energy and AI, according to a press release. Taiwan currently produces more than half of the world’s semiconductors. According to the Commerce Department, Taiwan will provide an additional $250 billion in credit guarantees for additional investments from these semiconductor and high-tech…