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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…
A critical misconfiguration in Amazon Web Services (AWS) CodeBuild could result in a complete takeover of a cloud service provider’s own GitHub repository containing the AWS JavaScript SDK, potentially putting all AWS environments at risk. The vulnerability has been codenamed “CodeBreach” by cloud security company Wiz. This issue was fixed by AWS in September 2025 following a responsible disclosure on August 25, 2025. “By exploiting CodeBreach, an attacker could inject malicious code and begin a platform-wide compromise, potentially impacting not only the countless applications that rely on the SDK, but also the console itself, threatening all AWS accounts,” researchers Yuval…
In an extension to its previous $50 million Series A round that closed in September, AI video generation startup Higgsfield sold an additional $80 million worth of stock, bringing its total Series A to $130 million. The company announced that it is now valued at $1.3 billion. Higgsfield provides tools for consumers, creators, and social media teams to create and edit AI-generated videos. The company was founded by Alex Mashrabov, former head of generative AI at Snap. He joined the company after acquiring his previous startup, AI Factory, for $166 million in 2020. Mashrabov was a co-founder of AI Factory.…
Scientists have mapped the rock beneath Antarctica’s giant ice sheet in unprecedented detail, revealing the hidden structures that form glaciers.The ice sheet covers more than 5.4 million square miles (14 million square kilometers) and covers the mountains, valleys, lakes and basins beneath it, according to a new study published Thursday (January 15) in the journal Science.This polar landscape beneath the ice has long been one of the least mapped planetary surfaces in the inner solar system, the researchers write in the study. Geological features shape how ice flows from below and sculpts the surface of glaciers, and a clearer picture…
Scientists have discovered that pieces of a long-lost tectonic plate are sliding beneath the North American continent in the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone. This leftover plate fragment could pose new earthquake hazards to the region.A new study published in the journal Science on Thursday (January 15) reveals that the Pioneer Fragment, the remnant of an oceanic plate that disappeared beneath the North American Plate about 30 million years ago, is now stuck to the floor of the Pacific Ocean and moving northwest with the plate.This is happening at a place called the Mendocino Triple Junction, where California’s…
As of Thursday, 92 million Iranians had been completely cut off from internet access for more than a week, making this nationwide internet shutdown one of the longest in history, according to experts. Last Thursday, Iranian leaders shut down internet and phone access across the country in response to massive anti-government protests that began late last year and sparked a brutal and deadly crackdown by authorities. As of this writing, Iranians have been without internet access for over 170 hours. The longest previous shutdown in the country was about 163 hours in 2019 and about 160 hours in 2025, said…
Genetic mutations are thought to cause blindness in almost everyone who carries them, but new research has found that less than 30% of people actually experience vision loss.This study challenges the concept of Mendelian diseases, or diseases or disorders that are thought to be caused by a single genetic mutation. The idea is that Mendelian diseases, such as the neurological disorder Huntington’s disease and the bleeding disorder hemophilia, are passed down in families in a predictable manner, such that if one person has the disease-causing mutation, the other person will also have the mutation.These diseases are in contrast to diseases…
Recent observations have revealed flaws in our understanding of the universe, and a new study suggests that may be because the universe is more “sticky” than we assumed.In a paper published on the arXiv preprint server but not peer-reviewed, Indian Institute of Technology researcher Muhammad Ghulam Khwaja Khan suggests that space may have a property called bulk viscosity.Viscosity is a measure of how much a fluid resists flowing or changing shape, like the difference between pouring water and pouring honey. In this case, we are talking about the bulk viscosity of the vacuum itself, the ghostly resistance that occurs as…
Endangered flightless parrots are breeding in New Zealand for the first time in four years, authorities announced on January 6.The kakapo (Strigops habroptilus) is a large, flightless, nocturnal parrot with mottled green and yellow plumage that breeds only every two to four years. Their breeding season is triggered by the mass fruiting of the Rimu tree (Dacrydium cupressinum), a native conifer that lives for more than 600 years.”It’s always exciting when the breeding season officially begins, but this year it’s especially exciting after such a long gap since last season in 2022,” Deirdre Varcoe, operations manager for kakapo recovery at…