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UK Government funding will drive UK agricultural projects that turn new crops and low-emission farming techniques into ready-to-use tools to improve productivity. The £21.5m of funding, delivered through Defra’s Agricultural Innovation Program in partnership with Innovate UK, will translate cutting-edge research into practical tools for UK farming, including vitamin-rich tomatoes and climate-smart hemp. Dame Angela Eagle, Minister for Agriculture, said: “This funding will support new ideas that farmers can use to reduce methane and fertilizer-related emissions on the ground, strengthen crop resilience and improve nutrition in UK agriculture.” New innovations in British agriculture Successful British agricultural projects include: ‘Sunshine Tomato’…

Ravi LakshmananFebruary 2, 2026Threat Intelligence/Malware Administrators of Notepad++ have revealed that state-sponsored attackers have hijacked the utility’s update mechanism and instead redirected update traffic to a malicious server. “This attack [an] “This resulted in an infrastructure-level compromise that allowed a malicious attacker to intercept and redirect update traffic destined for notepad-plus-plus.org. This compromise occurred at the hosting provider level, rather than through a vulnerability in the Notepad++ code itself,” said developer Don Ho. The exact mechanism by which this was achieved is currently under investigation, Ho added. The development comes a little more than a month after Notepad++ released version…

The update infrastructure for eScan antivirus, a security solution developed by Indian cybersecurity company MicroWorld Technologies, was compromised by an unknown attacker and a persistent downloader was distributed to business and consumer systems. “The malicious update was distributed through eScan’s legitimate update infrastructure, resulting in multi-stage malware being deployed to business and consumer endpoints around the world,” said Morphisec researcher Michael Gorelik. MicroWorld Technologies said it detected unauthorized access to its infrastructure and immediately isolated the affected update servers, which were taken offline for more than eight hours. We have also released a patch that reverts the changes introduced as…

Ravi LakshmananFebruary 2, 2026Developer tools/malware Cybersecurity researchers have revealed details of a supply chain attack targeting the Open VSX registry. In this attack, an unknown attacker compromised legitimate developer resources and pushed malicious updates to downstream users. “On January 30, 2026, four established Open VSX extensions published by the oorzc author had malicious versions published to Open VSX that embedded the GlassWorm malware loader,” socket security researcher Kirill Boychenko said in a report on Saturday. “These extensions had previously been presented as legitimate developer utilities (some of which were first published over two years ago) and had accumulated over 22,000…

First lady Melania Trump’s documentary “Melania” has exceeded box office expectations, with estimates on Sunday predicting it will gross $7.04 million in its opening weekend. The documentary finished in third place overall over the weekend, behind Sam Raimi’s thriller “Send Help” ($20 million) and YouTuber Mark Fischbacher’s (better known as Mark Plier) video game adaptation “Iron Lung” ($17.8 million). Amazon reportedly paid $40 million to acquire “Melania” and is spending $35 million on advertising. So even if the documentary exceeds pre-release expectations of $3 million to $5 million in opening weekend box office, it’s unlikely to make a profit in…

Indonesia follows Malaysia and the Philippines in lifting the ban on xAI’s chatbot Grok. Southeast Asian countries banned Grok for being used to mass create non-consensual sexual images on X (now a subsidiary of xAI), including images of real women and minors. From late December to January, Grok was used to create at least 1.8 million sexually explicit images of women, according to separate analyzes by The New York Times and the Center to Combat Digital Hate. Indonesia’s Ministry of Communications and Digital said in a statement that the ban was lifted after X sent a letter “outlining concrete steps…

Imagine an airplane hurtling across the sky at hundreds of miles per hour, firing millions of laser pulses into a dense tropical forest. The goal is to create a detailed map of thousands of square miles, including the ground beneath the canopy, within a few days.Once the stuff of science fiction, aerial lidar (light detection and ranging) is changing the way archaeologists map archaeological sites. Some have hailed this mapping technique as an innovative research method.But when this powerful technology is used to scan indigenous lands and ancestral remains, it often facilitates more cumbersome extraction plans. As an archaeologist who…

A new lab has used a ‘nose in a dish’ to understand why colds cause mild symptoms in some people and send others to the hospital.When cold and flu season is in full swing, rhinoviruses, the most common cause of colds, can make many of us miserable, causing symptoms such as runny noses, sore throats, and mild coughs. However, for some people, rhinovirus infection is a more serious condition.For example, in smokers and people with asthma, rhinoviruses can cause life-threatening breathing difficulties and require treatment. Variants of the same rhinovirus can cause vastly different medical outcomes depending on who it…

For close to a century, geoscientists have pondered a mystery: Where did Earth’s lighter elements go? Compared to amounts in the Sun and in some meteorites, Earth has less hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and sulfur, as well as noble gases like helium — in some cases, more than 99 percent less.Some of the disparity is explained by losses to the solar system as our planet formed. But researchers have long suspected that something else was going on too.Recently, a team of scientists reported a possible explanation — that the elements are hiding deep in the solid inner core of Earth. At…

A medieval seal with a blood-red jewel found in Britain holds an ancient secret, researchers have discovered.Metal detectors discovered a medieval seal in Gosfield, east Essex, in autumn 2024. However, a recent analysis of the seal by experts at Britain’s Portable Antiques Project revealed that the center of the 800-year-old object prominently featured 2,000-year-old Roman jewelry.”It’s not common to have objects from two different eras,” Lori Rogerson, Essex’s finds liaison officer, told the BBC. “I thought it was a really special discovery.” you may like According to the artifact’s entry in the Portable Antiquities Scheme database, the silver seal is…