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Two incredibly rare supernovae that exploded billions of years ago offer a unique opportunity to explain one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology: how fast the universe is expanding.But there’s a twist. Astronomers have already observed these exploding stars, but we have to wait up to 60 years for their light to reach us again.A phenomenon called gravitational lensing splits the light from these extinct stars into multiple images, each taking a different path through space and time to reach us. As a result, researchers may one day be able to measure the delay between these ghostly images and provide…
Researchers have found that new species may have evolved surprisingly quickly after the asteroid impact that wiped out the Nonabia dinosaur.New species of plankton may have emerged less than 2,000 years after the Chicxulub impact, which occurred about 66 million years ago, further fueling debate about how quickly new species emerged after the impact. This suggests that life recovered much more quickly than scientists previously thought, researchers report in a study published in the journal Geology on January 21.”This is an incredible rate,” study co-author Chris Lowery, a paleoceanographer at the University of Texas Geophysical Institute, said in a statement.…
In 2024, there will be more than 8 billion artificial intelligence (AI) voice assistants worldwide, or more than one per person on the planet. These assistants are kind and courteous, and are almost always women by default.Their names also have gender connotations. For example, Apple’s Siri (a Scandinavian female name) means “a beautiful woman who leads to victory.”Meanwhile, men’s input was included when IBM’s Watson for Oncology, which helps doctors process medical data, was launched in 2015. The message is clear. Women serve and men lead. you may like This is not a harmless branding, but a design choice that…
Farsi-speaking attackers aligned with Iran’s national interests are suspected of being behind a new campaign targeting non-governmental organizations and individuals involved in a recent record of human rights abuses. This activity, observed by HarfangLab in January 2026, is codenamed RedKitten. This is said to coincide with unrest that began across Iran towards the end of 2025 in protest against soaring inflation, rising food prices and a weak currency. The ensuing crackdown resulted in numerous casualties and an internet blackout. “The malware relies on GitHub and Google Drive for configuration and modular payload retrieval, and uses Telegram for command and control,”…
This week’s Science News chronicled the good, the bad, and the ugly of technological advances, with a study warning of the next generation of AI “swarms” that could soon invade social media.The signs of bots on social media are already evident, with more than half of the text written online by 2025 being churned out by large-scale language models. What scientists are warning about this next generation of bots is different. Bots trained to impersonate real humans and swarm as if they were part of an organic movement will adaptively target human users, spread false narratives, and influence public opinion.But…
Astronomers have solved the mystery of how some stars remain young, bright and blue despite being almost as old as the universe itself. In other words, stars cannibalize their sibling stars.These timeless objects, known as blue stragglers, have puzzled astronomers for more than 70 years. “Blue stragglers are hydrogen-burning stars with unusually heavy cores that, according to single-star evolution theory, should not exist,” the researchers said in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications on January 3.To investigate these mysterious stars, researchers used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to analyze 48 galactic globular clusters and more than 3,400…
Many objects in space rotate. While Earth completes its rotation in about 24 hours, Venus takes a whopping 243 Earth days. The moon’s rotation period is approximately 27 days. It turns out that the sun also rotates. So, how long does it take for the sun to go around once?The answer depends on your cosmic perspective and the part of the sun you’re measuring.In 1612, Galileo Galilei observed the Sun through a telescope, drew what he saw, and observed that sunspots (dark areas near the Sun’s surface) moved across the Sun’s surface over time. “Galileo tracked a lot of information…
Ravi LakshmananJanuary 31, 2026Social Engineering/SaaS Security Mandiant, a Google company, said Friday that it has seen “expanded threat activity” using tradecraft consistent with extortion-themed attacks organized by a group of financially motivated hackers known as Shiny Hunters. This attack utilizes sophisticated voice phishing (also known as vishing) and a fake credential aggregator site that imitates the targeted company to gain unauthorized access to the victim’s environment by harvesting sign-on (SSO) credentials and multi-factor authentication (MFA) codes. The ultimate goal of the attack is to target cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, siphon sensitive data and internal communications, and extort victims. The tech…
Ravi LakshmananJanuary 31, 2026Network security/SCADA CERT Polska, Poland’s computer emergency response team, has uncovered a coordinated cyberattack targeting more than 30 wind and solar power plants, private companies in the manufacturing industry, and large combined heat and power plants (CHPs) that provide heat to almost 500,000 customers in the country. This incident occurred on December 29, 2025. Government agencies believe this attack is due to a threat cluster known as Static Tundra. This cluster is also tracked as Berserk Bear, Blue Kraken, Crouching Yeti, Dragonfly, Energetic Bear, Ghost Blizzard (formerly Bromine), and Havex. Static Tundra is assessed to be associated…
From the street, the only sign I could find that it was Physical Intelligence’s headquarters in San Francisco was the pi symbol on the door, which was a slightly different color than the rest of the building. Once inside, you’ll immediately encounter activity. There’s no reception desk, no logo glowing in the fluorescent lights. Inside, it’s a huge concrete box, with long blond wooden tables arranged haphazardly, making it a little less solemn. Some are clearly for lunch, dotted with boxes of Girl Scout cookies, jars of Vegemite (I’m Australian here), and small wire baskets stuffed with way too many…