What is the difference between a newt and a salamander?
If you spot a small, long-tailed amphibian near a forested pond, you’re probably looking at a salamander or newt. But what is the difference between a salamander and a newt? And how do you tell them apart? “One of the things about all newts being salamanders is that not all salamanders are newts,” Nick Bergmeier, […]
CISA adds actively exploited XSS bug CVE-2021-26829 in OpenPLC ScadaBR to KEV
November 30, 2025Ravi LakshmananHacktivism / Vulnerability The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has updated its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog to include security flaws affecting OpenPLC ScadaBR, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2021-26829 (CVSS score: 5.4), a cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw that affects Windows and Linux versions of […]
Black Friday sets $11.8 billion online spending record, Adobe announces
U.S. consumers spent $11.8 billion online on Black Friday, according to data from Adobe Analytics, which tracks more than 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail websites. Adobe said this is a new record and surpasses the $10.8 billion spent on Black Friday last year. From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., online shoppers could have spent […]
No, you can’t get an AI to “admit” it’s sexist, but it probably is.
In early November, a developer nicknamed Cookie began a daily conversation with Perplexity. She often reads developer work on quantum algorithms and writes readme files and other documentation for GitHub. She is a Pro subscriber and uses the service in “best” mode. This means choosing which underlying model to tap between ChatGPT and Claude. It […]
Are biodegradable plastics really worth the hype?
Annual global production of plastics is expected to increase to 400 million tonnes in 2022 and double by 2050. Many of the products produced are single-use, and less than 10% of plastic waste is recycled. In August 2025, more than 2,600 participants from United Nations member states met for the fifth time to negotiate a […]
This week’s science news: Mysterious human relatives, discovery of dark matter, mysterious lights in the sky during nuclear weapons tests
This week’s biggest science news took us on a journey through human prehistory, with the discovery that a mysterious 3.4-million-year-old ‘Bartele foot’ in Ethiopia may belong to a mysterious human relative who lived at the same time as our ancestor ‘Lucy’. This study is important for many reasons, not only because it shows differences in […]
‘There’s no easy explanation’: new images emerge as scientists debate 70-year-old UFO mystery
More than 70 years ago, astronomers at California’s Palomar Observatory captured several star-like flashes that appeared and disappeared within an hour, a few years before the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched into orbit. A new peer-reviewed study revisiting these midcentury skyplates reports that these fleeting points of light, called transients, appeared on or […]
Do your dreams change as you get older?
You might think that children have nightmares about monsters under the bed, but adults dream about stressful events such as deadlines. But is there any scientific evidence that dreams change as we age? Although there are plausible mechanisms for how dreams change over time as we age, very few studies have investigated this topic. “Dreaming […]
VC Carla Nortman bet on women’s sports early and is now creating a market
When the season ended earlier this month, Angel City FC finished 11th out of 13 teams, a disappointing result for the Los Angeles soccer franchise co-founded in 2020 by venture capitalist Kara Nortman. But the season’s struggles are just part of a larger story that is reshaping the way investors think about women’s sports. Despite […]
Modern humans may have arrived in Australia 60,000 years ago and interbred with archaic humans such as ‘hobbits’
A new study of about 2,500 genomes may finally settle the debate over when modern humans arrived in Australia. Using a diverse database of DNA from ancient and modern Aboriginal people across Oceania, researchers found that people began settling in northern Australia by 60,000 years ago, arriving via two different routes. Experts have long debated […]