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Category: finance

Ancient Greece’s most famous oracle was just high on gas fumes

For centuries, people traveled to Delphi in southern Greece hoping for a glimpse of their future. There, at the temple of the god Apollo, a priestess was said to enter a trance and issue prophecies in the voice of Apollo himself. Everyday people, kings, even Alexander the Great traveled for miles to hear the priestess’s input on important decisions, from personal finance to matters of state.

Known as the Pythia or the Oracle of Delphi, the priestess wasn’t believed to be a psychic. Ancient writers like Plutarch, who served as a priest at Delphi in the first and second centuries, described her as a vessel for a power that came from the Earth.

According to Plutarch’s account, the temple of Delphi was constructed around a natural spring, where the water and fissures in the rock produced a sweet-smelling gas called pneuma. On designated days a few times per year, the chosen priestess sat amidst the pneuma on a tripod stool and inhaled enough to enter her trance. This was an exhausting ordeal for the woman. She might cry out, become hysterical, or collapse.

Power producers have financial incentives to block market integration despite cost savings, says study

Renewable energy is lowering electricity costs in some parts of the country, but those benefits aren’t being seen by consumers everywhere because they’re typically placed far away from demand centers. Better integrating electricity transmission networks across regions could significantly reduce generation costs, new research from the University of Michigan shows—at the expense of generation companies’ profits. The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Economist Catherine Hausman, associate professor at the Ford School of Public Policy, and colleagues found that improving interregional connectivity could have saved anywhere from $5.8 billion to $7.1 billion in electricity generation costs in 2022, and $3.4 billion to $5 billion in 2023.

At the same time, investing in regional connectivity could cost some power plants over $20 million in annual net revenue—giving them financial incentives to block or delay transmission network improvements.

Microsoft: Hackers abuse OAuth error flows to spread malware

Hackers are abusing the legitimate OAuth redirection mechanism to bypass phishing protections in email and browsers to take users to malicious pages.

The attacks target government and public-sector organizations with phishing links that prompt users to authenticate to a malicious application, Microsoft Defender researchers say.

With e-signature requests, Social Security notices, meeting invitations, password resets, or various financial and political topics that contain OAuth redirect URLs. Sometimes, the URLs are embedded in PDF files to evade detection.

Social Risk Prevalence in AYAs With and Without a History of Cancer

About one-third of adolescents and young adults, with or without Cancer, reported at least one social risk such as financial hardship or food insecurity, highlighting the need for routine screening.

This cross-sectional study used data from KPNW, an integrated health care system serving more than 620 000 members in northwest Oregon and southwest Washington, representing approximately 16% of the region’s population. The KPNW Institutional Review Board deemed the study exempt from review and informed consent under category 4 of the Common Rule, meaning that this research was determined to be low risk as it involves the use of secondary data. The study followed the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) reporting guideline for cross-sectional studies.

Members of KPNW are demographically similar to the surrounding community, with a broad age distribution (approximately 23% aged 18–35 years and 40% aged 36–64 years), a nearly equal sex distribution (52% female), and a racial and ethnic composition comparable to that of the regional population. Approximately 18% of members live below 200% of the federal poverty level, and approximately 80% receive coverage through employer-sponsored plans, contributing to high annual retention rates (approximately 88%). In early 2020, KPNW implemented a social risk screening tool via the EPIC-based (Epic Systems Corp) HealthConnect system. Full details of the screening process have been previously described.22,23

We included KPNW members aged 15 to 40 years who received care at KPNW; completed the social determinants of health screener between January 1, 2022, and December 31, 2024 (the first screening was defined as the index date); and had at least 6 months of follow-up data (eFigure 1 in Supplement 1).

Quantum reservoir computing peaks at the edge of many-body chaos, study suggests

Reservoir computing is a promising machine learning-based approach for the analysis of data that changes over time, such as weather patterns, recorded speech or stock market trends. Classical reservoir computing techniques are known to perform best at the “edge of chaos,” or in simpler terms, at a “sweet spot” in which the behavior of systems is neither entirely predictable (i.e., order) nor completely unpredictable (i.e., chaos).

In recent years, some physicists and quantum engineers have been exploring the possibility of realizing a quantum equivalent of classical reservoir computing, known as quantum reservoir computing (QRC). These approaches enable the processing of temporal data and the prediction of events unfolding over time, leveraging high-dimensional quantum states.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo carried out a study investigating how QRC would behave when applied to complex quantum many-body systems, which consist of several interacting quantum particles. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, introduces a physics-based framework that could inform the future development of QRC systems.

FBI: Over $20 million stolen in surge of ATM malware attacks in 2025

The FBI warned that Americans lost more than $20 million last year amid a massive surge in ATM “jackpotting” attacks, in which criminals use malware to force cash machines to dispense money.

According to a Thursday FBI flash alert, more than 700 ATM jackpotting incidents were reported last year alone in a significant spike compared to the roughly 1,900 total incidents reported across the United States since 2020.

These attacks can be carried out in minutes and target the software layer controlling an ATM’s physical hardware, using malicious tools such as the Ploutus malware. Most often, they go undetected by financial institutions and ATM operators until the cash is already gone.

Hackers target Microsoft Entra accounts in device code vishing attacks

Threat actors are targeting technology, manufacturing, and financial organizations in campaigns that combine device code phishing and voice phishing (vishing) to abuse the OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization flow and compromise Microsoft Entra accounts.

Unlike previous attacks that utilized malicious OAuth applications to compromise accounts, these campaigns instead leverage legitimate Microsoft OAuth client IDs and the device authorization flow to trick victims into authenticating.

This provides attackers with valid authentication tokens that can be used to access the victim’s account without relying on regular phishing sites that steal passwords or intercept multi-factor authentication codes.

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