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New Semiconductor Device Turns Light Into a Directed Current

The light-controlled electron current could open new paths for sensing, telecommunications, and other advanced technologies.

A pair of laser beams can now send electrons through a semiconductor in a chosen direction without any external electrical power. Researchers at the University of Michigan built the device to explore a previously unobserved physical effect and demonstrate that light alone can both generate and steer an electronic current.

The work could eventually support technologies that combine optics and electronics, including sensing, imaging, and telecommunications. By improving how signals move within and between devices, the effect may also allow those signals to carry more information.

Brain Scans Reveal Which Disorders May Accelerate Brain Aging

Accelerated brain aging was associated with dementia, addiction, and psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia.

A brain scan can make a person’s brain appear older or younger than their actual age. Across tens of thousands of scans, researchers found that dementia, mild cognitive impairment, alcohol addiction, and psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia were associated with older-appearing brains, although each condition showed a different anatomical pattern.

The findings were reported in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine by Shile Qi of the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China and colleagues.

Scientists Discover the Brain Is Not Always Ready To Make Memories

Your brain may have brief windows when it is primed to transform a passing moment into a lasting memory.

Researchers at the University of Tübingen found that natural shifts in alertness can briefly change the hippocampus, making its memory circuits more receptive to new information. The findings suggest that memory formation depends not only on what happens to us but also on the brain’s condition at that exact moment.

The study, published in Nature Communications, was led by Professor Andrea Burgalossi of the Institute of Neurobiology and the Werner Reichardt Center for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN).

Claude AI Just Cracked a PostQuantum Test Scheme and Found a Faster 7Round AES Attack

Anthropic says Claude Mythos Preview helped derive an end-to-end key-recovery attack against HAWK-256 and a 200-to 800-fold speedup for an attack on seven-round AES-128.

The HAWK attack exploits a previously unused symmetry in the lattice behind the signature scheme. Anthropic’s released implementation gives an expected end-to-end runtime of about three hours and 42 minutes on a 96-core server. The AES result removes a 256-way guessing step from an existing meet-in-the-middle attack.

Anthropic said neither result affects production systems. HAWK remains a candidate in a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) post-quantum standardization process, and the public recovery code only targets the smaller HAWK-256 parameter.

Nimbus Manticore Deploys NightLedger and Turns Victim Systems Into Covert Relays

The Iranian state-backed hacking group tracked as Nimbus Manticore (aka GalaxyGato, Mirage Kitten, Smoke Sandstorm, Subtle Snail, and UNC1549) has been attributed to a fresh set of attacks targeting entities across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.

The intrusions involve the use of a previously undocumented Windows backdoor called NightLedger and two custom WebSocket tunnelers, BridgeHead and ArcBridge, with an aim to maintain covert access.

Targets of the campaign include Egypt, SMB and government environments in Jordan and Tanzania, aviation organizations in Pakistan, telecommunication companies in Ethiopia, and financial-sector entities in Burkina Faso, per Kaspersky.

Critical TeamCity Flaw Could Let Attackers Run OS Commands Without Logging In

JetBrains is urging customers of on-premise versions of TeamCity to update to the latest version following the discovery of a critical security issue that could result in arbitrary code execution.

The vulnerability, assigned CVE-2026–63077 (CVSS score: 9.8), affects all TeamCity On-Premises versions. It has been addressed in versions 2025.11.7 and 2026.1.3. TeamCity Cloud instances have already been updated. JetBrains has credited Antoni Tremblay with discovering and reporting the flaw on July 10, 2026.

“If exploited, this flaw may enable an unauthenticated attacker with HTTP(S) access to a TeamCity server to bypass authentication checks and execute arbitrary operating system commands with the privileges of the TeamCity server process,” JetBrains said.

CubePilot drone software dev hit by DNS hijacking to intercept traffic

CubePilot, an Australian firm that designs flight controllers for drones (UAVs), announced a severe operational disruption caused by a DNS hijacking attack.

Hijacking domain name system (DNS) records allows threat actors to redirect users to their infrastructure, diverting traffic intended for a legitimate service. This exposes users to dangerous scenarios such as sensitive data interception, malware delivery, and phishing.

According to a status update published on CubePilot’s website, an attacker gained control of the cubepilot[.]org domain DNS settings on July 24, allowing them to intercept traffic intended for internal systems.

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