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Stress Hormone Cortisol Rewires the Brain to Strengthen Emotional Memories

Cortisol strengthens emotional memories by reshaping how brain networks for emotion and memory work together.

Stress does not strengthen every memory equally. New research suggests that cortisol, a hormone released during stressful situations, changes brain activity in ways that strengthen memories of experiences a person finds emotionally intense.

Yale researchers found that cortisol affected two distinct brain networks, one associated with emotional intensity and another with memory formation. It also increased coordination between them, offering a more detailed explanation for how stress can strengthen emotional memories.

Human Brain is Two Organs Fused Together, Study Suggests

The scientists also successfully coaxed human pluripotent stem cells to become functional hindbrain motor neurons in the lab.

These lab-grown neurons displayed all the hallmarks of authentic hindbrain cells: they exhibited waves of electrical activity called action potentials and made proteins that identify the segments of the hindbrain that control facial and swallowing muscles.

“Previous attempts to make hindbrain neurons likely tried to coax forebrain and midbrain progenitors into hindbrain cells, which our study shows is not possible,” said Stanford University graduate student Rayyan Jokhai.

Microsoft Takes Down EvilTokens Device-Code Phishing Service Tied to 12,000 Inbox Compromises

Simultaneously, EvilTokens employs a multi-stage delivery pipeline to bypass traditional email gateways and endpoint security through fake CAPTCHA checks and redirection chains that make use of high-reputation “serverless” platforms like Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, and AWS Lambda to blend in with legitimate enterprise cloud traffic and sidestep domain-blocklist triggers.

Statistics shared by Microsoft show that EvilTokens has been linked to more than 12,000 compromised email inboxes across over 10,000 organizations worldwide, indicating the service had gained widespread traction among threat actors in a short span of time.

The highest concentrations of victim activity have been observed in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, India, and France. Targeted organizations include wholesale distribution, construction, financial services, real estate, higher education, and healthcare.

New ClosedQuorum Windows malware uses AI for attack decisions

A new Windows malware named ClosedQuorum uses Google Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Mistral AI models to autonomously determine the actions to take during post-compromise stages of an attack.

The Go-based malware acts with no commands from a human operator, using reconnaissance information and a voting system to decide its next step on infected hosts.

When votes are tied, DeepSeek has priority at making the final call, based on the option it considers most appropriate, followed by Qwen, Mistral, and Gemini.

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