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Category: computing – Page 13

Steam forum ClickFix attacks infect gamers with XMRig cryptominers

Steam discussion forums are being abused in ClickFix attacks that pretend to be fixes for game and computer problems but actually infect devices with cryptominers.

BleepingComputer learned of the campaign from a reader, who told us threat actors are creating random Steam accounts to post what appears to be helpful fixes for people’s posts about games crashing, lost inventory items, and other technical issues.

The threat actors reply to posts, telling other members to open PowerShell as an administrator and run a command to fix the issue. However, when executing the command, it quietly downloads an XMRig miner executable and launches it on the computer.

Malaysia’s resource anxiety tests Asia’s fastest data center build-out

HONG KONG/JOHOR, Malaysia – After leapfrogging Singapore to become the region’s fastest-growing data center hub, Malaysia is facing intensifying scrutiny as the resources debate that has complicated the industry’s growth spreads to emerging Asia.

Protests over a data center complex in Johor state’s southern tip — the epicenter of the boom — were the first of their kind in the country. In Selangor, the richest and most populous state, debate about the burden on communities has become politicized.

“Two years ago, it was just about building capacity,” said Cheam Tat Inn, managing director at the Malaysian arm of U.S. data center operator Equinix.

Brain waves once seen as noise could help build a biological model of reality

Your brain has something surprising in common with the ocean: waves. Electrical activity washes over the brain’s surface, creating what are called traveling brain waves, or neural traveling waves. These waves cause real differences in your behavior and attention and—again, like ocean waves—can have variable causes, from intrinsic activity to environmental inputs.

A new review article by Salk Institute neuroscientists synthesizes physiological and computational information about these neural traveling waves and draws a new conclusion: Neural traveling waves are a computational engine in the visual cortex. These waves allow the visual cortex (and likely other areas of the brain) to build representations of the external world, enabling our capacity to predict, reconstruct and perceive the world around us.

The piece was published in Neuron on July 21, 2026.

Chemotherapy leaves detectable DNA fingerprints in childhood tumors within 18 months

Nearly half of childhood tumors treated with common types of chemotherapy showed detectable DNA changes linked to treatment within 18 months, according to a new international study led by The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids). Researchers say these changes could eventually help clinicians spot treatment resistance earlier, before cancer returns or spreads, opening the door to more precise use of chemotherapy.

For their study published in Nature, researchers analyzed more than 600 tumors from 544 patients in Canada, Australia and the United States. By combining whole-genome sequencing with detailed medical records and advanced computational methods developed at SickKids, the team found distinct genomic signatures of DNA changes left behind by different chemotherapies. Some of these patterns appeared as early as 91 days after treatment began.

“There’s a long-standing belief that pediatric cancers are genetically quiet because they haven’t had much time to mutate,” says lead author Dr. Adam Shlien, senior scientist, Genetics & Genome Biology, and a lab director in Genome Diagnostics at SickKids. “Instead, it was mind-blowing to see how many mutations found in tumors that had relapsed or spread were linked to the chemotherapy used to treat the cancer in the first place.”

Tiny BAP1 mutations can disrupt internal signals that suppress tumor growth

Scientists at the Institute of Biochemical Sciences at National Taiwan University have uncovered how tiny genetic changes can disable one of the body’s most important tumor-suppressing proteins. Their study, published in Nature Communications, reveals how cancer-associated mutations interfere with the function of BRCA1-associated protein 1 (BAP1), a protein that helps maintain normal cell growth and is frequently mutated in cancers such as mesothelioma, uveal melanoma and kidney cancer.

Although many cancer mutations in BAP1 have been identified over the years, it has remained unclear exactly how they impair the protein. To answer this question, the research team examined nearly 50 cancer-associated mutations using advanced nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, computer simulations and biochemical experiments.

Physicists say quantum mechanics may not need imaginary numbers after all

Physicists from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) have examined a fundamental property of quantum mechanics in collaboration with the German Aerospace Center (DLR). In the scientific journal Physical Review Letters, they show that this theory does not necessarily need to be formulated with imaginary numbers – real numbers can in fact also be used.

Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics that explains how matter and energy behave at the atomic and subatomic scale. Developed in the early 1900s by pioneers including Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger, it has become one of the most successful scientific theories ever created.

The theory accurately describes a wide range of microscopic phenomena. These include the famous double slit experiment, in which particles also display wave like behavior, and quantum tunneling, where particles have a probability of passing through a barrier even when they do not have enough energy to overcome it in the classical sense. Other key quantum effects, such as entanglement and coherence, now form the foundation of emerging technologies including quantum computing and quantum communication.

World’s first ‘zinc oxide spin qubit’ could advance scalable quantum devices

A research team led by SKKU professor Hosung Seo of the Department of Quantum Information Engineering and the SKKU Advanced Institute of Nanotechnology, working with the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Washington, has identified—for the first time—an atomic defect structure in the zinc oxide (ZnO) semiconductor with outstanding properties for use as a “spin qubit,” a core building block of future quantum computers, quantum communications and quantum sensors.

The results are published in PRX Quantum.

Electron spins trapped at point defects in solid-state crystals can operate at room temperature and retain quantum information for long periods, making them a leading platform not only for quantum computing but also for quantum communications and ultrasensitive quantum sensing. The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond has been the most prominent candidate, but diamond is difficult to grow into large-area, high-quality crystals and is poorly suited to standard semiconductor fabrication, posing major obstacles to the integration and mass production of quantum devices.

Long-lived ytterbium states could sharpen quantum computing and atomic clocks

Researchers from the University of Amsterdam and the University of New South Wales have answered a question that has been around for decades: whether ions of the metal ytterbium can enter certain long-lived, nearly stable states and, if so, for how long. The measured long-lived states may find applications in quantum computers and atomic clocks.

Many modern atomic clocks and quantum computers have so-called trapped ions at their core. Ions, electrically charged atoms, can be in many different states, all with different amounts of energy. Because of their charge, these ions can be suspended in empty space and kept in place using electromagnetic fields. The operation of the clock or computer then relies on precisely controlling which energy state an ion occupies.

Researchers from the University of Amsterdam and the University of New South Wales have now discovered that the ytterbium ion (Yb⁺), a leading candidate for both technologies, can remain in previously unexplored states for surprisingly long periods.

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