Earth may be far more vulnerable to powerful solar storms than scientists realized, with extreme events potentially hitting modern technology twice as hard as previous models predicted.

Earth’s magnetic shield may not have the safety limit scientists once thought it did. New research suggests that the most powerful solar storms could disturb the planet’s upper atmosphere up to twice as severely as traditional estimates predict.

The finding challenges a decades-old assumption about how Earth responds when it is struck by unusually intense solar wind. Rather than reaching a maximum and leveling off, the planet’s geomagnetic response may continue growing as conditions become more extreme.

A new light-trapping architecture could lead to CMOS-compatible night-vision technology.

Azure Cosmos DB’s Gremlin flaw let Wiz escape the sandbox and retrieve an account key. Microsoft found no unauthorized activity outside Wiz’s testing.

Hidden instructions in a Word document can make Microsoft 365 Copilot rewrite figures in a report, then copy the same instructions into the finished file. Håkon Måløy disclosed the technique on July 28,144 days after reporting it to Microsoft.

In his proof of concept, the internally generated file triggered the same behavior when it was used in a second Copilot drafting session.

Måløy’s timeline says Microsoft confirmed the reported behavior on March 31 and deployed two mitigations. The first blocked the original prompt wording; the second upgraded the underlying model to GPT-5.5.

Engram cells are formed during learning and store memory information. However, little is known about the modulation of engram cells on time-dependent memory flexibility. Employing a male mouse model, we demonstrated that a temporal factor dictates the memory state, driving either pattern separation or pattern completion. Reengagement of engram cells in the dentate gyrus (DG) during memory retrieval in altered contexts was higher during pattern separation than during pattern completion, concomitant with a time-dependent reduction in synaptic transmission. Specific activation of DG engrams promoted pattern separation, whereas their inhibition accelerated pattern completion.

The Gap: Knowing that a shape in front of you is a “door handle” (recognition) is easy. Knowing whether your arm is long enough to reach it, whether your foot is currently blocking the door from swinging open, or if you’ve already walked past it is where current VLMs fail.

Evaluating whether a vision-language model (VLM) can act through a physical body is challenging. The outcome of an action couples the VLM’s decision with motor control. When a task fails, it is hard to tell whether the VLM made a bad choice or the motor controller simply failed to execute it, e.g., losing balance and falling. In this work, we introduce HumanCLAW, an evaluation framework that decouples action decision-making from low-level execution. At every step, a harnessed, off-the-shelf VLM issues an atomic skill command, and the command is translated into a sub-second chunk of continuous full-body motion with real physical consequences, including gravity and collisions. The body can therefore act freely in the physical world, while execution-side disturbances, balance and motor errors, are factored out.

In this artist’s conception, an electron wave packet (blue) lies at the boundary between space and time. Lasting only attoseconds, an electron flash is generated between the tip of the scanning tunneling microscope and a metal sample. Researchers used a precisely controlled infrared light pulse to trigger the flash. Image: Brad Baxley

This narrative review finds that adequate iodine supports thyroid hormone signaling, leukocyte metabolism, antioxidant defenses, and antimicrobial activity in humans and domesticated mammals. Both deficiency and sustained excess may impair immunity or promote thyroid inflammation, but precise immune-specific intake thresholds remain uncertain.

A double meteor shower peak will occur this week — but sky-gazers might have a difficult time catching a glimpse of the cosmic activity.

The Alpha Capricornids are active from early July to mid-August, and the Southern Delta Aquariids are active from mid-July to mid-August, but both are expected to reach their peaks — the point at which Earth will pass through the densest part of the shower — Thursday night into Friday, according to the American Meteor Society.

A third meteor shower, the Perseids, will also be active this week, though it won’t peak until mid-August.

Pham et al. show that, during Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection, NRF2 activation in alveolar macrophages inhibits MHC II but not MHC I, leading to dampening of antigen presentation and CD4+ T cell activation. Although NRF2 promotes a cell-protective program, it unexpectedly impairs innate-adaptive crosstalk and host immunity in the lung.