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CERN’s Future Circular Collider project gets $1 billion funding

In a historic first for the laboratory, CERN has received $1 billion in private donations to support the development of the Future Circular Collider (FCC).

This philanthropic backing marks a shift in CERN’s 72-year funding history as it seeks to bridge the gap for the project’s estimated $18 billion price tag.

It comes from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund, and billionaire entrepreneurs John Elkann and Xavier Niel. Together, they pledged a combined $1 billion in late December 2025 to jumpstart the project.

ACF plugin bug gives hackers admin on 50,000 WordPress sites

A critical-severity vulnerability in the Advanced Custom Fields: Extended (ACF Extended) plugin for WordPress can be exploited remotely by unauthenticated attackers to obtain administrative permissions.

ACF Extended, currently active on 100,000 websites, is a specialized plugin that extends the capabilities of the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin with features for developers and advanced site builders.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025–14533, can be leveraged for admin privileges by abusing the plugin’s ‘Insert User / Update User’ form action, in versions of ACF Extended 0.9.2.1 and earlier.

The Scientific Study of Religion (feat. Dr. Andrew Aghapour)

Register for our 8-week seminar, Religion and Science!: https://www.religiondepartment.com/ReligionAndScience.

Religion and science don’t have to be enemies. Andrew Henry talks with scholar Andrew Aghapour about what the Religion and Science series revealed, how science studies religious experience, and where scientific approaches can quietly mislead.

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