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Squid Skin May Work Like an Ear, Surprising New Research Suggests

Squid have hundreds more sensory cells than scientists realized, with hair bundles that may help explain how human hearing works and breaks down.

Water flowing over a squid’s head and arms brushes tiny past bundles of hair-like projections that help the animal sense movement around it. Scientists have known about these sensory structures for years, but they had only a partial picture of how widely this equipment was spread across the squid’s body.

Brian McDermott and his colleagues at Case Western Reserve University have now found hundreds more of the cells carrying these bundles, extending across the animal’s entire surface. Their research, published in Current Biology, includes the first complete map of squid lateral lines, arrays of sensory cells known as hair cells. The newly revealed network could give researchers another way to investigate the delicate structures that make human hearing possible.

Scientists Discover a Strange New Quantum State Where Two Materials Meet

Researchers have directly observed an unusual quantum state emerging at the boundary between an atomically thin material and a metal.

Scientists have directly observed an unusual quantum state forming where a material just one atom thick meets a metal. The discovery, made by a research team led by the University of Osaka, demonstrates how interactions between electrons in different materials can produce a state known as a heavy fermion, potentially offering new ways to engineer quantum materials.

Heavy-fermion states occur when strong interactions cause electrons to behave as if they have unusually large effective masses. These states are closely associated with exotic quantum phenomena, including unconventional superconductivity, in which electrical current can flow without resistance through mechanisms that differ from those in conventional superconductors.

Scientists Decode the Unusual Weather of a Planet 20 Light-Years From Earth

JWST observations reveal that the changing atmosphere of brown dwarf SIMP 136 may be governed by just a few underlying processes.

A world 20 light-years from Earth appears to have a much more orderly atmosphere than its constantly changing clouds suggest.

Using observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists at Trinity College Dublin found that most of the atmospheric variability on the brown dwarf SIMP 136 can be traced to just two dominant processes: changes in temperature and changes in the vertical structure of its clouds. Those processes appear to combine into three recurring weather states that rotate in and out of view.

Inside AvisLoader: A Windows Malware Loader Built to Resist Disruption

A new Windows malware loader called AvisLoader uses encrypted peer-to-peer communications to make command-and-control infrastructure harder to disrupt. Varonis researchers explain how the malware uses ClickFix delivery, shortcut-based persistence, and remote command execution capabilities.

Yandex confirms service outage as users lose access to cloud files

Russian cloud services provider Yandex announced that drone attacks damaged three of its data centers, forcing it to shut down two facilities and partially disable a third.

Yandex customers are experiencing service outages, some of them reporting inability to access files stored on the company’s cloud infrastructure.

The impacted data centers are in Sasovo (hit on October 8), Kaluga (hit on October 9), and Vladimir (attacked on October 11). The Sasovo and Vladimir facilities stopped operating completely, while the Kaluga facility’s operations are degraded.

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