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The Mpemba effect, whereby hotter systems can cool faster than cooler ones under identical conditions, was first noted by Aristotle over 2,000 years ago. It was rediscovered in 1963 by Tanzanian student Erasto Mpemba, who observed the phenomenon while making ice cream during a school cooking class. Mpemba later co-authored a scientific paper with British physicist Denis Osborne, documenting the effect in water.

Following their work, researchers have found that the Mpemba effect is not limited to water or simple liquids. It has been observed in a wide range of physical systems, including microscopic ones. However, a major challenge remains: detecting the Mpemba effect depends critically on the choice of a distance measure used to track how far a system is from equilibrium.

Because there are infinitely many possible distance measures, an effect seen using one measure may not appear within any finite time using another. Traditional approaches often evaluate relaxation speed, the rate at which a system returns to equilibrium after a temperature change, using a single, monotonic measure. But this can yield inconsistent or misleading results.

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NASA’s Curiosity rover has unearthed the largest organic molecules ever detected on Mars—possible fragments of fatty acids—hinting at the tantalizing possibility that prebiotic chemistry on the Red Planet may have been more advanced than previously thought. Found in a sample from Gale Crater’s Ye

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The threat actor known as EncryptHub exploited a recently-patched security vulnerability in Microsoft Windows as a zero-day to deliver a wide range of malware families, including backdoors and information stealers such as Rhadamanthys and StealC.

“In this attack, the threat actor manipulates.msc files and the Multilingual User Interface Path (MUIPath) to download and execute malicious payload, maintain persistence and steal sensitive data from infected systems,” Trend Micro researcher Aliakbar Zahravi said in an analysis.

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025–26633 (CVSS score: 7.0), described by Microsoft as an improper neutralization vulnerability in Microsoft Management Console (MMC) that could allow an attacker to bypass a security feature locally. It was fixed by the company earlier this month as part of its Patch Tuesday update.

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Such credentials could be obtained from a data breach of a social media service or be acquired from underground forums where they are advertised for sale by other threat actors.

Credential stuffing is also different from brute-force attacks, which revolve around cracking passwords, login credentials, and encryption keys using a trial and error method.

Atlantis AIO, per Abnormal Security, offers threat actors the ability to launch credential stuffing attacks at scale via pre-configured modules for targeting a range of platforms and cloud-based services, thereby facilitating fraud, data theft, and account takeovers.

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Is there a cleaner and more environmentally friendly way for scientists to create lithium-6, which is a primary component in creating nuclear fusion fuel? This is what a recent study published in Chem hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated safer methods for separating lithium-6 from lithium-7, which is a common procedure for creating nuclear fusion fuel. However, this procedure has long-required liquid mercury, whose exposure often results in sever neurodevelopmental disorders, including memory loss, along with lung, kidney, and nervous system damage.

For the study, the researchers discovered their novel method purely by accident while they were working with “produced water”, which is groundwater that is forced to the surface during drilling processes for gas and oil that needs cleaning before it’s pumped back underground, and this process repeats. To accomplish this cleaning process, a membrane is used to filter out unwanted components, during which the researchers found they were filtering lithium within this now-surface groundwater.

“We saw that we could extract lithium quite selectively given that there was a lot more salt than lithium present in the water,” said Dr. Sarbajit Banerjee, who is a professor of chemistry at ETH Zurich and a co-author on the study. “That led us to wonder whether this material might also have some selectivity for the 6-lithium isotope.”

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