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Blog – Page 21

A stressful life can leave marks on our genetic code, some of which can even be passed on to our children. A study now reveals how the biological impact of trauma on a mother persists long after the violent acts themselves have passed.

The international team of researchers demonstrate the physical mechanisms behind intergenerational trauma in humans, explaining why people with a family history of adversity are more prone to mental health conditions like anxiety and depression, despite not having experienced the adverse events themselves.

The researchers analyzed DNA collected from 48 Syrian families across three generations. These families included grandmothers or mothers who while pregnant had fled the 1982 siege and massacre in Hama or the 2011 armed uprising – both part of the ongoing Syrian civil war.

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A newly devised “polymorphic” attack allows malicious Chrome extensions to morph into other browser extensions, including password managers, crypto wallets, and banking apps, to steal sensitive information.

The attack was devised by SquareX Labs, which warns of its practicality and feasibility on the latest version of Chrome. The researchers have responsibly disclosed the attack to Google.

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The Akira ransomware gang was spotted using an unsecured webcam to launch encryption attacks on a victim’s network, effectively circumventing Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), which was blocking the encryptor in Windows.

Cybersecurity firm S-RM team discovered the unusual attack method during a recent incident response at one of their clients.

Notably, Akira only pivoted to the webcam after attempting to deploy encryptors on Windows, which were blocked by the victim’s EDR solution.

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Microsoft has taken down an undisclosed number of GitHub repositories used in a massive malvertising campaign that impacted almost one million devices worldwide.

The company’s threat analysts detected these attacks in early December 2024 after observing multiple devices downloading malware from GitHub repos, malware that was later used to deploy a string of various other payloads on compromised systems.

After analyzing the campaign, they discovered that the attackers injected ads into videos on illegal pirated streaming websites that redirect potential victims to malicious GitHub repositories under their control.

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Cow D lived on a dairy farm in New Zealand. The animal looked like the typical black-and-white cow farmers raise for milk, except for one thing: Researchers had outfitted Cow D with an artificial fistula—a hole offering them a way to reach the microbes inhabiting the animal’s bathtub-size stomach. But it’s what happened next that offers a porthole into the global debate over the use of genetic data.

In the spring of 2009, Samantha Noel, then a doctoral researcher at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, reached into Cow D’s rumen and plucked out a strain of Lachnospiraceae bacterium, later dubbed ND2006. Another team of geneticists sequenced the microbe’s complete set of genes, or genome, and uploaded the information, which was then shared with GenBank, a public database run by the US National Institutes of Health. If genes are the book of life, then this process was like adding a digital copy to an online library. In policy circles, these lines of code go by another name: digital sequence information, or DSI.

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The role of solar heat in earthquake activity https://pubs.aip.org/aip/cha/article-abstract/35/3/033107/33…m=fulltext

Seismology has revealed much of the basics about earthquakes: Tectonic plates move, causing strain energy to build up, and that energy eventually releases in the form of an earthquake. As for forecasting them, however, there’s still much to learn in order to evacuate cities before catastrophes like the 2011 magnitude 9.0 Tōhoku earthquake that, in addition to causing the tsunami that led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, resulted in more than 18,000 deaths.

In recent years, research has focused on a possible correlation between the sun or moon and on Earth, with some studies pointing to or electromagnetic effects interacting with the planet’s crust, core, and mantle.

In Chaos researchers from the University of Tsukuba and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan explored the likelihood that Earth’s climate, as affected by , plays a role.

Continue reading “How heat from the sun plays a role in seismic activity on Earth” | >

On the weekend Elon Musk provided a live demonstration of Neuralink’s technology using pigs with surgically implanted brain monitoring devices. The Australian Society for Computers & Law invited Dr Michelle Sharpe (Victorian Barrister) and Dr Allan McCay (Lecturer and Author on Neurotechnology and the law) to explore the legal and ethical implications of technology that interfaces between the human brain and computer devices.

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