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Global initiative advances next-generation light sensors based on emerging materials

A global team of experts from academia and industry has joined forces in a landmark Consensus Statement on next-generation photodetectors based on emerging light-responsive materials, which could accelerate innovative applications across health care, smart homes, agriculture, and manufacturing.

Professor Vincenzo Pecunia, head of the Sustainable Optoelectronics Research Group (www.sfu.ca/see/soe), has led this global initiative culminating in the publication of a Consensus Statement in Nature Photonics. Featured on the journal’s cover, the paper provides a unified framework for characterizing, reporting, and benchmarking emerging light-sensing technologies. These guidelines could catalyze the adoption of such sensors across a wide range of applications, enhancing quality of life, productivity, and sustainability.

Light sensors, also known as photodetectors, are devices that convert light into electrical signals. They are at the heart of countless smart devices and represent a valued at over $30 billion, reflecting both their ubiquity and economic significance. Emerging photodetectors—including those based on organic semiconductors, perovskites, , and two-dimensional materials—could take this field even further by enabling ultrathin, flexible, stretchable, and lightweight sensors. These next-generation photodetectors promise lower costs, enhanced performance, and unique functionalities, paving the way for applications that were previously impossible.

Brains and stock markets follow the same rules in crisis, study finds

What do brains and the stock market have in common? While this might sound like a set-up for a joke, new research from U-M researchers reveals that the behaviors of brains and economies during crises can be explained using observations common in the realm of physics. Their work is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

UnCheol Lee, Ph.D. of the U-M Department of Anesthesiology and his collaborative team came up with the idea upon observing that some patients under anesthesia recover faster than others.

“Anesthetic drugs can be considered as introducing a controlled crisis in the brain, interrupting the brain’s network to induce unconsciousness,” explained Lee.

Physicist discusses the Higgs boson and whether it might change the fate of the universe

On July 4, 2012, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland announced with great fanfare that they had successfully detected the Higgs boson, the manifestation of the mechanism that gives some elementary particles their mass. The finding was a triumph of both the experimental skill required to definitively detect the particle, and the theoretical acumen of those who predicted its existence, recognized by the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Brown University researchers played key roles in both sides of the accomplishment. Experimentalists including David Cutts, Ulrich Heintz, Greg Landsberg and the late Meenakshi Narain made key contributions to the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the LHC credited with making the discovery. Years earlier, the late Gerald Guralnik was part of a group that made a theoretical prediction of the particle, which many scientists believe to be the most complete description of the Higgs mechanism.

The Higgs was the final missing piece in the standard model of —the theory that describes the basic building blocks of the universe. But its discovery was by no means a final destination for particle physics. Fundamental questions about the Higgs itself remain unanswered.

“This Is From a Meteorite”: Scientist Stunned by Water Inside 400-Million-Year-Old Plant

The research, led by Zachary Sharp, a professor in UNM’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The study centers on horsetails, a family of hollow-stemmed plants that have survived on Earth for more than 400 million years.

The researchers found that water moving through these plants experiences such a powerful natural purification process that its oxygen isotope composition closely matches that of meteorites and other materials from beyond our planet.

“It’s a meter-high cylinder with a million holes in it, equally spaced. It’s an engineering marvel,” Sharp said. “You couldn’t create anything like this in a laboratory.”

The Evolution of SOC Operations: How Continuous Exposure Management Transforms Security Operations

Security Operations Centers (SOC) today are overwhelmed. Analysts handle thousands of alerts every day, spending much time chasing false positives and adjusting detection rules reactively. SOCs often lack the environmental context and relevant threat intelligence needed to quickly verify which alerts are truly malicious. As a result, analysts spend excessive time manually triaging alerts, the majority of which are classified as benign.

Addressing the root cause of these blind spots and alert fatigue isn’t as simple as implementing more accurate tools. Many of these traditional tools are very accurate, but their fatal flaw is a lack of context and a narrow focus — missing the forest for the trees. Meanwhile, sophisticated attackers exploit exposures invisible to traditional reactive tools, often evading detection using widely-available bypass kits.

While all of these tools are effective in their own right, they often fail because of the reality that attackers don’t employ just one attack technique, exploit just one type of exposure or weaponize a single CVE when breaching an environment. Instead, attackers chain together multiple exposures, utilizing known CVEs where helpful, and employing evasion techniques to move laterally across an environment and accomplish their desired goals. Individually, traditional security tools may detect one or more of these exposures or IoCs, but without the context derived from a deeply integrated continuous exposure management program, it can be nearly impossible for security teams to effectively correlate otherwise seemingly disconnected signals.

Fake Solidity VSCode extension on Open VSX backdoors developers

A remote access trojan dubbed SleepyDuck, and disguised as the well-known Solidity extension in the Open VSX open-source registry, uses an Ethereum smart contract to establish a communication channel with the attacker.

Open VSX is a community-driven registry for extensions compatible with VS Code, which are popular with AI-powered integrated development environments (IDEs) like Cursor and Windsurf.

The extension is still present on Open VSX as ‘juan-bianco.solidity-vlang’, albeit with a warning from the platform, and has been downloaded more than 53,000 times.

Microsoft: SesameOp malware abuses OpenAI Assistants API in attacks

Microsoft security researchers have discovered a new backdoor malware that uses the OpenAI Assistants API as a covert command-and-control channel.

The company’s Detection and Response Team (DART) discovered the new malware, named SesameOp, during an investigation into a July 2025 cyberattack, which revealed that the malware allowed attackers to gain persistent access to the compromised environment.

Deploying this malware also enabled the threat actors to remotely manage backdoored devices for several months by leveraging legitimate cloud services, rather than relying on dedicated malicious infrastructure that could alert victims to an attack and be taken down during subsequent incident response.

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