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Warped protoplanetary disks reshape existing ideas about how planets form

The textbook picture of how planets form—serene, flat disks of cosmic dust—has just received a significant cosmic twist.

New research, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, is set to reshape this long-held view. An international team of scientists, wielding the formidable power of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), has found compelling evidence that many , the very birthplaces of planets, are in fact subtly warped.

These slight bends and twists in the disk plane, often just a few degrees, bear a striking resemblance to the subtle tilts observed among the planets in our own solar system. This discovery suggests the initial conditions for planetary systems might be far less orderly than previously thought, with profound implications for how planets grow and settle into their final orbits.

Breathwork can induce altered states of consciousness linked with changes in brain blood flow

Breathwork while listening to music may induce a blissful state in practitioners, accompanied by changes in blood flow to emotion-processing brain regions, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS One by Amy Amla Kartar from the Colasanti Lab in the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, U.K., and colleagues.

These changes occur even while the body’s stress response may be activated and are associated with reporting reduced negative emotions.

The popularity of breathwork as a therapeutic tool for psychological distress is rapidly expanding. Breathwork practices that increase ventilatory rate or depth, accompanied by music, can lead to altered states of consciousness (ASCs) similar to those evoked by psychedelic substances.

‘Unhappiness hump’ in aging may have disappeared worldwide

A new survey-based study suggests that the “unhappiness hump”—a widely documented rise in worry, stress, and depression with age that peaks in midlife and then declines—may have disappeared, perhaps due to declining mental health among younger people. David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One.

Since 2008, a U-shaped trend in well-being with age, in which well-being tends to decline from childhood until around age 50 before rebounding in old age, has been observed in developed and developing countries worldwide. Data have also revealed a corresponding “ill-being” or hump.

Recent data point to a worldwide decline in well-being among younger people, but most studies have not directly addressed potential implications for the unhappiness hump. To help clarify, Blanchflower and colleagues first analyzed data from U.S. and U.K. surveys that included questions about participants’ .

Scientists Discover Strange New Parasitic Wasp Species in the U.S.

The lab is contributing to a broader initiative aimed at studying the diversity of oak gall wasps and their parasites. Researchers, including faculty from Binghamton University, State University of New York, have discovered two parasitic wasp species in the United States that were previously unkn

Scientists Detected Signs of a Structure Hiding Inside Earth’s Core

While most of us take the ground beneath our feet for granted, written within its complex layers, like the pages of a book, is Earth’s history. Our history.

Research shows there are little-known chapters in that history, deep within Earth’s past. In fact, Earth’s inner core appears to have another even more inner core within it.

“Traditionally we’ve been taught the Earth has four main layers: the crust, the mantle, the outer core and the inner core,” Australian National University geophysicist Joanne Stephenson explained in 2021.

Storm-0501 Exploits Entra ID to Exfiltrate and Delete Azure Data in Hybrid Cloud Attacks

The financially motivated threat actor known as Storm-0501 has been observed refining its tactics to conduct data exfiltration and extortion attacks targeting cloud environments.

“Unlike traditional on-premises ransomware, where the threat actor typically deploys malware to encrypt critical files across endpoints within the compromised network and then negotiates for a decryption key, cloud-based ransomware introduces a fundamental shift,” the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a report shared with The Hacker News.

“Leveraging cloud-native capabilities, Storm-0501 rapidly exfiltrates large volumes of data, destroys data and backups within the victim environment, and demands ransom — all without relying on traditional malware deployment.”

Storm-0501 hackers shift to ransomware attacks in the cloud

Microsoft warns that a threat actor tracked as Storm-0501 has evolved its operations, shifting away from encrypting devices with ransomware to focusing on cloud-based encryption, data theft, and extortion.

The hackers now abuse native cloud features to exfiltrate data, wipe backups, and destroy storage accounts, thereby applying pressure and extorting victims without deploying traditional ransomware encryption tools.

Storm-0501 is a threat actor who has been active since at least 2021, deploying the Sabbath ransomware in attacks against organizations worldwide. Over time, the threat actor joined various ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) platforms, where they used encryptors from Hive, BlackCat (ALPHV), Hunters International, LockBit, and, more recently, Embargo ransomware.

Experimental PromptLock ransomware uses AI to encrypt, steal data

Threat researchers discovered the first AI-powered ransomware, called PromptLock, that uses Lua scripts to steal and encrypt data on Windows, macOS, and Linux systems.

The malware uses OpenAI’s gpt-oss:20b model through the Ollama API to dynamically generate the malicious Lua scripts from hard-coded prompts.

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