UNSW researchers interrogated the ‘sounds’ of a cluster of stars within the Milky Way, uncovering a new technique for astrophysicists to probe the universe and learn more about its evolution.
The SpotBugs maintainer has since confirmed that the PAT that was used as a secret in the workflow was the same access token that was later used to invite “jurkaofavak” to the “spotbugs/spotbugs” repository. The maintainer has also rotated all of their tokens and PATs to revoke and prevent further access by the attackers.
One major unknown in all this is the three-month gap between when the attackers leaked the SpotBugs maintainer’s PAT and when they abused it. It’s suspected that the attackers were keeping an eye out on the projects that were dependent on “tj-actions/changed-files” and waited to strike a high-value target like Coinbase.
“Having invested months of effort and after achieving so much, why did the attackers print the secrets to logs, and in doing so, also reveal their attack?,” Unit 42 researchers pondered.
Novice hacker Coquettte exposed through OPSEC failure using Proton66 to distribute malware and illicit content via fake antivirus sites.
New physics research reveals how math transforms the testing of partially entangled quantum systems, improving device accuracy.
An innovative method using superconducting sensors precisely measures the recoil energy of lithium-7 nuclei, setting a lower limit on the spatial extent of neutrino wavepackets, advancing understanding of neutrino properties and weak nuclear decays.
New research from The University of Manchester may reshape our understanding of what happens to the immune system when we fast. The study on mice shows that the brain’s hypothalamus controls how the immune system adapts during fasting, through a handful of highly specialized neurons responsible for making animals hungry.
Published in Science Immunology, the study shows the brain’s perception of hunger or fullness, rather than actual eating or caloric restriction, is enough to drive changes in the body’s immune cells.
The findings cast doubt on the current view that a lack of nutrients alone controls how the immune system responds to fasting, indicating the brain has a critical role, beyond the simple absence of food.
In this study, researchers engineered an attenuated strain, Designer Bacteria 1 (DB1), which efficiently survives and proliferates in tumor tissues while being cleared in normal tissues, achieving a remarkable “tumor-targeting” effect as well as “tumor-clearing” effect.
To understand how DB1 simultaneously achieves these effects, researchers investigated the interactions between the bacteria and tumors. They discovered that DB1’s antitumor efficacy is closely linked to tissue-resident memory (TRM) CD8+ T cells within the tumor, which are reinvigorated and expanded following DB1 therapy. Interleukin-10 (IL-10) plays a crucial role in mediating this effect, with efficacy depending on the high expression of interleukin-10 receptor (IL-10R) on CD8+ TRM cells.
To investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying the high expression of IL-10R on CD8+ TRM cells, researchers conducted a series of computational and quantitative experiments. They found that IL-10 binds to IL-10R on CD8+ TRM cells, activating the STAT3 protein and further promoting IL-10R expression. This established a positive feedback loop, enabling cells to bind more IL-10 and creating a nonlinear hysteretic effect, whereby CD8+ TRM cells “memorize” previous IL-10 stimulation during tumorigenesis. The high expression of IL-10R on CD8+ TRM cells was exploited by a bacteria-induced IL-10 surge, which activated and expanded CD8+ TRM cells to clear tumor cells.
To examine the source of IL-10 within the tumor microenvironment (TME) after bacterial therapy, researchers found that tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) upregulate IL-10 expression following DB1 stimulation via the Toll-like Receptor 4 (TLR4) signaling pathway. Interestingly, IL-10 reduced the migration speed of tumor-associated neutrophils (TANs), aiding DB1 in evading rapid clearance. These processes depended on high IL-10R expression in tumor-associated immune cells, highlighting the critical role of IL-10R hysteresis.
A research team elucidated the mechanism behind bacterial cancer therapy using a genetically engineered bacterial strain. Their findings were published in Cell.
Exploring the use of antitumor bacteria in cancer therapy dates back to the 1860s. Despite this long history, however, clinical application of bacterial-based cancer therapy has faced significant challenges in terms of safety and efficacy.
Barrington, S., Cooper, E.A. & Farid, H. People are poorly equipped to detect AI-powered voice clones. Sci Rep 15, 11,004 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-94170-3
Researchers have successfully revived algae that remained dormant underneath sediment at the bottom of the Baltic Sea for more than 7,000 years.