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Physicists Hunted a Mysterious Particle — and Found Two Unexpected Structures Instead

A first attempt to produce a mysterious strangeonium state using a photon beam yielded important and unexpected results.

Physicists have spent decades trying to organize the growing collection of subatomic particles, yet some of the most unusual discoveries still resist simple classification. At the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, researchers have now detected evidence for two unexpected structures that could help clarify this increasingly complicated landscape.

The signals may shed light on a puzzling class of particles called XYZ states. These objects do not fit comfortably within the conventional picture of particles built from quarks, the elementary constituents of matter. For the first time at Jefferson Lab, two such signals were observed when a beam of high-energy photons struck a proton target.

Critical Avada WordPress theme flaw enables zero-click RCE

A critical vulnerability chain in the popular Avada theme for WordPress can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary PHP code on the server.

The exploit chains six security issues into a zero-click attack. The flaws are collectively tracked as CVE-2026–18431 and received a 9.8 critical severity score.

The attack comprises exploits for authorization, input-validation, trust-boundary, and file-handling weaknesses, which must be executed in a specific order to enable arbitrary PHP code execution on a target server.

New GPUThor attack defeats NVIDIA ECC protection for root access

A newly disclosed Rowhammer attack called GPUThor can bypass error-correcting code (ECC) protections on NVIDIA GPUs, enabling denial-of-service (DoS) and root-level privilege escalation.

In a paper published by the University of Toronto, researchers say that GPUThor achieves far more practical bit-flip rates than past concepts like their own GPUHammer or GPUBreach, which became irrelevant after ECC was introduced.

The attack was demonstrated against Ampere-class NVIDIA workstation GPUs with GDDR6 memory, including the RTX A4000, RTX A4500, RTX A5000, and RTX A6000, all widely used in AI and cloud infrastructure.

Meta agrees to $18 billion settlement over teen social media harms

Meta has reached a proposed settlement worth up to approximately $18 billion with a bipartisan coalition of 52 attorneys generals over allegations that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately designed to encourage compulsive use by children and teenagers.

The settlement, which is awaiting court approval, resolves a lawsuit filed in 2023 by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general.

The lawsuit accused Meta of designing features that drove compulsive use among young users while misleading users, families, and the public about the risks of its platforms.

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