An international research team from the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany, and the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has developed a method to detect compromised hosts at an internet scale by probing servers with public SSH keys previously observed in attacker operations.
This way, the team was able to identify more than 16,000 compromised hosts. Their findings have now been published at the USENIX Security Symposium 2025, where they were awarded a Distinguished Paper Award and the Internet Defense Prize.
Secure Shell (SSH) is one of the most common tools used to manage servers remotely. It provides a secure, encrypted channel between a client and a server, allowing users to log in, execute commands, and transfer files safely. SSH is widely used by system administrators and developers for maintaining and configuring remote systems.
A research team affiliated with UNIST has unveiled a novel technology that enables hydrogen to be stored within polystyrene-derived materials, particularly those originating from Styrofoam. The research is published in the journal ACS Catalysis.
This advancement not only offers a solution to the low recycling rate of polystyrene —less than 1%—but also makes hydrogen storage and transportation more practical and accessible, addressing the challenges associated with handling gaseous hydrogen.
Led by Professor Kwangjin An from the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST, in collaboration with Dr. Hyuntae Sohn from KIST and Professor Jeehoon Han from POSTECH, the team successfully designed a comprehensive, closed-loop system to convert waste polystyrene into a liquid organic hydrogen carrier (LOHC). This innovative process enables efficient hydrogen storage, retrieval, and reuse.
In a new paper, published in Nature Human Behaviour, scientists from DTU (the Technical University of Denmark) examine how geography shapes human mobility and propose a way to separate physical constraints from behavioral patterns. A result that may improve urban planning, transportation design as well as epidemiology models.
Using 36 years of detailed residential relocation data from Denmark, which covers 39 million moves, between more than three million addresses, the researchers show that when you account for the influence of geography, the likelihood of moving decreases consistently with distance. This means, roughly speaking, that if you double the distance, the likelihood of people moving there is half. In cities, however, distance matters less.
The reader would be right in thinking this result seems obvious. But from a scientific perspective, the data describing these several million moves was anything but simple.
In turbulent fluids, mixing of the components happens easily. However, in more viscous fluids such as those enclosed within cellular compartments, the intermixing of particles and molecules is much more challenging. As time also plays a role in such systems, the slow mixing by molecular movement is typically not sufficient and efficient stirring strategies are thus required to maintain functionality.
In the department of Living Matter Physics at MPI-DS, scientists investigated the universal physical principles underlying such mixing dynamics. They identified protocols that allow for the optimal mixing of the system when energetic costs or fluid motion are limiting factors. The paper is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
“We found that the most effective stirring strategies share a universal structure and are symmetric in time,” says Luca Cocconi, first author of the study. “These optimal protocols reveal a fundamental limit on how efficiently information—for example about the identity and position of particles—can be erased in such systems.”
Throughout human history, there have been many instances where two populations came into contact—especially in the past few thousand years because of large-scale migrations as a consequence of conquests, colonialization, and, more recently, globalization. During these encounters, not only did populations exchange genetic material, but also cultural elements.
When populations interact, they may borrow technologies, beliefs, practices, and also, crucially, aspects of language. With this, sounds, words or grammatical patterns can be exchanged from one language to the other. For example, English borrowed “sausage” from French after the Norman conquests, while French later borrowed “sandwich” from English.
However, studying these linguistic exchanges can be challenging due to the limited historical records of human contacts, especially on a global scale. As a result, our understanding of how languages evolved over time through such interactions remains incomplete.
What looks like ordinary sand, rocks or snow flowing in one direction can actually hide swirling currents that move in multiple directions beneath the surface.
When grains move in a landslide, most follow the steepest downhill path. This is the “primary flow,” where particles largely follow the herd. But some grains move sideways or swirl in hidden patterns, forming “secondary flows” that subtly influence how far and fast the material travels.
Understanding how grains move beneath the surface could help explain the physics of avalanches and landslides, and even improve how we handle everyday materials like wheat in silos or powders in pharmaceuticals.
The final section of what scientists and engineers say will be the largest and most powerful pulsed, superconducting magnet in the world has been completed at the Poway campus of San Diego-based General Atomics.
The 270,000-pound module is poised for shipment to France, where it will join six other identical sections at the ITER project—an ambitious international effort aimed at determining whether the so-far-untapped potential of nuclear fusion as an energy source can be practical or not.
“This is a momentous achievement,” General Atomics Chief Executive Officer Neal Blue said Thursday during a news conference at the company’s Magnet Technologies Center in Poway.
More than 5,000 planets have been discovered beyond our solar system, allowing scientists to explore planetary evolution and consider the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Now, a UC Riverside study published in Physical Review D suggests that exoplanets, which are planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, could also serve as tools to investigate dark matter.
The researchers examined how dark matter, which makes up 85% of the universe’s matter, might affect Jupiter-sized exoplanets over long periods of time. Their theoretical calculations suggest dark matter particles could gradually collect in the cores of these planets. Although dark matter has never been detected in laboratories, physicists are confident it exists.
“If the dark matter particles are heavy enough and don’t annihilate, they may eventually collapse into a tiny black hole,” said paper first author Mehrdad Phoroutan-Mehr, a graduate student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy who works with Hai-Bo Yu, a professor of physics and astronomy. “This black hole could then grow and consume the entire planet, turning it into a black hole with the same mass as the original planet. This outcome is only possible under the superheavy non-annihilating dark matter model.”