Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 3

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

CISA and NSA Issue Urgent Guidance to Secure WSUS and Microsoft Exchange Servers

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and National Security Agency (NSA), along with international partners from Australia and Canada, have released guidance to harden on-premise Microsoft Exchange Server instances from potential exploitation.

“By restricting administrative access, implementing multi-factor authentication, enforcing strict transport security configurations, and adopting zero trust (ZT) security model principles, organizations can significantly bolster their defenses against potential cyber attacks,” CISA said.

The agencies said malicious activity aimed at Microsoft Exchange Server continues to take place, with unprotected and misconfigured instances facing the brunt of the attacks. Organizations are advised to decommission end-of-life on-premises or hybrid Exchange servers after transitioning to Microsoft 365.

CISA: High-severity Linux flaw now exploited by ransomware gangs

CISA confirmed on Thursday that a high-severity privilege escalation flaw in the Linux kernel is now being exploited in ransomware attacks.

While the vulnerability (tracked as CVE-2024–1086) was disclosed on January 31, 2024, as a use-after-free weakness in the netfilter: nf_tables kernel component and was fixed via a commit submitted in January 2024, it was first introduced by a decade-old commit in February 2014.

Successful exploitation enables attackers with local access to escalate privileges on the target system, potentially resulting in root-level access to compromised devices.

First Stem Cell Transplant from Deceased Donor Multiple Myeloma

A 68-year-old woman with relapsed acute myeloid leukemia (AML) underwent what appears to be the first successful stem cell transplant using stem cells recovered from a deceased donor. The procedure was performed at Henry Ford Health in Detroit and is notable because it may expand access for people who cannot find a suitable living donor, a barrier that mainly affects people from racial and ethnic minorities.

First-in-world marrow transplant from a deceased donor and what trials mean for access and timelines.

A Practitioner’s Guide to Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs), inspired by the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem. Unlike MLPs, which use fixed activation functions on nodes, KANs employ learnable univariate basis functions on edges, offering enhanced expressivity and interpretability. This review provides a systematic and comprehensive overview of the rapidly expanding KAN landscape, moving beyond simple performance comparisons to offer a structured synthesis of theoretical foundations, architectural variants, and practical implementation strategies. By collecting and categorizing a vast array of open-source implementations, we map the vibrant ecosystem supporting KAN development. We begin by bridging the conceptual gap between KANs and MLPs, establishing their formal equivalence and highlighting the superior parameter efficiency of the KAN formulation. A central theme of our review is the critical role of the basis function; we survey a wide array of choices, including B-splines, Chebyshev and Jacobi polynomials, ReLU compositions, Gaussian RBFs, and Fourier series, and analyze their respective trade-offs in terms of smoothness, locality, and computational cost. We then categorize recent advancements into a clear roadmap, covering techniques for improving accuracy, efficiency, and regularization. Key topics include physics-informed loss design, adaptive sampling, domain decomposition, hybrid architectures, and specialized methods for handling discontinuities. Finally, we provide a practical “Choose-Your-KAN” guide to help practitioners select appropriate architectures, and we conclude by identifying current research gaps. The associated GitHub repository https://github.com/AmirNoori68/kan-review complements this paper and serves as a structured reference for ongoing KAN research.

Another protease, pepsin, cuts in the same general region of the antibody molecule as papain but on the carboxy-terminal side of the disulfide bonds (see Fig

3.3). This produces a fragment, the F(ab′)2 fragment, in which the two -binding arms of the antibody molecule remain linked. In this case the remaining part of the is cut into several small fragments. The F(ab′)2 fragment has exactly the same antigen-binding characteristics as the original antibody but is unable to interact with any effector molecule. It is thus of potential value in therapeutic applications of antibodies as well as in research into the functional role of the Fc portion.

Genetic engineering techniques also now permit the construction of many different -related molecules. One important type is a truncated Fab comprising only the of a linked by a stretch of synthetic peptide to a V domain of a . This is called , named from Fragment v ariable. Fv molecules may become valuable therapeutic agents because of their small size, which allows them to penetrate tissues readily. They can be coupled to protein toxins to yield immunotoxins with potential application, for example, in tumor therapy in the case of a Fv specific for a tumor (see Chapter 14).

Experimental proof of long-suspected atomic decay pathway adds new detail to ‘nuclear periodic table’

For the first time, a research team from the University of Cologne has observed the electron capture decay of technetium-98, an isotope of the chemical element technetium (Tc). Electron capture decay is a process in which an atomic nucleus “captures” an electron from its inner shell. The electron merges with a proton in the nucleus to form a neutron, turning the element into a different one. The working group from the Nuclear Chemistry department has thus confirmed a decades-old theoretical assumption.

The findings contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of technetium processes and extend the chart of nuclides—the “nuclear periodic table.” The study was published under the title “Electron-capture decay of 98 Tc” in the journal Physical Review C.

As early as the 1990s, researchers suspected that technetium-98 could also decay by capturing an electron, but no proof could be found, as the isotope only is available in extremely small quantities. For the current study, the Cologne research team used around three grams of technetium-99, which contains tiny traces of the rare isotope technetium-98 (around 0.06 micrograms).

Advanced imaging reveals how electrocatalysts simultaneously generate hydrogen and organic compounds

Hybrid water electrolysers are recent devices, which produce hydrogen or other reduction products at the cathode, while valuable organic oxidation products are formed at the anode. This innovative approach significantly increases the profitability of hydrogen production.

Another advantage is that organic oxidation reactions (OOR) for producing the valuable compounds are quite environmentally friendly compared to the conventional synthesis processes which often require aggressive reagents. However, organic oxidation reactions are very complex, involving multiple catalyst states, , intermediate products, the formation and dissolution of bonds, and varying product selectivity. Research on OOR is still in its infancy.

Calorimetric experiment achieves tightest bound on electron neutrino mass

In a Physical Review Letters study, the HOLMES collaboration has achieved the most stringent upper bound on the effective electron neutrino mass ever obtained using a calorimetric approach, setting a limit of less than 27 eV/c² at 90% credibility.

This result validates a decades-old experimental vision and demonstrates the scalability needed for next-generation neutrino mass experiments.

While oscillation experiments have measured the differences between neutrino mass states, the actual individual mass values—the absolute neutrino mass scale—remain unknown. Pinning down these values would help complete our understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics.

A problem that takes quantum computers an unfathomable amount of time to solve

It’s a well-known fact that quantum calculations are difficult, but one would think that quantum computers would facilitate the process. In most cases, this is true.

Quantum bits, or qubits, use , like superposition and entanglement, to process many possibilities simultaneously. This allows for exponentially faster computing for complex problems. However, Thomas Schuster, of California Institute of Technology, and his research team have given quantum computers a problem that even they can’t solve in a reasonable amount of time—recognizing phases of matter of unknown quantum states.

The team’s research can be found in a paper published on the arXiv preprint server.

/* */