Axios 1.14.1 and 0.30.4 injected malicious [email protected] after npm compromise on March 31, 2026, deploying cross-platform RAT malware.
Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.
Microsoft pulls KB5079391 Windows update over install issues
Microsoft has pulled a buggy Windows 11 non-security preview update to investigate a known issue that triggers 0×80073712 errors during installation.
KB5079391, the problematic optional cumulative update, started rolling out on Thursday to Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 systems with 29 changes, including Smart App Control and Display improvements.
This preview update also improved Windows Hello Fingerprint reliability on some devices and Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) stability when running x64 apps on ARM64 devices.
Apple adds macOS Terminal warning to block ClickFix attacks
Apple has introduced a security feature in macOS Tahoe 26.4 that blocks pasting and executing potentially harmful commands in Terminal and alerts users to possible risks.
The new mechanism appears to be aimed primarily at blocking ClickFix attacks and has been reported by macOS users since the release candidate version of the operating system. Apple didn’t specifically mention it in macOS Tahoe 26.4 release notes.
ClickFix is a social engineering technique that tricks users into pasting malicious commands into the command line interface under the pretense of fixing a problem or a verification process.
Study of 6 Million People Could Rewrite How We Understand Mental Health
From the article:
The study also identified specific brain cell types associated with the genetic patterns.
For the schizophrenia bipolar group, the strongest genetic signals appeared in genes active in excitatory neurons. These neurons transmit signals that activate other brain cells and help different parts of the brain communicate.
In contrast, genetic risk tied to internalizing disorders such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD showed stronger links to oligodendrocytes. These cells help nerve signals travel more efficiently through the brain.
“The findings suggest these ‘support cells’ might play an important role in those conditions,” said Verhulst, research assistant professor and an expert in quantitative and statistical genetics.”
A massive genetic analysis of more than 6 million people is revealing new clues about why mental health disorders frequently overlap.
Hydrogen atmosphere could keep exomoons habitable for billions of years
Liquid water is considered essential for life. Surprisingly, however, stable conditions that are conducive to life could exist far from any sun. A research team from the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS at LMU and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) has shown that moons around freefloating planets can keep their water oceans liquid for up to 4.3 billion years by virtue of dense hydrogen atmospheres and tidal heating—that is to say, for almost as long as Earth has existed and sufficient time for complex life to develop.
Planetary systems often form under unstable conditions. If young planets come too close, they can fling each other out of their orbits. This creates free-floating planets (FFPs) that wander through the galaxy without a parent star. An earlier study by LMU physicist Dr. Giulia Roccetti had shown that gas giants ejected in this way do not necessarily lose all of their moons in the process. The new study is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Tidal heating keeps oceans liquid The ejection does, however, alter the orbits of the moons. They become highly elliptical, such that their distance from the planet constantly changes. The resulting tidal forces rhythmically deform the lunar body, compress its interior, and generate heat through friction. This tidal heating can be sufficient to maintain oceans of liquid water on the surface—even without the energy of a star, and in the cold of interstellar space.
Pitfalls and Potential of Dementia Prevention Trials
💬 Editorial by Holly Elser, MD, PhD, and Jonathan Graff-Radford, MD:
Recent randomized clinical trials on dementia prevention highlight several challenges in interpreting lifestyle intervention studies, including practice and Hawthorne effects, modest changes in cognitive outcomes, and heterogeneity in both trial design and participant baseline risk.
The trial by Zhang et al—evaluating aerobic exercise and intensive vascular risk reduction—showed no significant cognitive benefit over 2 years in older adults at elevated risk, underscoring the potential influence of midlife vs late-life intervention timing and the need for longer trials or biomarker-enriched cohorts to better assess dementia prevention strategies.
Dementia prevention is a global public health priority,1,2 with up to 45% of cases potentially attributable to modifiable risk factors over the life course.3 While recent landmark trials, including FINGER, SPRINT MIND, and POINTER, suggest either single-or multidomain lifestyle interventions can improve cognitive outcomes,4-6 others have shown no clear benefit,7,8 thus highlighting ongoing uncertainty in the field.
In this issue of JAMA Neurol ogy, Zhang and colleagues9 report the results of a single-blind, multicenter randomized clinical trial of the effects of exercise and intensive vascular risk reduction on cognitive function. Eligible study participants were between the ages of 60 and 85 years at baseline with a history of hypertension, family history of dementia, or self-reported cognitive decline. The study used a 2 × 2 factorial design wherein participants were randomized to aerobic exercise training alone, intensive pharmacological reduction of cardiovascular risk factors (IRVR) alone, both aerobic exercise and IRVR, or usual care for a 24-month period. The IRVR protocol lowered systolic blood pressure to less than 130 mm Hg, and participants with baseline serum low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) of 70 mg/dL or higher were also treated with a high-intensity statin.
Studying 2 distinct human cohorts with recent exposure to TB
https://doi.org/10.1172/jci.insight.202134 Paul Ogongo & team find different individual Mycobacterium tuberculosis antigens induce distinct T cell responses, with important implications for TB vaccine development.
5Center for Global Health Research, Kenya Medical Research Institute, Kisumu, Kenya.
6Center for Vaccine Innovation, La Jolla Institute for Immunology, La Jolla, California, USA.
7Department of Infectious Disease and Immunology, Center for Vaccine Research, Statens Serum Institut, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Long-term inflammatory memory driver identified!
The researchers first gave a bout of psoriasis to mice when they were young. They discovered that about 10–15% of the memories that persisted a month later stuck around even to the end of the mouse’s life (~2 years). To see why these long-term memories lingered while their short-term counterparts faded within six months, they analyzed the DNA sequence characteristics within each of the memories by using a deep learning model customized by the third co-first author.
“When we compared the DNA sequences of short and long-term memory domains, they looked very similar in terms of the numbers and kinds of transcription factor binding sites,” says the author. “We realized we needed to develop a new metric that specifically captures memory persistence across time, not just total accessibility at any one point.”
Soto-Ugaldi’s adaptation, called PersistNet, quickly identified a telling trait: The longest lasting memory domains had an unusually high frequency of CpG dinucleotides—short DNA sequences of cytosine followed by guanine, which are known to play a key role in gene regulation. In fact, the model predicted that CpG density hardwires a timer into every memory domain: The more CpG’s, the longer the memory.
When they tested the prediction, that’s exactly what they found. “Looking across all 1,000 memory domains, we discovered that these nucleotide densities alone, and no other DNA sequence pattern, could distinguish how long each memory would linger,” says the author.
Back in the lab, the team discovered that these genetically wired densities enabled a host of epigenetic changes in memory domains, including DNA demethylation (the removal of a methyl group specifically found on CpG dinucleotides); the binding of transcription factors that prefer demethylated states; and the recruitment of a histone variant called H2A.Z, which preferentially seeks out demethylated sites and boosts chromatin accessibility while staving off future re-methylation. Together, these changes stabilized the open chromatin formation and its gene-priming activity. As the authors discovered, this structure could crucially be passed down across cellular generations, essentially keeping the doors open for life. Science Mission sciencenewshighlights.
One of the most puzzling aspects of common chronic inflammatory skin diseases such as psoriasis is how they become chronic. What allows an ongoing condition to stay dormant for months or even years, then seemingly spring back out of nowhere?
Fragmented phone use—not total screen time—is the main driver of information overload, study finds
Amid hot discussion on screen time, social media use and the impact of digital devices on our well-being, a seven-month study from Aalto University in Finland sheds new light on what overwhelms users the most—and the results aren’t what you might think.
“Screen time does matter, but the heaviest users aren’t the most overloaded,” says doctoral researcher Henrik Lassila. “Those who feel most overwhelmed are the ones who return to their phone again and again for brief moments and then put it down shortly after.”
The seven-month study followed the digital behavior of nearly 300 adults in Germany across smartphones and computers. Participants completed repeated surveys about information overload, while all apps and websites used were logged, creating a rich longitudinal dataset of real world device use.