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

New catalogs map the quantum possibilities of atomically thin materials

Twistronics has become a new alchemy of materials. By choosing atomically thin layers, stacking them and changing their relative angle, researchers can create electronic behavior absent from the original ingredients. Twisted graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides have already yielded superconductivity and fractional Chern insulators, states with fractionally charged excitations. One of physics’ most active frontiers now has a moonshot ambition: to design entirely new forms of quantum matter.

New families of twisted materials have repeatedly brought new rules for how electrons move and interact—a different Hamiltonian—and new kinds of quantum simulators. The team’s recent Nature study of M-point twisting illustrates how changing the starting electronic structure opens different physics. Exploring other atomic architectures could therefore uncover quantum states and models that today’s familiar platforms cannot reach.

Now, in two back-to–back papers to be published Sept. 24 in Science, an international collaboration provides both the building blocks and a guide to that vast search. The first maps the electronic structures and topology of nearly 9,000 two-dimensional entries, whether topological or not. The second identifies more than 1,600 candidates for twisting, with different electronic starting points that could enable entirely new kinds of quantum simulators.

Stanford Researchers Discover That the Human Brain May Be Two Separate Organs Fused Together

A split in early brain development helped researchers grow human hindbrain neurons that could shed light on SMA and ALS.

The human hindbrain, the region at the back of the brain that helps control breathing and swallowing, has been difficult to study in the laboratory. For decades, scientists have struggled to grow its neurons, leaving them without an important tool for investigating diseases that gradually take away those abilities.

Researchers led by Stanford Medicine have now grown functional human hindbrain motor neurons, the nerve cells that control muscles, by identifying a developmental split that begins as an embryo takes shape. Their work suggests that making these cells requires a different starting point from the one that produces the brain’s other major regions.

Jupiter Handles the Solar Wind in a Way Scientists Didn’t Expect

New observations from NASA’s Juno mission are revealing that Jupiter’s bow shock behaves in more complex ways than its counterpart at Earth.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has captured the most detailed measurements yet of Jupiter’s bow shock, the vast boundary where the solar wind crashes into the planet’s magnetic environment. The observations show that Jupiter manages this high-energy interaction very differently from Earth, using a more complex mix of plasma waves and smaller shock structures to slow incoming particles.

The results, reported by a University of Iowa-led team, also give researchers a nearby example of shock physics that could help them study far more energetic environments, including the remnants of exploded stars.

Scientists May Have Uncovered the Mystery Behind Webb’s Strange Little Red Dots

New simulations suggest Webb’s Little Red Dots capture a rapid growth phase that could explain the early appearance of supermassive black holes.

Little Red Dots, the small, extremely red objects spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope in the early universe, may reveal how black holes grew so big, so quickly.

Astronomers have found supermassive black holes with masses millions or even billions of times that of the Sun less than 600 million years after the Big Bang. Explaining how they gained so much mass in that time has been difficult, and new simulations suggest the dots could represent the rapid growth needed to get them there.

Once-in-a-Century Impact: NASA Just Found a Massive New Crater on the Moon

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter helped uncover a 728-foot-wide crater that formed on the Moon in 2024 after a rare, powerful impact.

What began as a routine check of lunar mapping data quickly turned into an unexpected discovery. Robert Wagner, a scientist working with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), was examining a large map of the Moon when one feature immediately stood out: an unusually bright patch surrounded by a dark halo.

The pattern suggested that material on the lunar surface had recently been disturbed.

TeamFiltration Campaign Compromises Seven Microsoft 365 Accounts Using Default Passwords

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an active TeamFiltration campaign codenamed UNK_CondorFiltration that has targeted over 5,700 accounts across 28 Microsoft 365 tenants.

According to Proofpoint, the activity has primarily focused on Chilean retail and financial institutions. It originated from 1,487 unique AWS EC2 source IP addresses.

“The campaign compromised 7 accounts – all of which were unmanaged functional or service accounts rather than individual employee accounts – highlighting a critical exposure gap around forgotten, non-human identities carrying default or unrotated passwords and no MFA [multi-factor authentication],” the enterprise security company said in a statement.

MacSync malware uses public iCloud calendars to deliver new payloads

A new variant of the MacSync info-stealing malware targeting macOS systems now uses public iCloud calendar events to deliver fresh payloads.

MacSync is a Swift-based malware that emerged in April 2025 and has been observed recently being delivered in ClickFix campaigns disguised as Homebrew and macOS disk space analyzer tools.

Kaspersky researchers say that while earlier versions of the malware were derived from the AMOS stealer family, MacSync evolved and added new capabilities via modules.

Exposed GitLab project email addresses let attackers push code

Private GitLab email addresses that allow developers to push issues or tasks to a project are being deliberately exposed in READMEs, contributing guides, and support pages used to collect bug reports.

The addresses are part of a built-in GitLab feature called “Email work item to this project” and contain a long-lived token tied to the developer’s account.

These addresses are generated automatically and contain a string that serves as a credential for creating work items via email. When an external client sends a message to one of them, GitLab parses it into a project issue or task.

/* */