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Physicists Tackle a Classic Quantum Problem With a Powerful New Computational Method

A new computational approach uses the real electronic structure of materials to predict a classic quantum effect far more accurately than simplified models.

Seven magnetic atoms embedded one at a time in copper have given physicists a new way to test whether computers can predict the behavior of real quantum materials without first reducing them to simplified models.

For most of the seven transition-metal impurities, calculations developed by researchers at Caltech and Yale University improved on the accuracy of conventional model-based predictions by as much as two orders of magnitude. The test involved the Kondo effect, a classic quantum problem whose general physics has been understood for decades even though its precise behavior in specific materials has remained difficult to calculate.

New RemControl Android banking malware targets users in Europe and Canada

A new Android malware-as-a-service (MaaS) platform called RemControl is targeting users through malvertising campaigns that impersonate the TVTap IPTV application.

Although the infrastructure has been active since at least May, the first samples were observed in July and contained more than 30 phishing overlays designed to steal banking credentials.

Researchers at cybersecurity company Group-IB say that the malware targets users in Europe (Italy, France, Spain, Poland, Portugal), Canada, and countries in the Middle East.

Hackers start exploiting critical WordPress flaw for code execution

Threat actors have moved from probing WordPress sites vulnerable to CVE-2026–87902 to exploiting the flaw to write files to disk that execute shell commands when accessed.

Initial attack traffic was only for reconnaissance and started less than five hours after the patch was released in WordPress 7.1.2. Malicious activity increased by ten times, and attackers are now trying to deliver payloads.

WordPress security firm Patchstack reports that it observed the first malicious requests at 17:44 UTC on September 22 from a small group of IP addresses targeting multiple sites under its protection.

Check Point warns of hackers exploiting Security Gateway VPN RCE flaw

Cybersecurity company Check Point has confirmed active exploitation of CVE-2026–85102, a pre-authentication remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in the VPN certificate-handling functionality of its Security Gateway product.

The same advisory also warns of threat actors exploiting a pre-authentication path traversal flaw tracked as CVE-2026–93616, which impacts the Management web service and can allow script execution and Java class loading.

The company says that CVE-2026–93616 has been exploited as a zero-day since July 23.

Qualcomm PickNik Acquisition Is A Software Land Grab Nobody Priced In

Qualcomm agreed to acquire PickNik Robotics on September 23, 2026, bringing MoveIt—the world’s most widely adopted open-source robot manipulation framework—under its Dragonwing physical AI platform. Qualcomm committed to keeping MoveIt open-source, but the Qualcomm PickNik acquisition consolidates the software layer that sits between AI models and physical robot motion. The procurement implication is structural: a semiconductor company now controls the dominant open-source framework for robot manipulation, and every integrator building on MoveIt inherits a new corporate dependency.

Qualcomm PickNik acquisition landed on September 23, 2026, when Qualcomm Technologies announced it had agreed to acquire PickNik Inc., the Boulder-based company that stewards MoveIt, the open-source manipulation framework used across robotics research and commercial deployments worldwide. The acquisition was announced at ROSCon Toronto, the annual gathering of the Robot Operating System community.

The strategic logic is straightforward. Qualcomm wants to own the software layer that connects AI models to physical robot motion. MoveIt is that layer for a large share of the robotics industry.

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