Long-distance gene control first emerged around 650 to 700 million years ago, significantly earlier than scientists had previously believed.
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Microsoft Exchange, Windows 11 hacked on second day of Pwn2Own
During the second day of Pwn2Own Berlin 2026, competitors collected $385,750 in cash awards after exploiting 15 unique zero-day vulnerabilities in multiple products, including Windows 11, Microsoft Exchange, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations.
The Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 hacking competition takes place at the OffensiveCon conference from May 14 to May 16 and focuses on enterprise technologies and artificial intelligence.
Security researchers can earn over $1,000,000 in cash and prizes by hacking fully patched products in the web browser, enterprise applications, cloud-native/container environments, virtualization, local privilege escalation, servers, local inference, and LLM categories.
Popular node-ipc npm package compromised to steal credentials
Hackers have injected credential-stealing malware into newly published versions of node-ipc, a popular inter-process communication package, in a new supply chain attack targeting npm.
The node-ipc package is a Node.js module that enables various processes to communicate through all forms of sockets, including Unix, Windows, UDP, TLS, and TCP.
Despite the maintainer publishing in March 2022 weaponized versions that targeted Russia and Belarus-based systems with a data-overwriting module, in protest to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the package still has more than 690,000 weekly downloads on npm.
Avada Builder WordPress plugin flaws allow site credential theft
Two vulnerabilities in the Avada Builder plugin for WordPress, with an estimated one million active installations, allow hackers to read arbitrary files and extract sensitive information from the database.
One of the flaws is tracked as CVE-2026–4782 and can be exploited in all versions of the plugin through 3.15.2 by an authenticated users with at least subscriber-level access to read the contents of any file on the server.
The other security issue received the identifier CVE-2026–4798 and is an SQL injection that can be leveraged without authentication. However, exploitation is possible only if the WooCommerce e-commerce plugin for WordPress has been enabled and then deactivated.
Microsoft backpedals: Edge to stop loading passwords into memory
Microsoft is updating the Edge web browser to ensure it no longer loads saved passwords into process memory in clear text at startup after previously stating it was “by design.”
This behavior was disclosed on May 4 by security researcher Tom Jøran Sønstebyseter Rønning, who demonstrated that all credentials stored in the Edge built-in password manager were decrypted on launch and kept in memory even when not in use.
Rønning also released a proof-of-concept (PoC) tool that would allow attackers with Administrator privileges to dump passwords from other users’ Edge processes (without admin privileges, the PoC only allows accessing Edge processes launched by the same user).
Scientists accidentally discover DNA that breaks the rules of life
A routine experiment with a new single-cell DNA sequencing method turned into a surprising scientific twist when researchers stumbled upon a bizarre genetic code in a microscopic pond organism. Instead of following the near-universal “rules” of life, this newly identified protist rewrites how genes signal their end. This unexpected discovery challenges long-held assumptions about how genetic translation works and hints that nature may be far more flexible—and mysterious—than scientists realized.
The Biggest Gap in Science: Complexity
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Everyone loves to talk about complex problems and complex systems, but no one has any idea what it means. I think that understanding complexity is THE biggest gap in science today. What do we even mean by complexity? What do we know about it? And what’s the problem with trying to explain it? That’s what we’ll talk about in this video.
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00:00 Intro.
00:28 What is complexity?
02:57 Measures for complexity.
07:41 Properties of complex systems.
13:33 Recent Approaches.
16:20 Stay up-to-date with Ground News.
#science #complexity