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

Scientists May Have Solved a Billion-Year-Old Mystery About DNA’s Evolution

On an early Earth exposed to intense ultraviolet radiation, the evolution of DNA may have depended on an unexpected molecular advantage.

Early life on Earth faced intense ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun without the protection of an ozone layer. Yet DNA came to rely on thymine, a chemical building block that is more prone to UV damage than uracil, its counterpart in single-stranded RNA.

A study at Texas A&M University suggests that thymine may have helped early genetic molecules survive by directing that damage into a form that was easier to reverse. The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), offer a possible explanation for why thymine replaced uracil as genetic systems evolved toward DNA.

Scientists Solve a 30-Year Biological Mystery and the Discovery Could Change How We Treat Inflammation

Scientists have solved a decades-old biological mystery, revealing an unexpected dual role for a key inflammatory signaling pathway.

Scientists have uncovered a surprising function of a molecule that controls inflammation: It not only recruits immune cells to fight infections but also helps protect healthy tissue from damage. The discovery, published October 7 in Nature, solves a biological mystery that puzzled researchers for more than 30 years.

The findings from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) could advance research into cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, and asthma.

Pegasus Spyware Infection Confirmed on Serbian University Rector’s iPhone Days Before Election

The Security Information Agency (BIA), Serbia’s civilian security service, dismissed the September allegations that students and opposition politicians had been spied on as “purely trivial sensationalism” in a statement on September 3, as translated by the broadcaster N1, and said it operates strictly within Serbian law.

The two cases extend a wave that SHARE reported on September 2, when it said at least 14 people in Serbia, including student activists, an opposition MP and a local councilor, had been targeted with spyware since the start of the year. Twelve of them had received Apple Threat Notifications in August, the month Apple warned users in 110 countries.

One was Jelena Kontić, a student whose Pegasus infection the Citizen Lab confirmed. The other two had a new version of NoviSpy, an Android spyware, installed on their phones.

PHP warns admins of two critical flaws, emergency patches coming tomorrow

The PHP security team is warning administrators to prepare for emergency security updates tomorrow to address two critical vulnerabilities, as information about the flaws has reportedly leaked ahead of their scheduled disclosure.

PHP powers many websites and web applications, including content management systems, e-commerce platforms, and custom web services.

In an advisory published Tuesday, the PHP development team announced that it plans to release security updates on Wednesday, October 21, at 14:00 UTC (10:00 AM Eastern), to address two vulnerabilities, each rated 9.2 under CVSS v4.0.

Mozilla, Google, Apple block compromised eMudhra CA certificates

Certificate authority eMudhra revoked eight compromised intermediate certificates after researchers found their private keys were so weak that anyone could recover them almost instantly and use them to forge trusted certificates for legitimate websites.

Major browsers and operating systems trusted the compromised certificates, potentially allowing attackers to impersonate legitimate websites and intercept encrypted communications.

A security researcher known as Wayne discovered the weakness on October 17 while scanning publicly available certificate data.

Brain-inspired randomness makes artificial vision more reliable

Humans are usually remarkably good at recognizing objects, even under poor conditions. Artificial vision systems, by contrast, reach their limits more quickly. Researchers at the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research have now investigated what artificial vision systems can learn from the brain. They found that combining two brain-inspired features can make image recognition considerably more reliable. The research findings are published in the journal Patterns.

The study focused on two questions: What makes human vision so robust, and what can artificial vision systems learn from it? Such systems use artificial neural networks, for example, to recognize objects in images. The more reliably they can do so even when visual information is degraded or incomplete, the better suited they are for use under challenging conditions.

One possible explanation for the robustness of biological vision lies in how the brain works. When we see, information does not simply travel from the eyes to the brain. Higher brain areas also send signals back to earlier processing stages, influencing how incoming sensory information is processed. Researchers refer to this as top-down feedback. Such connections are a fundamental feature of biological visual systems but are not incorporated into many artificial vision systems.