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

Soft vibrations reveal warning signs before granular crystals yield

Sand, powders, and other collections of visible-sized grains are found throughout daily life, from food and pharmaceuticals to soils and industrial materials. When grains of similar size are arranged regularly, they can form a strong crystal-like solid. Yet what happens inside such an ordered structure immediately before it begins to break has remained unclear.

Researchers at the University of Osaka, Shimane University, and Kyoto Sangyo University have now theoretically identified an unusual pattern of vibrations that emerges just before a crystal made of regularly arranged grains yields. Many vibrational modes soften simultaneously along particular directions, while long-wavelength waves travel more slowly than shorter ones. The findings, published in Physical Review E, reveal a possible physical precursor to failure in highly ordered particulate materials.

Scientists Discover a Surprising Link Between Human Genes and Language

Human migration and isolation appear to shape genetic and language diversity in opposite ways.

The finding may seem counterintuitive at first. Regions shaped by migration and population mixing often have higher genetic diversity, so it might seem logical that their languages would be more varied too. Instead, the study finds the reverse pattern.

“We were struck by how robust this inverse relationship is across the globe,” says Anna Graff, lead author of the study and linguist at the University of Zurich. “Places where people have mixed more tend to be genetically diverse, but their languages are structurally more similar. In contrast, places with long-term isolation show less genetic diversity, yet much greater diversity in how languages are structured. Crucially, this relationship holds after adjusting for a wide range of confounding factors, including deep population history such as the timing of continental settlement.”

Neuroscientist Challenges the Idea That Your Brain “Makes” Decisions

A professor proposes that behavior emerges through continuous interactions among sensory, sensorimotor, and motor processes rather than a dedicated decision-making mechanism.

There may be a gap between how people believe decisions are made and what actually happens inside the brain, according to Indiana University professor Tom James.

For decades, both scientific theories and everyday thinking have treated decision-making as a separate step between perception and action. Under this traditional view, information moves through a linear sequence from sensing to thinking to acting, with each stage linked to a distinct brain function.

Have We Found Alien Life? Here’s What Scientists Really Think

Claims about possible extraterrestrial life on K2-18b and Mars generated worldwide excitement, but a survey of hundreds of astrobiologists found that most experts remained cautious rather than convinced.

It may seem like we are on the verge of discovering alien life. In 2025, a press release stated that we have the “strongest hints yet” of extraterrestrial life on the exoplanet K2-18b. And when talking about a collected sample from a rock named “Cheyava Falls” on Mars, NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said this was the “closest we have ever come” to discovering life on the red planet.

Such moments capture the imagination. But they also raise an important question: what do the majority of scientists actually think?

StopAndProtect Uses Nearly 2,000 Hacked WordPress Sites to Spread Malware and Steal Data

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a global cybercrime operation that abuses thousands of hacked WordPress websites as infrastructure to disseminate malware, commandeer infected hosts, store stolen documents, screenshots, and activity logs created to track the status of the activity.

“The operation doesn’t rely on a single piece of malware, but on a whole toolkit of criminal software working together – some components encrypt files, others silently steal documents or lock the screen, and another acts as a live chat between the attackers and their victims,” Check Point Research’s Jaromír Hořejší said.

The large-scale campaign is being tracked by the cybersecurity company under the moniker StopAndProtect after discovering a ransomware family of the same name in mid-May 2026. The infection chain begins with a ClickFix social engineering attack, resulting in the execution of a PowerShell command that leads to the deployment of additional. NET downloaders and loaders.

/* */