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The ‘wonder material’ graphene can be made using a kitchen blender, a mobile phone and a newspaper

There is something slightly ridiculous about using a kitchen blender to make graphene. This is, after all, the “wonder material” associated with futuristic technologies. You might reasonably expect its production to involve equally futuristic equipment. Often, it does.

Producing graphene in liquid form can rely on purified graphite (better known to many as the “lead” in pencils), specialized solvents or additives, ultrapure water and carefully controlled processing. Our latest research, published in ACS Sustainable Resource Management, asked what happens if you try to make it using things you’d find in your household.

Could you start with graphite found in electronic waste, use old newspaper to help hold it in a liquid, mix everything in ordinary tap water and still end up with useful graphene?

Corners in focus: Metasurface enables motion tracking without digital image processing

A research team at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) has developed a new optical corner-detection imaging method that uses azimuthal Hilbert transform metasurfaces and is designed to work as a universal framework. The study marks an important advance in high-speed, low-power optical information processing and has demonstrated potential for motion-tracking applications.

The study was led by Professor Tsai Din-ping, chair professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at CityUHK. The project was conducted in collaboration with Professor Tao Li from the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Nanjing University.

Titled “Optical corner detection with azimuthal Hilbert transform metasurfaces,” the study is published in Science Advances.

New free-space optical link adds a wireless component to the nation’s longest quantum network

There’s a new lighthouse on Long Island. But instead of shining light to guide ships through waterways, this one transmits and receives particles of light that carry quantum information. Perched atop a seven-story building at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, the “Quantum Lighthouse” is a key pillar of the free-space optical (FSO) link spanning Brookhaven Lab, the State University of New York at Stony Brook (Stony Brook University) and Yale University.

“An FSO link is analogous to the wireless technology that allowed today’s classical internet to expand beyond wired connections to orbiting satellites, as well as our cellphones,” said Justine Haupt, Brookhaven Lab’s lead scientist on the cross-institutional FSO link project. “It’s one of the key technologies needed to make a quantum internet truly useful.”

This FSO link—the first permanent one of its kind—adds a wireless component to the nation’s longest quantum network, which spans 161 miles (259 kilometers) across Long Island and the New York metropolitan area.

The superconducting gap of an ultrathin nickelate defies expectations

Superconductors are materials that carry electrical current with zero resistance below a specific critical temperature. In conventional superconductors, the transition to superconductivity generally occurs at very low temperatures.

Some unconventional superconductors, however, enter their superconducting phase at comparatively higher critical temperatures. This could be advantageous for practical applications, as superconductivity at higher temperatures could reduce the need for complex and expensive cooling systems. However, these materials generally still require substantial cooling.

Researchers at Nanjing University, the University of Science and Technology of China, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and other institutes in China recently investigated the electronic processes underpinning superconductivity in La₃Ni₂O₇, a nickelate that has exhibited superconductivity at temperatures of up to around 80 K (−193°C, −316°F) under very high pressure.

This Grain-of-Rice-Sized “Rainbow” Chip Could Transform 6G Communications

A tiny chip that produces a precisely organized “rainbow” of light could help enable faster, higher-capacity 6G communications and more precise timing for quantum technologies.

A microchip about the size of a grain of rice can generate a carefully ordered spectrum of light and convert it into multiple high-frequency electromagnetic signals called millimeter waves. Physicists at Loughborough University and their international collaborators say the approach could eventually support technologies that require large amounts of bandwidth and exceptionally precise signals.

Millimeter waves are especially attractive for future communications because they provide far more bandwidth, effectively creating additional capacity for transmitting data. The challenge has been producing these frequencies with the precision and stability required for advanced systems.

Physicists Discover Time Crystals Can Communicate Across a Semiconductor

Separate time crystals inside a semiconductor can “find” each other across surprising distances and lock into the same rhythm.

Researchers at TU Dortmund University demonstrated the effect using a semiconductor system in which electron and nuclear spins form continuous time crystals. Their latest experiments, published in Nature Communications, reveal that spatially separated oscillators can lock to the same frequency even when they begin with different rhythms.

The finding builds on the team’s earlier demonstration of an unusually robust continuous time crystal in a semiconductor. That system produced persistent electron-nuclear spin oscillations with coherence lasting for hours, giving the researchers a stable platform for exploring what happens when several time crystals occupy the same material.

WordlistLoader Delivers Amatera via ClickFix, SynkLoader Phishes Windows Passwords

This leads to the execution of a VBScript loader that decodes and runs PowerShell designed to fetch a JPEG image from an image-hosting service and extract it from the stealer payload in memory to minimize on-disk artifacts and complicate detection and analysis.

“The primary purpose of WordlistLoader, an intermediate stage in the Amatera infection chain, is to reconstruct a shellcode that serves as the entry point for subsequent stages,” Gen Digital said. At the same time, it employs a hardware-breakpoint-based method to bypass Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) and avoid leaving traces of malicious activity.

WordlistLoader gets its name from the fact that the shellcode is stored in encoded form as a sequence of plain English words, with each word representing one byte. Gen said it also identified a variant that replaces the wordlist with an array of 16-byte UUID-encoded chunks.

Operation QUICSILVER Targets Myanmar Government and IT with QUICAgent Backdoor

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a cyber espionage campaign targeting Myanmar that uses graduation ceremony invitation lures to deliver a Go backdoor called QUICAgent.

The campaign, codenamed Operation QUICSILVER, has been found to target government and information technology sectors, per Seqrite Labs. The activity is assessed to be the work of a China-nexus threat actor with moderate confidence.

It was first observed in April 2026, when the attack was observed delivering a file named “HolidayNotice.pdf.exe” along with a lure that was a fabricated Belgian–Myanmar public holiday calendar. Two subsequent artifacts, each detected in June and July 2026, make use of a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) file that activates the infection chain.

UAT10147 Uses AI to Scale Server Attacks, Deploys SPECTRE With EDR Bypass and Linux Rootkit

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a Chinese-speaking cybercrime group dubbed UAT-10147 that’s targeting Windows and Linux web servers globally across the education, media, technology, and gaming sectors.

The vast majority of the targets are located in Brazil, Bolivia, China, Canada, and Vietnam. Details of the threat activity came to light following the discovery of an open directory hosted at “139.180.197[.]150,” which was observed communicating with one of the compromised machines.

“The actor leveraged publicly disclosed vulnerabilities to gain initial access at scale,” Cisco Talos said in a two-part report published last week. The actor employed a mixture of open-source offensive frameworks, including Metasploit, ysoserial, PentestGPT, DeepAudit, and multiple privilege escalation exploits to automate intrusion operations and establish persistence.”

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