UCLA chemists proved that some of chemistry’s oldest rules can be broken—and new molecules emerge when they are.
Organic chemistry is built on well-known principles that describe how atoms connect, how chemical bonds form, and how molecules take shape. These rules are often treated as firm boundaries that define what structures are possible. Researchers at UCLA, however, are showing that some of these limits are more flexible than long assumed.
Challenging a Century Old Rule.
Microsoft announced today that the Exchange Web Services (EWS) API for Exchange Online will be shut down in April 2027, after nearly 20 years.
EWS is a cross-platform API for developing apps that can access Exchange mailbox items, such as email messages, meetings, and contacts, retrieved from various sources, including Exchange Online and on-premises editions of Exchange (starting with Exchange Server 2007).
Microsoft will begin blocking Exchange Online EWS by default on October 1, 2026, but administrators can temporarily maintain access via an application allowlist. The final shutdown occurs on April 1, 2027, with no exceptions granted.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency is warning of suspected state-sponsored threat actors targeting high-ranking individuals in phishing attacks via messaging apps like Signal.
The attacks combine social engineering with legitimate features to steal data from politicians, military officers, diplomats, and investigative journalists in Germany and across Europe.
The security advisory is based on intelligence collected by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) and the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).
A newly discovered toolkit called DKnife has been used since 2019 to hijack traffic at the edge-device level and deliver malware in espionage campaigns.
The framework serves as a post-compromise framework for traffic monitoring and adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) activities. It is designed to intercept and manipulate traffic destined for endpoints (computers, mobile devices, IoTs) on the network.
Researchers at Cisco Talos say that DKnife is an ELF framework with seven Linux-based components designed for deep packet inspection (DPI), traffic manipulation, credential harvesting, and malware delivery.
With the projection, Alphabet is resetting the year’s expectations for how it’ll spend in 2026 and testing its favor with Wall Street. The company said in October that it expected “a significant increase” to capex in 2026, but the projections shared Wednesday surpassed those of its hyperscaler peers.
In its quarterly report last week, Microsoft didn’t provide a specific forecast for the year, but said capex will “decrease on a sequential basis” this quarter, after the company reported spending of $37.5 billion in the latest period. Meta said it expects to spend between $115 billion and $135 billion in 2026, which at the high end would be almost double last year’s figure of $72.2 billion.
The concept of cancer vaccines has developed over the last century with initial promise from a young doctor, William Coley. In the late 19th to early 20th century Dr. Coley developed a treatment that elicited strong immune response. This elixir was referred to as Coley’s toxin, which comprised of bacteria that generated an inflammatory response in patients. As a result, the generated response recognized and targeted the patient’s tumor. However, his treatment did not yield consistent clinical benefit. He also had his critics among physicians. At the time, the scientific community debated how safe the toxin was and whether it really worked. Colleagues at Memorial Sloan Kettering and other top institutions questioned Coley’s motive for the toxin, since there was little empirical data or scientific basis for its use. Although Coley’s toxin proved to be an inconsistent treatment, it laid the foundation for future immunotherapies as preventative and therapeutic cancer vaccines were developed.
Cancer vaccines were limited in their ability to effectively treat patients with cancer. Preventative cancer vaccines are difficult to developed because of the uncertainty to predict the onset of mutations in patients. Currently, the only U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved preventative cancer vaccine is for the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. While it directly protects against HPV, the vaccine indirectly prevents a multitude of cancers, including cervical, anal, and genital. Additionally, researchers have previously struggled to generate a therapeutic vaccine that elicits a strong immune response with limited adverse effects. However, a reinvigorated interest has emerged in therapeutic vaccines due to improved delivery platforms and better biomarkers to target on cancer.
Recently, an article in Cell Reports Medicine, by Dr. Nina Bhardwaj and others, examined the evolution of cancer vaccines. Specifically, the paper focused on tumor biomarker-based vaccines, which are highly personalized and designed to target genetic mutations specific to a patient’s tumor. Bhardwaj is a physician scientist, the Ward-Coleman Chair in Cancer Research, and Director of Vaccine and Cell Therapy Laboratory at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her work focuses on improving vaccine strategies to provide strong single agent affect against tumors. Bhardwaj’s group studies different cellular pathways to understand how to therapeutically target cancer.