Microsoft released fixes for SharePoint remote code execution vulnerability CVE-2026–45659 with a CVSS score of 8.8.
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Microsoft Defender can now automatically isolate hacked endpoints
Microsoft is testing a new Defender for Endpoint capability that will automatically isolate compromised endpoints to thwart attackers’ attempts to move laterally across the network.
This is now available in preview mode and works as part of automatic attack disruption, a feature designed to contain attacks, limit their impact, and provide security teams with more remediation time.
Compromised endpoints that are automatically isolated are disconnected from the network to reduce the risk of further impact, but they retain connectivity to the Microsoft Defender for Endpoint service, which will continue to monitor the device.
Teaching thermodynamic laws to AI unlocks a polymer modeling challenge
For more than half a century, materials scientists have struggled with how to simulate the complexity of polymer materials. An individual chain can comprise tens of thousands of atoms, a melt or composite contains billions, and the properties engineers actually care about, such as how an adhesive grips a surface, how a self-assembling block copolymer locks into a nanostructure, or how a biopolymer film stretches without tearing, emerge only over length and time scales that forcible atomistic simulation cannot reach.
The standard workaround is coarse-graining: replacing groups of atoms with simpler mesoscopic particles so the model is fast enough to run. The catch is that this compression almost always sacrifices physics. Conventional coarse-grained polymer models can usually reproduce equilibrium structure or large-scale dynamics, but rarely both, and they routinely fail to capture the entropic and viscous forces that govern how polymers actually flow, relax, and dissipate energy. Those are the forces that dictate mechanical performance, and they are the forces that traditional machine-learning approaches, despite their flexibility, also tend to break.
A research paper recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences introduces a new machine-learning framework that lets coarse-grained models achieve both at once. A team from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pennsylvania has built an AI architecture that learns coarse-grained dynamics directly from data, whether simulated or experimental, while being mathematically incapable of violating the laws of thermodynamics.
The nocebo effect: How prior experience and verbal suggestion rewire the brain to make pain worse
Researchers have a better understanding of the nocebo effect and the neuroscience behind it all. Opposite of the better-known placebo effect, where positive expectations trigger genuine pain relief, the nocebo effect is the experience from negative expectations, created by prior experience, verbal suggestion, or social observation, which can drive anxiety and make pain worse.
A new study published in Nature Communications, by researchers at the University of Toronto Mississauga and McGill University, identified a brain pathway through which negative expectations can amplify pain. The findings, generated independently by the two labs without prior coordination, converged on the neurochemical cholecystokinin (CCK), which has previously been linked to nocebo pain responses in humans.
The researchers identified a specific brain pathway through which CCK acts, traveling from the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a region involved in the emotional dimensions of pain, to a midbrain structure called the lateral periaqueductal gray (lPAG), where it increases pain sensitivity.
Vitamin D analog shuts down pancreatic cancer’s shield in a clinical trial
A small clinical trial led by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers has put a Salk Institute idea to the test in patients: that activating the vitamin D receptor can help reshape the protective environment surrounding pancreatic tumors in ways that could make the notoriously difficult-to-treat cancer more vulnerable to therapeutic treatments.
In the study, published in Nature Cancer, patients with previously untreated metastatic pancreatic cancer received standard chemotherapy with or without paricalcitol, a vitamin D analog that is already FDA-approved for other uses. In patients who received paricalcitol orally or intravenously, the combination was found to be safe and to reduce activation of fibroblasts in the tumor microenvironment, validating Salk’s preclinical findings.
The trial was not intended to measure how well the approach works in treating pancreatic cancer, yet the researchers noted improved chemotherapy responses and increased progression-free survival at one year among patients who received paricalcitol plus chemotherapy. In addition, they found that patients with high vitamin D receptor expression and who received paricalcitol had the longest overall survival.
Progress in stem cell therapy for type 1 diabetes
Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and KTH Royal Institute of Technology have developed an improved method for creating insulin-producing cells from human stem cells. The results, published in Stem Cell Reports, demonstrate that these cells effectively regulate blood sugar levels in laboratory tests and can reverse diabetes in mice.