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Scientists Discover a Surprising Shortcut to Nuclear Fusion

Scientists may have found a surprising shortcut to nuclear fusion that could dramatically cut the energy needed to ignite the power of the Sun.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have identified a potentially much more efficient way to achieve nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun. Their calculations suggest that changing the order in which plasma is heated and compressed could dramatically reduce the energy needed to reach ignition, a crucial milestone in the pursuit of practical fusion power.

For more than seven decades, scientists have relied on an equation called the Lawson criterion to determine whether plasma can remain sufficiently hot and dense for long enough to sustain fusion reactions without additional external heating. Developed in the 1950s, this equation establishes the conditions required for ignition, but it does not explain the most efficient way to achieve them.

Webb Discovers Something Extraordinary in the Clouds of a World With No Sun

A world with no sunrise still has changing skies, and Webb has caught its water clouds thickening and thinning just 7.5 light-years away.

Astronomers have tracked weather on WISE 855, the coldest known brown dwarf, using the James Webb Space Telescope. A team led by Brittany Miles of the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory watched the Jupiter-sized object for 11 hours, recording a spectrum of its light every 15 minutes. Those observations allowed researchers to distinguish shifting water clouds from gases carried upward by heat deep inside the atmosphere.

The findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal, provide the most detailed time-series view yet of this frigid neighbor. They also offer the first direct confirmation that water clouds on another world change thickness over time, a familiar feature of weather on Earth.

Researchers Demonstrate OpenBSD Root Exploit Chaining 37-Year-Old Shared-Memory Bug

A local privilege escalation exploit published today gains root on OpenBSD 7.9 by chaining a roughly 37-year-old integer overflow with a separate kernel flaw, bypassing OpenBSD’s KARL kernel-address randomization and its SMAP and SMEP hardware protections. Security firm Calif, which found and reported the flaws, published a detailed writeup and full proof-of-concept code after OpenBSD shipped patches for both issues in September.

The integer overflow in the shmat attach function was fixed in errata 018, shipped September 14 as a reliability fix. The reference-counting use-after-free that completes the chain was fixed separately in errata 26, shipped September 30 as a security fix.

Both are available through syspatch and cover all architectures. OpenBSD 7.8 also received the integer-overflow fix.

Attackers Tampered with AOMEI Backupper’s Update Servers for Minutes to Deliver a Backdoor

Attackers repeatedly changed the files that AOMEI Backupper fetches from the vendor’s own update servers, in windows of five to ten minutes at a time between May and July 2026, so that any copy of the Windows backup program that checked for an update during one of those windows would download and run a backdoor.

Google Threat Intelligence Group, Mandiant, and ManageEngine’s Threat Analysis Lab, which disclosed the campaign this week, say AOMEI has reported fixing its servers, but that fix does not remove the backdoor from machines that were already hit.

AOMEI Backupper is Windows backup and disk-cloning software made by AOMEI Technology, a vendor registered in Hong Kong. Like the company’s remote-desktop tool AnyViewer, it runs background services that regularly check AOMEI’s servers over HTTPS for software updates and promotional pop-ups.

Hackers exploit Collabora RCE flaw to backdoor Nextcloud servers

Threat actors are exploiting a critical command execution flaw, now tracked as CVE-2026–110447, in the Collabora Online — Built-in CODE Server app (richdocumentscode) for Nextcloud.

Multiple administrator reports indicate that attacks began in mid-September, roughly a month before the formal security bulletin, the GitHub advisory, and CVE publication.

CVE-2026–110447 impacts richdocumentscode versions before 26.4.303 and resides in the Nextcloud app’s mechanism for starting the bundled Collabora server.

Targeted ads installed Candiru spyware in zero-click attacks

Candiru spyware was delivered to devices at Al Jazeera Media Network via targeted online advertisements in a zero-click attack that required only rendering the malicious ads on the victim’s device.

Researchers at Citizen Labs investigating the attacks referred to this technique as AdFection, noting that their report is the first public technical confirmation of mercenary spyware delivered through targeted ads.

A similar method was documented in late 2025 by Amnesty International, involving ads that infected targets with Predator spyware without them clicking anything.

NASA to Help Unlock Mysteries of Mars’ Moons in Upcoming Mission

NASA is playing an important role in JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) MMX (Martian Moons eXploration) mission, to advance our understanding of Mars’ moons and build on the agency’s long history of exploring the Red Planet.

The mission aims to characterize and determine the origin of Mars’ moons Phobos and Deimos and deliver a sample of Phobos to Earth. The MMX spacecraft is targeting launch from JAXA’s Tanegashima Space Center in Japan at 3:41 p.m. EDT on Monday, Oct. 19 (4:41 a.m. JST on Tuesday, Oct. 20).

Anthropic is “destructively scanning” millions of books. Should you care?

An informative data-driven perspective which explores why the alarming-sounding headlines about Anthropic’s destructive book scanning efforts may be misleading (and even manipulative). To be clear, I’m not saying that all critiques of tech companies are invalid. It’s just that the evidence for the validity of this specific moral panic is thinner than it might appear.

I’m a proponent of looking deeply into the underlying context and data of complex issues like this one. Many news outlets do report in a negativity-biased fashion since they can stir up outrage and get more attention. So, I feel it is important to be media literate and pay attention to the nuances of issues.

I should also note that this is just a Substack post and thus does not constitute a verified primary source like a scientific paper. From what I can tell, it makes legitimate arguments and presents legitimate data, but this is not a 100% certain conclusion.

On the curious debate over AI companies buying, digitizing, and discarding “rare” books.