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‘BigDiskBuster’ Leaves Microsoft Defender Running, Blocks Updates
BigDiskBuster contains approximately 300 lines of C++ and combines four different mechanisms including, the post explained, “a raw device handle, a relative file open, a recursive volume watch, and an oversized allocation.”
Lister tells Dark Reading that LevelBlue’s testing environment was “primarily targeted at standard, out-of-the-box Defender installations on Windows assets with the goal of testing if the PoC worked as described and to help identify behaviors related to successful exploitation.” As such, researchers found BigDiskBuster can run successfully under a standard user account.
While not quite an EDR killer, the technique could theoretically extend the useful lifetime of malicious tooling already on a victim’s machine by preventing that endpoint from receiving new Defender detections for it.
Ultraprocessed meals produce distinct metabolic and brain responses
Most nutrition science suggests that meals with the same basic nutritional profile will have the same impact on a person’s blood sugar.
But is there something about food processing itself that influences how our bodies respond?
Researchers exploring that question were surprised to find that minimally and highly processed meals nutritionally matched on calories, carbohydrates, fats, proteins, water, salt, and weight produced distinct metabolic responses.
NASA Selects GIMLI Payload to Probe Hidden Lunar Caves
NASA has selected the GIMLI payload, equipped with a lander, rover, gravimeter, seismic sensors, and ground-penetrating radar, to investigate whether the Moon’s Marius Hills Pit expands into subsurface lava caves. [ https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/31165/nasa-selects-g…ar-caves-2](https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/31165/nasa-selects-g…ar-caves-2)
What new methods can be developed to explore lava caves on the Moon? This is what a new NASA-approved mission hopes to address as a team of researchers from the Planetary Science Institute (PSI) proposed a new method for exploring lunar lava caves. This proposal has the potential to help scientists, engineers, and future astronauts use new methods for exploring the Moon’s subsurface environment.
For the project, NASA selected GIMLI (Geophysical Instruments for Marius Lunar pit Investigation), whose primary mission objective will be to explore the size of the subsurface lava caves compared to the small entrance holes on the surface. GIMLI’s primary location will be the Moon’s Marius Hills Pit, with the Marius Hills consisting of large volcanic domes averaging several hundred feet in height. The pit was discovered in 2009 by discovered in 2009 by Japan’s SELENE (Kaguya) spacecraft and its opening’s width measures about 213 feet (65 meters) with an estimated depth of about 111 to 131 feet (34 to 40 meters). The primary conundrum has been trying to ascertain whether this pit expands into a larger cavern beneath the surface.
To accomplish this, GIMLI, which will comprise a lander and rover, will use a myriad of instruments to examine how deep the pit goes and whether it expands into the subsurface. These instruments include a gravimeter, seismic sensors, and a ground-penetrating radar.
Star Slowly Devours Brown Dwarf Companion 300 Light-Years Away
Astronomers discovered a binary system 300 light-years away where a red dwarf star is actively stripping material from its closely orbiting brown dwarf companion. [ https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/31171/star-slowly-de…ight-years](https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/31171/star-slowly-de…ight-years)
What can a star consuming another star teach astronomers about star formation and evolution? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated the unique celestial event of larger star consuming a smaller star. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand how stars interact with planetary companions and what this could mean in the search for life beyond Earth.
For the study, the researchers examined the binary star, ZTF J0440+2325, which is located about 300 light-years from Earth and is comprised of a red dwarf star and a smaller brown dwarf. Red dwarf stars are both smaller and cooler than our Sun while brown dwarfs are planet-like objects larger than planets like Jupiter but did not reach a big enough size to begin the process of nuclear fusion to become a star.
The primary motivation behind the study was to fill a longstanding knowledge gap regarding peculiar, repeating data patterns of starlight changes that astronomers observed years ago. While astronomers have grown accustomed to seeing specific data patterns for celestial events like supernova or colliding neutron stars, whose data displays a bell curve, this new data displayed more like a triangle. The researchers pondered what could be causing this peculiar data, then studied the region where the signals were originating, discovering a red dwarf star and brown dwarf orbiting each other in only 87 minutes. Additionally, they discovered the material from the brown dwarf was being consumed by the larger red dwarf, resulting in regions of the red dwarf exhibiting higher temperatures.
Designing enzymes for new-to-nature chemistry and non-natural substrates with AlphaProtein Novo
Google Deepmind just broke chemistry…
They open-sourced a model that can invent completely new biology from scratch.
It’s called “AlphaProtein Novo”
For decades, scientists have dreamed of designing enzymes—nature’s tiny molecular machines—from scratch to perform chemistry that doesn’t exist in the natural world. Traditionally, protein engineers have had to start with enzymes that already exist in nature and tweak them, but finding the right natural starting point is often difficult, and there’s no guarantee nature has an enzyme for the job you want done.
A new approach called de novo design aims to build enzymes from first principles, like designing a tool for a specific task rather than adapting whatever happens to be in the toolbox. Until now, however, designed enzymes haven’t been good enough to be practically useful.
Enter AlphaProtein Novo (AP Novo), a machine-learning pipeline that changes the game. The researchers show, for the first time, that designing enzymes from scratch can actually beat searching through nature’s existing enzyme diversity when it comes to tackling hard chemistry problems.
Using AP Novo, the team designed entirely new enzymes for two impressive tasks. First, they created “nitrene transferases”—enzymes that don’t exist in nature—to build piperidine, a molecular building block important in many medicines, with exceptional precision in producing the desired form of the molecule. Second, they designed enzymes that can break down DEHP, a harmful environmental pollutant, under harsh conditions that would destroy natural enzymes.
They also achieved top-tier performance on two well-studied benchmark reactions. By analyzing what made these designs work, they discovered that two strategies were key: using predictions from AlphaFold 3 (an AI system that predicts protein structures) to guide designs based on chemical mechanisms, and scoring candidate enzyme scaffolds by looking at how ensembles of related sequences behave.
Photonic neuromorphic learning via generalized in situ physical gradient descent
Photonic neuromorphic computing (using light to do neural-network math) promises big speed/energy wins, but there’s a catch: training has almost always happened in silico. You build a digital model of the chip, train it on a GPU, then transfer the weights to the physical device. That approach:
- Requires an accurate physics model of every component (expensive to build and validate)
- Breaks down when fabrication imperfections make the real chip deviate from the model.
- Doesn’t scale well as circuits get larger and more complex.
What INSPIRE does.
INSPIRE (IN-Situ Physical gRadient dEscent) is a general on-chip training method for photonic integrated circuits. The key mechanism is on-chip synthetic time-reversal holography — essentially exploiting optical reciprocity so that the physical system itself generates the gradient information:
1. Forward pass: light propagates through the circuit carrying your input.
Nobel Prize in Medicine: Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, Georg Nagel win for work on optogenetics
American Karl Deisseroth and Germans Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday (October 5) for their discoveries on light and optogenetics that have helped understand how the brain works.
The Nobel Assembly of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute medical university said Deisseroth, 54, Hegemann, 71, and Nagel, 73, were selected for their \.