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Microsoft shares temporary fix for Windows 11 gaming issues

Microsoft has shared a temporary fix for ongoing gaming issues caused by Windows 11 updates released during the August 2026 Patch Tuesday.

On impacted PCs, users reported games crashing or failing to launch, as well as game freezes, “EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION” errors, and even unexpected system restarts.

When it confirmed it was investigating this known issue on Wednesday, Microsoft said it affects games like ARC Raiders, MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls, and The Finals on systems running Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2.

Hackers target WordPress sites in miniOrange auth bypass attacks

Hackers are attempting to exploit two critical authentication bypass vulnerabilities in the miniOrange SAML 2.0 Single Sign On plugin for WordPress that can be used to forge SAML responses and log in as administrators.

The miniOrange SAML SSO plugin turns a WordPress site into a SAML service provider, letting users log in through corporate identity platforms such as Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Google Workspace, or OneLogin instead of separate WordPress credentials.

Created by Xecurify, miniOrange is a family of seven plugins, with a free version that has 10,000 downloads and 30,000 customers for the other six.

Common medications may change your gut for years

Common medications may reshape the gut microbiome long after the last dose is taken. In a study of more than 2,500 people, researchers found lasting microbial changes linked not only to antibiotics, but also to antidepressants, beta-blockers, acid-reducing drugs, and benzodiazepines. Some effects were still detectable years later, suggesting past medication use may strongly influence the gut bacteria people carry today.

NASA’s Roman Telescope Enclosed in SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket Fairing

Teams have finished preparing NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope for launch. On Aug. 21, the team encapsulated the observatory inside the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket’s fairing in the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The 43-foot-tall fairing encloses the spacecraft and is mounted atop the Falcon Heavy rocket. On the ground, the fairing and its ground support equipment maintain a safe, controlled environment for Roman and allow the team to transport it out of the facility.

During ascent, the fairing protects Roman from acoustic vibrations, aerodynamic pressure, and heating as the rocket travels through Earth’s atmosphere. A few minutes into the flight, once conditions are safe, the fairing separates, allowing Roman to continue its journey toward its destination at Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 (L2). Meanwhile, the two fairing halves will return to Earth and be recovered by SpaceX.

Living circuit boards built by printing bacterial transistors

It points toward a future in which computation isn’t necessarily confined to silicon. Instead, we could build living materials that sense, communicate, compute, and respond—with the “circuit board” itself made of living cells.

Electronic circuit boards carry out different operations on the basis of the configuration of their components. Now, equivalent biological circuits are engineered that compute functions on the basis of the spatial arrangement of different bacterial strains printed on a surface.

Mapping thorium’s preferred sites could pave the way for nuclear clocks

For decades, physicists have used a technique called Mössbauer spectroscopy to peer inside solid materials, revealing fine details of their surroundings by studying how their atomic nuclei absorb and re-emit gamma rays.

Through new research published in Science, a team led by Takahiro Hiraki at Okayama University has pushed this approach into entirely new territory, using visible-adjacent light instead of gamma rays to study the nuclei of thorium-229 atoms. The advance offers a promising new route toward nuclear clocks, devices that could one day keep time more precisely than anything built before.

Meteorite dust holds records of magnetism that may have helped form the sun

4.6 billion years ago, the solar system was little more than a giant ball of gas and dust. Over the next few million years, this “solar nebula” underwent a huge transformation, flattening into a disk of matter that then condensed to form the central sun and orbiting planets.

Scientists have assumed that the early solar system was shaped mainly through gravity. But a new study finds that magnetism also likely played a role.

MIT scientists have discovered records of ancient magnetism in the oldest samples of meteorites known today. The team analyzed microscopic grains embedded in a meteorite that was discovered in Antarctica in 2008. These grains, called calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions, or CAIs, originally formed during the solar system’s first 200,000 years, making the samples the oldest known solar system material.

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