Redis CVE-2026–23479 enables authenticated RCE; affecting versions since 7.2.0, patched May 5 to reduce exploitation risk.
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New ‘HTTP/2 Bomb’ DoS attack crashes web servers in under a minute
A new denial-of-service (DoS) attack dubbed HTTP/2 Bomb can be launched from a single machine to take down web servers within seconds.
The technique works on default HTTP/2 configurations of major web servers, including NGINX, Apache HTTP Server, Microsoft IIS, Envoy, and Cloudflare Pingora.
Discovered by OpenAI’s Codex software agent under the guidance of researchers at offensive security firm Calif, HTTP/2 Bomb combines two previously known HTTP/2 DoS methods: the HPACK compression amplification and Slowloris-style resource retention via HTTP/2 flow-control stalling.
Acer working to patch max severity zero-days in Wave 7 routers
Acer confirmed that it’s working to address two maximum-severity zero-day vulnerabilities affecting its Wave 7 mesh routers.
According to a Friday security advisory, the two security flaws were reported by security researcher Gergo Pap and affect Wave 7 routers running firmware version T7c_GBL_1.01.000055 or earlier.
The first zero-day, a broken access control vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026–49200, can allow unauthenticated attackers to remotely access plaintext credentials stored in log archives.
Google adds Android protection against AI deepfake scam calls
Google is introducing a new Android security feature that will detect and flag phone calls in which scammers use artificial intelligence to impersonate a user’s personal contacts.
Called “fake call detection,” the feature is rolling out globally this month to Android 12 and later devices, starting with Pixel devices, and will be enabled by default.
Once activated, it works automatically when both a caller and recipient are using Phone by Google: when a contact places a call, their device sends a silent, encrypted confirmation signal to the recipient’s device in real time.
Scientists identify a cell type in the brain that was previously ignored and it may explain why human memory has no known upper limit
The human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons. That number appears in almost every popular account of memory and intelligence, and it tends to carry an implicit argument: that the scale of human cognition follows from the scale of this cell count. What is less often mentioned is that the brain contains a roughly comparable number of a different cell type entirely, one that researchers have treated, for most of the history of neuroscience, as little more than biological scaffolding.
A paper published on 23 May in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences puts forward a new hypothesis about what those cells, called astrocytes, might actually be doing. The work comes from a team at MIT: lead author Leo Kozachkov, Jean-Jacques Slotine, a professor of mechanical engineering and brain and cognitive sciences, and Dmitry Krotov of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, who is the paper’s senior author. Their claim is not that astrocytes have been misunderstood in any dramatic sense; it is the more careful suggestion that they may be doing computational work that neurons, on their own, cannot account for.
This is a hypothesis supported by a mathematical model. The experimental work needed to test it has not yet been done.
The REAL Reason It’s Already Too Late For Most People
A former Google executive says the West is sleepwalking into irrelevance. Mo Gawdat, the former Chief Business Officer at Google X, explains why every nation that fails to build its own AI infrastructure will become a technology colony of the United States and China, dependent on imported intelligence the way developing nations once depended on imported manufacturing.
Mo draws a direct comparison to how China built its tech independence. When Google operated in China, Russian search engine Yandex was protected by the government through regulation that made it difficult for American companies to dominate. The result was that domestic competitors were forced to exist, and they became competitive. He argues the UK and Europe are doing the opposite: importing every piece of software, every AI model, and every platform from Silicon Valley, sending trillions in licensing fees overseas while building nothing domestically.
Discover:
• Why every nation not building its own AI will become \.
Fermi Paradox: The Partial Galactic Colonization Hypothesis
An exploration of the idea of an indefinite partial colonization of a galaxy as a solution to the Fermi Paradox.
An exploration of the question of whether transhumanism, and the analogue in alien civilizations is in fact the great filter.
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Highly Efficient Perovskite/CIGS Tandem Enabled by Modification of Band Profile of CIGS Bottom Cell
This study examined the potential of narrow-bandgap (Perovskite-based tandem solar cells are a promising photovoltaic (PV) technology to exceed the Shockley–Queisser limit of single-junction solar cells. Perovskite/Si tandem solar cells have been intensively studied, demonstrating a record power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 34.6% [1]. In contrast, the certified record PCE of perovskite/Cu(In, Ga)Se2 (CIGS) tandem solar cells remains 24.6% with a reported efficiency of 24.9% [1, 2]. Theoretical calculations for double-junction tandem solar cells using a detailed balance model indicate that the bandgap (Eg) combinations of 1.12 eV (for a bottom cell) and 1.70 eV (for a top cell) or 0.90 to 1.04 eV (for a bottom cell) and 1.58 to 1.67 eV (for a top cell) can yield a maximum theoretical tandem efficiency [3, 4]. Wide-bandgap perovskite (with Eg equal to or greater than 1.7 eV) has been actively studied for tandem application with Si (Eg = 1.12 eV), the most successful solar cell technology to date as a bottom cell. However, previous studies have shown that wide-bandgap perovskite suffers from substantial open-circuit voltage (VOC) loss due to halide segregation [5], and the maximum PCEs of single-junction perovskite cells have been produced by perovskite with Eg between 1.52 and 1.63 eV [6– 8]. The bandgap of CIGS can be tuned between 1.01 and 1.68 eV by adjusting the Ga/(Ga+In) (GGI) ratio and through tuning of bandgap grading profile [9]. Employing a narrow-bandgap CIGS close to 1.00 eV as a bottom cell is advantageous to use the most efficient, conventional bandgap perovskite as the top cell. Therefore, unlike Si, the bandgap tunability of CIGS offers an opportunity for perovskite/CIGS to attain a greater ultimate performance than perovskite/Si tandem solar cells. Han et al. [10] introduced a thick indium-doped tin oxide (ITO) recombination layer to bury the intrinsic surface roughness of CIGS, followed by chemical mechanical polishing to prepare a smooth surface for the subsequent solution process of perovskite, attaining a certified PCE of 22.4%. Albrecht and coworkers have improved the PCE of perovskite/CIGS tandem solar cells by modifying the hole transport layer (HTL). In their earlier work, a NiOx/PTAA bilayer was utilized to form a uniform HTL on CIGS bottom cells. Recently, a self-assembled monolayer such as 2PACz and Me-4PACz was used, which can enhance the device performance of single-junction perovskite solar cell and its perovskite/CIGS tandem counterpart, achieving a certified PCE of 24.2% [2, 11 – 13].
Most recent studies on perovskite/CIGS tandem solar cells have focused on optimizing the perovskite top cell. In contrast, all CIGS bottom cells include an absorber with a double-graded (DG) bandgap profile optimized around the bandgap of ~1.1 eV. The DG bandgap profile has been adapted primarily for CIGS absorbers prepared by thermal evaporation, which has resulted in high-performing CIGS solar cells with PCEs up to 23.4% [14], and it has proven to be an effective strategy for enhancing performance, optimized for “single-junction” CIGS; however, it has not been determined whether DG would be the ideal configuration for tandem applications. Kim et al. [15] used single-graded (SG) CIGS with a bandgap close to 1.0 eV, where the band grading is only formed on the backside of the absorber. They employed dual alkali post-deposition treatment (PDT) with KF and CsF, demonstrating a CIGS solar cell with a PCE of 20.