The Iranian state-backed hacking group tracked as Nimbus Manticore (aka GalaxyGato, Mirage Kitten, Smoke Sandstorm, Subtle Snail, and UNC1549) has been attributed to a fresh set of attacks targeting entities across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.
The intrusions involve the use of a previously undocumented Windows backdoor called NightLedger and two custom WebSocket tunnelers, BridgeHead and ArcBridge, with an aim to maintain covert access.
Targets of the campaign include Egypt, SMB and government environments in Jordan and Tanzania, aviation organizations in Pakistan, telecommunication companies in Ethiopia, and financial-sector entities in Burkina Faso, per Kaspersky.
JetBrains is urging customers of on-premise versions of TeamCity to update to the latest version following the discovery of a critical security issue that could result in arbitrary code execution.
The vulnerability, assigned CVE-2026–63077 (CVSS score: 9.8), affects all TeamCity On-Premises versions. It has been addressed in versions 2025.11.7 and 2026.1.3. TeamCity Cloud instances have already been updated. JetBrains has credited Antoni Tremblay with discovering and reporting the flaw on July 10, 2026.
“If exploited, this flaw may enable an unauthenticated attacker with HTTP(S) access to a TeamCity server to bypass authentication checks and execute arbitrary operating system commands with the privileges of the TeamCity server process,” JetBrains said.
CubePilot, an Australian firm that designs flight controllers for drones (UAVs), announced a severe operational disruption caused by a DNS hijacking attack.
Hijacking domain name system (DNS) records allows threat actors to redirect users to their infrastructure, diverting traffic intended for a legitimate service. This exposes users to dangerous scenarios such as sensitive data interception, malware delivery, and phishing.
According to a status update published on CubePilot’s website, an attacker gained control of the cubepilot[.]org domain DNS settings on July 24, allowing them to intercept traffic intended for internal systems.
Building next-generation semiconductors and low-power electronic devices requires precisely stacking materials with different functions. In this process, it is essential to preserve each material’s intrinsic properties, as well as the interface where the two materials meet, without damage. Layered van der Waals materials, including transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), have attracted considerable attention as next-generation semiconductor platforms because their layers interact through weak forces, enabling different materials to be stacked while maintaining atomically clean interfaces.
A research team led by Professor Joonki Suh from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at KAIST, in collaboration with Professor Bonggeun Shong’s team at Hanyang University and Professor Yimo Han’s team at Rice University in the United States, have developed a new semiconductor manufacturing technique based on atomic layer deposition (ALD). ALD is a thin-film deposition process in which semiconductor precursors are supplied sequentially, enabling uniform thin films to be deposited with atomic-level control over their thickness. The paper is published in Science Advances.
The research team focused on van der Waals materials. These two-dimensional semiconductor materials consist of multiple atomic layers held together by weak interlayer forces, allowing them to be peeled apart into sheets as thin as paper. Because different materials can be freely stacked, van der Waals materials are attracting attention as key building blocks for next-generation AI chips and ultra-low-power semiconductor devices.
Efficient heat management in solids is key to advancing the next generation of electronics. However, wave-like heat movement—known as phonon focusing—had been observed only at extremely low, or cryogenic, temperatures, limiting its study and practical use.
Now, researchers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have demonstrated that phonons, atomic heat-carrying vibrations with quantum properties, can travel in focused, raylike paths at room temperature. Instead of spreading uniformly in all directions, heat can move along guided pathways defined by a material’s crystal structure, opening new possibilities for managing heat flow in future electronics and quantum technologies.
On Sunday, July 19, 2026, at 1 p.m. U.S. Pacific Time, watch the third compilation stream, consisting of three additional presentations from the May 3, 2026, sessions at the University of California, Berkeley Conference on Aging and Longevity (BerkeleyCAL), hosted by Professor Steven A. Garan, Director of Bioinformatics at the Center for Research and Education on Aging.
These presentations delve into cutting-edge science, including actual human trials on rejuvenation, efforts to improve human longevity through genetic screening, and models of senescence at the cellular level. They are delivered by renowned longevity researchers Gregory Fahy, Wei-Wu He, and Andreas Stahl. The presentations include question-and-answer sessions, including questions posed by U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II to Andreas Stahl.
Dr. Greg Fahy of Intervene Immune presents evidence that thymic involution—the age-related decline of the thymus gland—is a primary driver of immune failure and various age-related diseases, including cancer and cardiovascular issues. To address this, he details the multiple TRIIM clinical trials in small cohorts of human patients, which successfully demonstrate that a combination of growth hormone, DHEA, and metformin can safely regenerate functional thymic tissue and rejuvenate the immune system.
Dr. Wei-Wu He of Human Longevity, Inc., emphasizes the critical importance of whole-genome sequencing for personalized longevity and healthcare, noting that genetics account for approximately 50–55% of an individual’s healthspan and lifespan. Reflecting on the legacy of Human Longevity, Inc. founder Dr. J. Craig Venter (1946−2026), Dr. He’s presentation advocates for utilizing genomic data alongside AI and advanced clinical diagnostics to shift from reactive sick care to proactive, data-driven prevention. Dr. He highlights new, accessible initiatives to bring comprehensive genomic analysis and proteomic testing to the public to help individuals identify and manage their unique health risks.
Dr. Andreas Stahl of UC Berkeley presents a microphysiological \.
Ancient DNA can be a powerful tool for helping us reconstruct the long-dead past. Most surviving genetic material comes from the bones and teeth of animals that lived in cold environments, where freezing temperatures help prevent decay. While hotter climates are seen as hostile to preservation, researchers have recently extracted DNA from a tooth found in South Africa that may date to around 50,000 years ago—the oldest yet retrieved from sub-Saharan Africa.
Despite many fossil-rich sites across the continent, such as South Africa’s coastal caves, few ancient DNA projects have been carried out because of the expectation of poor preservation. But that didn’t stop an international team of researchers who wanted to see whether it was possible to extract viable DNA from ancient skeletons across different time periods and sites in South Africa.
The results of their work are published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.
Plastic has become a ubiquitous part of modern life—in water bottles, shopping bags and car dashboards. But once discarded, it is among the hardest materials on Earth to recycle. Most recycling processes require plastics to be sorted by type first, a step that is both labor-intensive and costly. As a result, only 9% of discarded plastic is actually recycled, while 79% is dumped in landfills and another 12% is incinerated, releasing carbon dioxide in the process.
Now, a team co-led by researchers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and Ewha Womans University in South Korea has demonstrated a new chemical approach that converts a mixture of the three most common plastics directly into high-purity hydrogen fuel at temperatures far below conventional gasification. The process locks carbon dioxide away as a solid mineral without releasing the greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.
Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study shows that alkaline thermal treatment (ATT)—a process in which sodium hydroxide reacts with organic material under heat to drive hydrogen production—can efficiently handle mixed polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) waste in a single reactor, yielding hydrogen gas with purities exceeding 90% without requiring any sorting of plastic types.
We discuss a possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network. We identify two different types of dynamical degrees of freedom: “trainable” variables (e.g., bias vector or weight matrix) and “hidden” variables (e.g., state vector of neurons). We first consider stochastic evolution of the trainable variables to argue that near equilibrium their dynamics is well approximated by Madelung equations (with free energy representing the phase) and further away from the equilibrium by Hamilton–Jacobi equations (with free energy representing the Hamilton’s principal function). This shows that the trainable variables can indeed exhibit classical and quantum behaviors with the state vector of neurons representing the hidden variables.
