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A Strange New Material Breaks the Usual Rules of Heat and Stiffness

A new material barely lets heat through yet is up to 10,000 times stiffer than the silicone used in oven mitts.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have engineered a thin film that combines exceptional stiffness with extreme thermal insulation. Its thermal conductivity ranks among the lowest reported for a dense, nonporous material, approaching the theoretical limit for how effectively such a material can block heat. The film can also be printed at large scales and applied as a coating.

“Stiff materials that are good thermal insulators would have substantial utility in a variety of applications, from cookware to electronic devices to space travel,” says Dali Sun, a physics professor at NC State and co-corresponding author of a journal article describing the work.

James Webb Telescope Detects the Fingerprints of Catastrophic Planetary Collisions

Dust around distant stars may reveal whether colliding worlds grazed one another or hit hard enough to vaporize rock.

Vaporizing vast amounts of solid rock, a Mars-sized world called Theia may have slammed into the infant Earth, blasting debris into space that eventually gathered into the Moon. Astronomers searching for similar collisions around distant stars cannot observe the developing planets directly because they appear too small at such great distances. They look for clues in the dust those impacts may leave behind, though these unusually dusty environments appear around only about 1% of young stars.

Kate Su of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and her colleagues used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to examine these environments, known as extreme debris disks. Using observations from Webb and NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope, the team identified minerals through distinctive features in the dust’s mid-infrared light. Their findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal, suggest that those minerals could distinguish impacts powerful enough to vaporize rock from less energetic encounters.

Ransomware recovery CEO charged over secret ransom payments

The owner of ransomware remediation company MonsterCloud has been charged with allegedly defrauding ransomware victims by secretly paying their attackers for decryptors while claiming to use proprietary technology to recover encrypted data.

Zohar Pinhasi, 50, also known as “Zack Silver” and “Zack Green,” was indicted by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of New York on September 23 and arraigned Wednesday in federal court in Brooklyn.

He is charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and two counts of wire fraud in connection with an alleged ransomware decryption scheme that prosecutors say ran from June 2018 to June 2023.

FBI: Ongoing FortiBleed attacks lock out FortiGate VPN admins

The FBI is warning that FortiBleed attacks are still ongoing, targeting exposed Fortinet FortiGate firewalls and SSL VPN gateways and locking out legitimate administrators.

Hackers gain access to exposed endpoints by using previously leaked credentials, or logins obtained from infostealer logs, credential stuffing, and password spraying attacks.

They then extract additional authentication data from compromised devices and use a distributed GPU cluster running Hashcat and Hashtopolis to crack offline the stolen password hashes.

Hackers hijack Google domains after breaching ccTLD registries

Hackers obtained unauthorized HTTPS certificates for several Google domains and hijacked domains in the country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) for Ghana, American Samoa, and Sierra Leone after compromising third-party operators and modifying authoritative DNS records.

Google underlines that the attacks affected domains of other organizations in the. GH,.SL, and. AS ccTLDs but “did not involve a compromise of Google’s systems.”

By gaining access to the domain name system (DNS) records, a threat actor can request an HTTPS certificate from a Certificate Authority (CA) for a domain they don’t own.

General-Sep29

The guidelines were published on Sept. 29, but OpenAI chose to announce proofs for the 722 problems anyway.

OpenAI proceeded with the release format the guidelines warned against (a headline drop generated by a closed model), but structured the drop itself to comply with many of the documentation and formalization standards laid out in those guidelines. https://agmai.org//

About the guidelines:

AI laboratories have begun using powerful artificial intelligence models to solve complex mathematical problems. However, this is creating a dilemma: AI systems can produce advanced proofs that humans do not yet understand, cannot easily verify, or cannot take responsibility for.

Historically, mathematics relies on human understanding, peer review, and open collaboration. To protect this foundation, a group from the mathematical community—backed by feedback from over 600 mathematicians—has issued guidelines on how AI labs should responsibly handle and share mathematical discoveries.

Core Principles.

* Prioritize Human Understanding: The ultimate goal of mathematics is human insight. AI discoveries shouldn’t remain black boxes.

* Lab Responsibility: If an AI lab releases a major math discovery that humans don’t yet understand, the lab is responsible for funding and supporting the effort to help human mathematicians understand it.

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