Lifeboat Foundation

Exploit in the widely used document service leveraged to send malicious links that appear legitimate but actually steal victims credentials.

Threat actors are exploiting Google Docs by hosting their attacks within the web-based document service in a new phishing campaign that delivers malicious links aimed at stealing victims’ credentials.

Researchers at email and collaboration security firm Avanan discovered the campaign, which is the first time they said they’ve seen attackers use this type of exploit in Google’s hosted document service, according to a report published Thursday by Jeremy Fuchs, marketing content manager for Avanan.

The graphics specialist enjoys a huge advantage over its smaller rival in an important market.

Signals can be amplified by an optimum amount of noise, but this so-called stochastic resonance is a rather fragile phenomenon. Researchers at AMOLF were the first to investigate the role of memory for this phenomenon in an oil-filled optical microcavity. The effects of slow non-linearity (i.e. memory) on stochastic resonance were never considered before, but these experiments suggest that stochastic resonance becomes robust to variations in the signal frequency when systems have memory. This has implications in many fields of physics and energy technology. In particular, the scientists numerically show that introducing slow non-linearity in a mechanical oscillator harvesting energy from noise can increase its efficiency by tenfold. They published their findings in Physical Review Letters on May 27th.

It is not easy to concentrate on a difficult task when two people are having a loud discussion right next to you. However, complete silence is often not the best alternative. Whether it is some soft music, remote traffic noise or the hum of people chatting in the distance, for many people, an optimum amount of noise enables them to concentrate better. “This is the human equivalent of stochastic resonance,” says AMOLF group leader Said Rodriguez. “In our scientific labs stochastic resonance happens in non-linear systems that are bistable. This means that, for a given input, the output can switch between two possible values. When the input is a periodic signal, the response of a non-linear system can be amplified by an optimum amount of noise using the stochastic resonance condition.”

The Crew-3 Dragon mission will now launch Oct. 31.

Heavy traffic at the International Space Station has pushed SpaceX’s next crewed launch to the orbiting lab for NASA back a week.

But now a spy swims among them: Mesobot. Today in the journal Science Robotics, a team of engineers and oceanographers describes how they got a new autonomous underwater vehicle to lock onto movements of organisms and follow them around the ocean’s “twilight zone,” a chronically understudied band between 650 feet and 3200 feet deep, which scientists also refer to as mid-water. Thanks to some clever engineering, the researchers did so without flustering these highly sensitive animals, making Mesobot a groundbreaking new tool for oceanographers.

“It’s super cool from an engineering standpoint,” says Northeastern University roboticist Hanumant Singh, who develops ocean robots but wasn’t involved in this research. “It’s really an amazing piece of work, in terms of looking at an area that’s unexplored in the ocean.”

Mesobot looks like a giant yellow-and-black AirPods case, only it’s rather more waterproof and weighs 550 pounds. It can operate with a fiber-optic tether attached to a research vessel at the surface, or it can swim around freely.

Applied Materials said it has reached a breakthrough in chip wiring that will enable semiconductor chip production to miniaturize to chips so the width between circuits can be as little as three billionths of a meter. Current chip factories are making 7nm and 5nm chips, so the 3nm chips represent the next generation of technology.

These 3nm production lines will be part of factories that cost more than $22 billion to build — and generate a lot more revenue than that. The breakthrough in chip wiring will enable logic chips to scale to three nanometers and beyond, the company said.

Chip manufacturing companies can use the wiring tools in their huge factories, and the transition from 5nm factories to 3nm factories could help ease a shortage of semiconductor chips that has plagued the entire electronics industry. But it will be a while before the chips go into production. In addition to interconnect scaling challenges, there are other issues related to the transistor (extending the use of FinFET transistors and transitioning to Gate All Around transistors), as well as patterning (extreme ultraviolet and multi-patterning).

This looks extremely promising:

SAN DIEGO, June 17, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Viking Therapeutics, Inc. (Viking) (NASDAQ: VKTX), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on the development of novel therapies for metabolic and endocrine disorders, today announced results from the company’s Phase 1 single ascending dose (SAD) and multiple ascending dose (MAD) clinical trial of VK0214, a novel, orally available small molecule thyroid receptor beta (TRβ) agonist in development for the potential treatment for X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy (X-ALD). In this study, VK0214 demonstrated encouraging safety and tolerability, as well as a predictable pharmacokinetic (PK) profile. The company expects to initiate a Phase 1b study of VK0214 in patients with X-ALD in the coming weeks.

The Phase 1 trial was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study in healthy volunteers. The primary objective of the study was to evaluate the safety and tolerability of VK0214 administered orally for up to 14 days. The secondary objective was to evaluate the pharmacokinetics of VK0214 following single and multiple oral doses. The first portion of the study evaluated single doses of VK0214; in the second portion of the study subjects received VK0214 once daily for 14 days. Subsequent cohorts in both parts of the study received successively higher VK0214 doses.

VK0214 was shown to be safe and well-tolerated at all doses evaluated in this study. No serious adverse events were reported, and no treatment or dose-related trends were observed for vital signs, gastrointestinal effects, cardiovascular measures, or physical examinations. VK0214 demonstrated dose-dependent exposures, no evidence of accumulation following multiple doses, and a half-life consistent with anticipated once-daily dosing regimens.

Continue reading “Viking Therapeutics Announces Results from Phase 1 Clinical Trial of Novel Oral Thyroid Receptor Beta Agonist VK0214” »

BES/BZR転写因子ファミリー間の競合関係は維管束幹細胞の増殖と分化のバランスを安定化させ幹細胞の永続的な維持に貢献する。

This special issue of Nature shines a spotlight on collaborations in science today, particularly in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. It reveals that such cooperation, although complex, is thriving in many ways. It is clearly essential, both to the progress of research and for the betterment of society. But, at the same time, international collaboration is under pressure, partly as a result of geopolitical tensions. And science’s historical conventions continue to hinder such team-based working.

The other is the initiative created in Flint. Lewis is a community activist and now principal investigator at the Flint Center for Health Equity Solutions. Sadler is a geographer at Michigan State University. They draw lessons from how researchers and members of the community worked together to identify where diseases were concentrated. It’s a frank account that also flags the fact that some scientists discounted and overlooked ideas from communities, and raises the injustice of work that saves lives not necessarily meeting the ‘excellence’ criteria needed to progress in academic institutions.

These are clearly testing times for collaboration. The stories and data show that there is still some way to travel before all parts of the research enterprise recognize the true value of working across borders, cultures and disciplines.

Continue reading “Research collaborations bring big rewards: the world needs more” »