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Businesses around the world rushed Saturday to contain a ransomware attack that has paralyzed their computer networks, a situation complicated in the U.S. by offices lightly staffed at the start of the Fourth of July holiday weekend.

It’s not yet known how many organizations have been hit by demands that they pay a ransom in order to get their systems working again. But some cybersecurity researchers predict the attack targeting customers of software supplier Kaseya could be one of the broadest ransomware attacks on record.

It follows a scourge of headline-grabbing attacks over recent months that have been a source of diplomatic tension between U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin over whether Russia has become a safe haven for cybercriminal gangs.

Researchers and entrepreneurs are starting to ponder how AI could create versions of people after their deaths—not only as static replicas but as evolving digital entities that may steer companies or influence world events.


Experts are exploring ways artificial intelligence might confer a kind of digital immortality, preserving the personalities of the departed in virtual form and then allowing them to evolve.

Astronomers have discovered the smallest yet most massive white dwarf star ever seen.

According to a new study published Thursday in the journal Nature, the “very special” star has a mass greater than that of our sun, all packed into a relatively small body, similar in size to our moon. It formed when two less massive white dwarf stars, which spent their lives as a pair orbiting around each other, collided and merged together.

At the end of their lives, the vast majority of stars become white dwarfs, which are essentially smoldering corpses, in addition to being one of the densest objects in the universe alongside black holes and neutron stars. In about 5 billion years, our sun will become a red giant before ultimately suffering the same fate.

A year after University at Buffalo scientists demonstrated that it was possible to produce millions of mature human cells in a mouse embryo, they have published a detailed description of the method so that other laboratories can do it, too.

The ability to produce millions of mature human in a living organism, called a chimera, which contains the cells of two species, is critical if the ultimate promise of to treat or cure is to be realized. But to produce those mature cells, human primed stem cells must be converted back into an earlier, less developed naive state so that the can co-develop with the inner cell mass in a blastocyst.

The protocol outlining how to do that has now been published in Nature Protocols by the UB scientists. They were invited to publish it because of the significant interest generated by the team’s initial publication describing their breakthrough last May.

How does the human brain keep track of the order of events in a sequence?

New research suggests that ‘time cells’ – neurons in the hippocampus thought to represent temporal information – could be the glue that sticks our memories together in the right sequence so that we can properly recall the correct order in which things happened.

Evidence for these kinds of sequence-tracking time cells was previously found in rats, where specific neuron assemblies are thought to support the recollection of events and the planning of action sequences – but less is known about how episodic memory is encoded in the human brain.