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Laser-within-a-laser delivers MeV X-ray radiography in picoseconds

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the hottest place on Earth for the briefest of moments during an experiment. Now, it can be one of the brightest places thanks to the Advanced Radiographic Capability (ARC), NIF’s laser-within-a-laser. How this is possible and how it’s measured is detailed in a paper in Physics of Plasmas titled “Development and scaling of MeV X-ray radiography at NIF-ARC.”

“This paper is a culmination of 13 NIF experiments over five years of data gathering, analyzing experiments, modeling and refining diagnostics,” said LLNL physicist Dean Rusby, the paper’s first author. “We’re able to create and measure an MeV X-ray source that can’t be done anywhere else on Earth.”

Scientists unveil universal aging mechanism in glassy materials

“Glass” has a unique and distinct meaning in physics—one that refers not just to the transparent material we associate with window glass. Instead, it refers to any system that looks solid but is not in true equilibrium and continues to change extremely slowly over time. Examples include window glass, plastics, metallic glasses, spin glasses (i.e., magnetic systems), and even some biological and computational systems.

When a liquid is cooled very quickly—a process called quenching—it doesn’t have time to organize into a crystal but becomes stuck in a disordered state far from equilibrium. Its properties—like stiffness and structure—slowly evolve through a process called “aging.”

Now, a research team from the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has proposed a new theoretical framework for understanding the universal aging behavior of glassy materials. The study is published in the journal Science Advances.

Fake Google Security site uses PWA app to steal credentials, MFA codes

A phishing campaign is using a fake Google Account security page to deliver a web-based app capable of stealing one-time passcodes, harvesting cryptocurrency wallet addresses, and proxying attacker traffic through victims’ browsers.

The attack leverages Progressive Web App (PWA) features and social engineering to deceive users into believing they are interacting with a legitimate Google Security web page and inadvertently installing the malware.

PWAs run in the browser and can be installed from a website, just like a standalone regular application, which is displayed in its own window without any visible browser controls.

Florida woman imprisoned for massive Microsoft license fraud scheme

A Florida woman was sentenced to 22 months in prison for running a massive years-long scheme to traffic thousands of stolen Microsoft Certificate of Authenticity (COA) labels.

52-year-old Heidi Richards (also known as Heidi Hastings, Heidi Shaffer, and Heidi Williams), who operated an e-commerce business called Trinity Software Distribution, was also ordered to pay a $50,000 fine.

COA labels are small stickers that authenticate software and carry unique product key codes used to activate products distributed on physical media, such as Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Office productivity suite.

Anthropic confirms Claude is down in a worldwide outage

Claude appears to be having a major outage, with elevated errors reported across all platforms.

The incident was flagged on March 2, 2026 at 11:30 UTC, and it’s impacting users broadly rather than being limited to one app or region.

According to Anthropic’s status updates, the first “Investigating” notice went out at 11:49 UTC, followed by a 12:06 UTC update saying the team was still investigating.

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