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SilentCryptoMiner Infects 2,000 Russian Users via Fake VPN and DPI Bypass Tools

A new mass malware campaign is infecting users with a cryptocurrency miner named SilentCryptoMiner by masquerading it as a tool designed to circumvent internet blocks and restrictions around online services.

Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky said the activity is part of a larger trend where cybercriminals are increasingly leveraging Windows Packet Divert (WPD) tools to distribute malware under the guise of restriction bypass programs.

“Such software is often distributed in the form of archives with text installation instructions, in which the developers recommend disabling security solutions, citing false positives,” researchers Leonid Bezvershenko, Dmitry Pikush, and Oleg Kupreev said. “This plays into the hands of attackers by allowing them to persist in an unprotected system without the risk of detection.”

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Optimal brain processing requires balance between excitatory and inhibitory neurons, study suggests

The brain’s ability to process information is known to be supported by intricate connections between different neuron populations. A key objective of neuroscience research has been to delineate the processes via which these connections influence information processing.

Researchers at the University of Padova, the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding the contribution of excitatory and inhibitory neuron populations to the brain’s encoding of information. Their findings, published in Physical Review Letters, show that is maximized when the activity of excitatory and inhibitory neurons is balanced.

“Our research was inspired by a fundamental question in neuroscience: how does the structure of the brain shape its ability to process information?” Giacomo Barzon, co-author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “The brain continuously receives and integrates sensory inputs, and neurons do not act in isolation—they are part of complex, recurrent networks. One particularly intriguing feature of these networks is the balance between the activity of excitatory and inhibitory neurons, which has been observed across different brain regions.”

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Scientists Just Found a Mind-Bending Way to Control Electrons

Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a new technique to better understand how electrons interact within materials. By using a moiré material — created by twisting ultra-thin atomic layers — they generated an artificial crystal lattice in a nearby semiconductor, allowing for more precise studies of electron behavior.

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Age and cognitive skills: Use it or lose it

Regular use of math and reading skills could prevent cognitive decline with age, according to a new Science Advances study.

Cognitive skills of the population such as literacy and numeracy are important not only for individual incomes but also for the economic growth of nations (2–6). As a result, the aging of world populations presents an economic concern if the commonly assumed declines of these skills with age hold.

We use longitudinal variation in individual literacy and numeracy skills for a representative adult sample to create age-skill profiles that credibly separate age from cohort effects. The pure age component that we derive provides a different perspective on the impacts of aging populations. Overall, our results are not consistent with a view that a natural law dictates an inevitable decline in these skills with age. Potential cognitive declines only occur at later ages and are not inevitable with usage of skills.

This is consolation for countries with aging populations, but avoidance of skill losses is not automatic and appears related to stimulation from skill usage. These results thus suggest that age-skill relationships of adults deserve policy attention, consistent with concerns about the necessity of lifelong learning.

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Detection of Epileptogenic Focal Cortical Dysplasia Using Graph Neural Networks: A MELD Study

Can the diagnosis of epilepsy-causing focal cortical dysplasias (FCD) be improved using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence?

This study evaluates the efficacy and interpretability of graph neural networks in automatically detecting focal cortical dysplasia lesions on magnetic resonance imaging scans.

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PCK1 inhibits cGAS-STING activation by consumption of GTP to promote tumor immune evasion

New study from Wenxing Qin, Yuran Duan, Zhiqiang Hu, Yueru Hou, Daqian Xu and colleagues (Zhejiang University School of Medicine) unveils a novel mechanism by which the metabolic enzyme PCK1 hinders cGAS-STING activation by competitively consuming GTP, consequently fostering tumor immune evasion.

This study unveils a novel mechanism by which the metabolic enzyme PCK1 hinders cGAS-STING activation by competitively consuming GTP, consequently fosterin.

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