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Gold Does Something Unexpected When Superheated Past Its Melting Point

Gold remains perfectly solid when briefly heated beyond previously hypothesized limits, a new study reports, which may mean a complete reevaluation of how matter behaves under extreme conditions.

The international team of scientists behind the study used intense, super-short laser blasts to push thin fragments of gold past a limit known as the entropy catastrophe; the point at which a solid becomes too hot to resist melting. It’s like a melting point, but for edge cases where the physics isn’t conventional.

In a phenomenon called superheating, a solid can be heated too quickly for its atoms to have time enter a liquid state. Crystals can remain intact way past their standard melting point, albeit for a very, very brief amount of time.

BlackSuit ransomware extortion sites seized in Operation Checkmate

Law enforcement has seized the dark web extortion sites of the BlackSuit ransomware operation, which has targeted and breached the networks of hundreds of organizations worldwide over the past several years.

The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed the takedown in an email earlier today, saying the authorities involved in the action executed a court-authorized seizure of the BlackSuit domains.

Earlier today, the websites on the BlackSuit.onion domains were replaced with seizure banners announcing that the ransomware gang’s sites were taken down by the U.S. Homeland Security Investigations federal law enforcement agency as part of a joint international action codenamed Operation Checkmate.

Flaw in Gemini CLI AI coding assistant allowed stealthy code execution

A vulnerability in Google’s Gemini CLI allowed attackers to silently execute malicious commands and exfiltrate data from developers’ computers using allowlisted programs.

The flaw was discovered and reported to Google by the security firm Tracebit on June 27, with the tech giant releasing a fix in version 0.1.14, which became available on July 25.

Gemini CLI, first released on June 25, 2025, is a command-line interface tool developed by Google that enables developers to interact directly with Google’s Gemini AI from the terminal.

Microsoft: macOS Sploitlight flaw leaks Apple Intelligence data

Attackers could use a recently patched macOS vulnerability to bypass Transparency, Consent, and Control (TCC) security checks and steal sensitive user information, including Apple Intelligence cached data.

TCC is a security technology and a privacy framework that blocks apps from accessing private user data by providing macOS control over how their data is accessed and used by applications across Apple devices.

Apple has fixed the security flaw tracked as CVE-2025–31199 (reported by Microsoft’s Jonathan Bar Or, Alexia Wilson, and Christine Fossaceca) in patches released in March for macOS Sequoia 15.4 with “improved data redaction.”