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Blog – Page 6

Researchers at the Sainsbury Wellcome Center (SWC) at UCL have unveiled the precise brain mechanisms that enable animals to overcome instinctive fears. Published in Science, the study in mice could have implications for developing therapeutics for fear-related disorders such as phobias, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The research team, led by Dr. Sara Mederos and Professor Sonja Hofer, mapped out how the brain learns to suppress responses to perceived threats that prove harmless over time.

“Humans are born with instinctive reactions, such as responses to loud noises or fast-approaching objects,” explains Dr. Mederos, Research Fellow in the Hofer Lab at SWC.

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Researchers at Tohoku University have achieved a significant advancement in opto-magnetic technology, observing an opto-magnetic torque approximately five times more efficient than in conventional magnets. This breakthrough, led by Koki Nukui, Assistant Professor Satoshi Iihama, and Professor Shigemi Mizukami, has far-reaching implications for the development of light-based spin memory and storage technologies.

Opto-magnetic is a method which can generate force on magnets. This can be used to change the direction of magnets by light more efficiently. By creating alloy nanofilms with up to 70% platinum dissolved in cobalt, the team discovered that the unique relativistic quantum mechanical effects of platinum significantly boost the magnetic torque.

The study revealed that the enhancement of opto-magnetic torque was attributed to the electron generated by circularly polarized light and relativistic quantum mechanical effects. The findings are published in Physical Review Letters.

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How does cold milk disperse when it is dripped into hot coffee? Even the fastest supercomputers are unable to perform the necessary calculations with high precision because the underlying quantum physical processes are extremely complex.

In 1982, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman suggested that, instead of using conventional computers, such questions are better solved using a quantum computer, which can simulate the quantum physical processes efficiently—a quantum simulator. With the rapid progress now being made in the development of quantum computers, Feynman’s vision could soon become a reality.

Together with researchers from Google and universities in five countries, Andreas Läuchli and Andreas Elben, two at PSI, have built and successfully tested a new type of digital–analog quantum simulator.

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Multiferroic materials, in which electric and magnetic properties are combined in promising ways, will be the heart of new solutions for data storage, data transmission, and quantum computers. Meanwhile, understanding the origin of such properties at a fundamental level is key for developing applications, and neutrons are the ideal probe.

Neutrons possess a which makes them sensitive to magnetic fields generated by unpaired electrons in materials. This makes scattering techniques a powerful tool to probe the magnetic behavior of materials at atomic level.

The story of the so-called layered perovskites and the breakthrough results now published are a paradigmatic example highlighting both the role of fundamental studies in the development of applications and of the power of neutrons. Being a promising class of materials exhibiting coupled magnetic and electric ordering properties at ambient temperatures, the magnetic structure of the layered perovskites YBaCuFeO5—and thus the origin of their interesting magneto-electric behavior—was still to be unambiguously determined.

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When humans kick swim through water, vortices form around their legs, generating the force that propels them forward. However, the mechanisms underlying variations in the structure of these vortices with swimming speed remain unclear.

In a new study published in Experiments in Fluids, researchers analyzed swimmer movement using an optical motion capture system and investigated vortex structure changes with varying speeds. They employed to visualize water flow dynamics.

Their results revealed that during underwater undulatory swimming, the vortex structure in the down-kick-to-up-kick transition phase changed as swimming speed increased. Specifically, with rising swimming speed, the direction of the jet flow between the two around the foot shifted to a more vertically downward orientation, a shift hypothesized to enhance forward propulsion during up-kicking.

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A new study reveals that short-term exposure to particulate matter (PM) air pollution can reduce a person’s ability to focus and interpret emotions, potentially making everyday tasks — like grocery shopping — more difficult.

Scientists found that even brief exposure to high levels of PM can impair concentration, increase distractibility, and affect social behavior.

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In the incident analyzed by the Canadian cybersecurity company, the initial access was gained to a targeted endpoint via a vulnerable SimpleHelp RMM instance (“194.76.227[.]171”) located in Estonia.

Upon establishing a remote connection, the threat actor has been observed performing a series of post-exploitation actions, including reconnaissance and discovery operations, as well as creating an administrator account named “sqladmin” to facilitate the deployment of the open-source Sliver framework.

The persistence offered by Sliver was subsequently abused to move laterally across the network, establishing a connection between the domain controller (DC) and the vulnerable SimpleHelp RMM client and ultimately installing a Cloudflare tunnel to stealthily route traffic to servers under the attacker’s control through the web infrastructure company’s infrastructure.

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Morphisec CTO Michael Gorelik told The Hacker News that there is evidence connecting the two activity clusters, and that the deceptive Chrome installer site was previously leveraged to download the Gh0st RAT payload.

“This campaign specifically targeted Chinese-speaking users, as indicated by the use of Chinese-language web lures and applications aimed at data theft and evasion of defenses by the malware,” Gorelik said.

“The links to the fake Chrome sites are primarily distributed through drive-by download schemes. Users searching for the Chrome browser are directed to these malicious sites, where they inadvertently download the fake installer. This method exploits the users’ trust in legitimate software downloads, making them susceptible to infection.”

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A 7-Zip vulnerability allowing attackers to bypass the Mark of the Web (MotW) Windows security feature was exploited by Russian hackers as a zero-day since September 2024.

According to Trend Micro researchers, the flaw was used in SmokeLoader malware campaigns targeting the Ukrainian government and private organizations in the country.

The Mark of the Web is a Windows security feature designed to warn users that the file they’re about to execute comes from untrusted sources, requesting a confirmation step via an additional prompt. Bypassing MoTW allows malicious files to run on the victim’s machine without a warning.

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