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Our Solar System Has a New Visitor: Interstellar Comet Could Be Nearly As Old as the Galaxy Itself

U-M astronomers are helping study a fast-moving, ancient, and massive comet that formed beyond our galaxy. A group of astronomers from around the world, including a doctoral student from the University of Michigan, were the first to report the discovery of the third confirmed interstellar object

“No One Had Any Idea This Existed” — Astronomers Discover Hidden River of Gas Flowing to the Milky Way’s Heart

Newly identified Midpoint cloud reveals rare insight into star formation and the movement of galactic material toward the center of the Milky Way. A group of astronomers from around the world has identified a vast cloud of gas and dust in an underexplored part of the Milky Way. This structure, cl

Zoom and Xerox Release Critical Security Updates Fixing Privilege Escalation and RCE Flaws

Zoom and Xerox have addressed critical security flaws in Zoom Clients for Windows and FreeFlow Core that could allow privilege escalation and remote code execution.

The vulnerability impacting Zoom Clients for Windows, tracked as CVE-2025–49457 (CVSS score: 9.6), relates to a case of an untrusted search path that could pave the way for privilege escalation.

“Untrusted search path in certain Zoom Clients for Windows may allow an unauthenticated user to conduct an escalation of privilege via network access,” Zoom said in a security bulletin on Tuesday.

Is gravity quantum? Experiments could finally probe one of physics’ biggest questions

“How quantum mechanics and gravity fit together is one of the most important outstanding problems in physics,” says Kathryn Zurek, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena.

Generations of researchers have tried to create a quantum theory of gravity, and their work has produced sophisticated mathematical constructs, such as string theory. But experimental physicists haven’t found concrete evidence for any of these, and they’re not even sure what such evidence could look like.

Now there is a sense that insights could be around the corner. In the past decade, many researchers have become more optimistic that there are ways to test the true nature of gravity in the laboratory. Scientists have proposed experiments to do this, and are pushing the precision of techniques to make them possible. “There’s been a huge rise in both experimental capability and our theoretical understanding of what we actually learn from such experiments,” says Markus Aspelmeyer, an experimental physicist at the University of Vienna and a pioneer of this work.

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