Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 7

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

New dataset maps global city boundaries in high resolution from 2000 to 2022

A research team led by Prof. Liu Liangyun from the Aerospace Information Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (AIRCAS) has produced the first comprehensive, high-resolution map of global city and town boundaries, offering a view of how urban boundaries have expanded and transformed over the past two decades. The new dataset—derived from 30-meter-resolution satellite observations—fills a long-standing gap in global urban studies.

Cities and towns are the dominant form of human settlement, playing a crucial role in sustaining ecological balance and advancing sustainable development. However, their complex spatial structures and rapid evolution have made high-resolution global urban boundary datasets scarce. To address this gap, the team integrated the GISD30 global impervious surface dynamic dataset with LandScan global population data to develop the Global City and Town Boundaries (GCTB) Dataset, which covers the period from 2000 to 2022.

Published in Scientific Data, the study details the researchers’ development of a morphology-oriented boundary delineation framework that combines kernel density estimation (KDE) and cellular automata (CA) to accurately map urban boundaries. When compared with multiple reference datasets, the GCTB Dataset showed the strongest agreement with the manually curated Atlas of Urban Expansion, achieving an R2 value of approximately 0.88—indicating high reliability in capturing urban extents.

A 30-Year Superconductivity Mystery Just Took a Sharp Turn

Superconductors are materials that allow electrical current to flow without any resistance, a property that typically appears only at extremely low temperatures. While most known superconductors follow established theoretical frameworks, strontium ruthenate, Sr₂RuO₄, has remained difficult to explain since researchers first identified its superconducting behavior in 1994.

The material is widely regarded as one of the purest and most thoroughly examined examples of unconventional superconductivity. Even so, scientists have not reached agreement on the exact nature of the electron pairing within Sr₂RuO₄, including its symmetry and internal structure, which are central to understanding how its superconductivity arises.

DarkSpectre Browser Extension Campaigns Exposed After Impacting 8.8 Million Users Worldwide

The threat actor behind two malicious browser extension campaigns, ShadyPanda and GhostPoster, has been attributed to a third attack campaign codenamed DarkSpectre that has impacted 2.2 million users of Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox.

The activity is assessed to be the work of a Chinese threat actor that Koi Security is tracking under the moniker DarkSpectre. In all, the campaigns have collectively affected over 8.8 million users spanning a period of more than seven years.

ShadyPanda was first unmasked by the cybersecurity company earlier this month as targeting all three browser users to facilitate data theft, search query hijacking, and affiliate fraud. It has been found to affect 5.6 million users, including 1.3 newly identified victims stemming from over 100 extensions flagged as connected to the same cluster.

IBM Warns of Critical API Connect Bug Allowing Remote Authentication Bypass

IBM has disclosed details of a critical security flaw in API Connect that could allow attackers to gain remote access to the application.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025–13915, is rated 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. It has been described as an authentication bypass flaw.

“IBM API Connect could allow a remote attacker to bypass authentication mechanisms and gain unauthorized access to the application,” the tech giant said in a bulletin.

The World’s Largest Lithium Deposit (That We Know of) Won’t Be Easy to Mine

Grid storage batteries, for their part, collect excess power from various green energy sources, like wind farms. They can be charged and then discharged at times of higher demand and lower supply. Having plentiful, economical batteries is a key factor in pitching this kind of facility to nations and communities that are considering using renewables, or larger portions of renewables.

But setting up a mine to extract the massive deposit of lithium in Thacker Pass is not a simple task: it will require a wholly new process to separate the lithium from its natural clay deposit.

Lithium is all around us. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there are 89 million tons of lithium in deposits on Earth, just two one-thousandths of 1 percent of Earth’s elemental abundance. Experts believe more than half of that lithium can be found in one triangular area of desert in western South America; but Thacker Pass in the United States, we now know, could contain as much as 40 million tons of lithium.

Candida auris spreads globally as drug resistance and virulence increase, review finds

Best advice is simply disinfect with vinegar because it kills it on contact.

The fungal species Candida auris is spreading across the globe, and gaining in virulence, according to a new review by a Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI) scientist and colleagues.

But there are strategies available and underway to combat the invasive and drug-resistant germ, says the work in Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews.

The paper summarizes and analyzes the latest developments—and needs—in mycology in 2025. Neeraj Chauhan, Ph.D., of the CDI, is co-author with Anuradha Chowdhary, Ph.D., of the Medical Mycology Unit at the Vallabhbhai Patel Chest Institute at the University of Delhi, who is a global leader in identifying and combating fungal threats, and was one of the first scientists to identify C. auris as a major public health threat in India in 2014. Chowdhary is also a visiting researcher at the CDI.

/* */