Autism is associated with differences across several systems in the brain, but understanding how those differences connect has been difficult. Researchers from the University of Southern Denmark and Odense University Hospital investigated that question in 60 adults using three forms of brain imaging.
For the first time, the researchers combined three advanced brain scanning techniques to examine the dopamine system, energy use, and communication among brain regions within the same study.
Depression was linked to stalled adult neurogenesis and widespread molecular changes in hippocampal memory circuits.
A small stream of new neurons continues to appear in the adult hippocampus even though most of the brain’s roughly 100 billion neurons are formed before birth. Research from Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons suggests that this limited adult neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons, could play an important role in protecting against depression.
The researchers report for the first time that neurogenesis stalls in the brains of adults with major depressive disorder. They also identified molecular programs involved in controlling this process, providing potential targets for future treatments.
Researchers discovered lymph node-like immune hubs inside skull bone marrow that appear to act as rapid-response centers for the brain.
For decades, the brain was thought to operate largely apart from the immune system. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have now identified lymph node-like structures inside the skull bone marrow of mice that respond rapidly to brain cancer, before more distant lymph nodes receive signals that abnormal cells are present. They also found evidence of similar immune cells in human skull bone marrow.
The findings add to growing evidence that the brain communicates directly with the immune system and suggest that specialized immune centers are positioned unusually close to the organ they help protect.
Forescout Research — Vedere Labs said it used Anthropic’s Claude to port a working pre-authentication remote code execution (RCE) exploit from one WAGO programmable logic controller (PLC) to another, executing attacker-supplied ARM shellcode on live hardware.
The exploit targets CVE-2021–31886, a stack-based buffer overflow in the Nucleus FTP server’s handling of the USER command, which carries a Siemens-assigned CVSS score of 9.8 and is accessible before authentication over TCP port 21.
CERT@VDE says no updates are available for the affected WAGO controllers, and advises owners to disable or block FTP on port 21, enforce segmentation controls, and monitor network traffic for anomalies.
International law enforcement agencies and private partners have seized Sality malware infrastructure in a joint action aiming to disrupt and take down the peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet.
As part of this operation, supported by Europol and Eurojust, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), FBI, and DCIS seized Sality-linked domains in the United States, while authorities in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania seized additional Sality-linked domains hosted in Europe.
CrowdStrike’s Counter Adversary Operations team, in collaboration with international law enforcement and private industry partners, also dismantled the botnet’s control channels in a peer-to-peer sinkhole operation that isolated infected machines.