Agregátor RSS

Slavný Maxwellův démon, který straší v druhém termodynamickém zákoně, se dočkal vylepšení informačním „motorem“. Fyzici zjistili, že informace skrytá v pohybech molekulárních struktur v kapalině umožní získat až trojnásobek užitečné práce oproti teoretickému limitu pro systém bez takové paměti.

Fosilie z čínské provincie Kuej-čou, staré asi 237 milionů let se ukázaly být prvním známým obojživelníkem, který žil v oceánu. Gerrothorax maritimus zřejmě číhal na dně a nasával tam všechno, co se k němu dostalo příliš blízko, podobně jako dnešní bentičtí žraloci wobegongové.

V lednu ohlásil CEO Nvidie Jen-Hsun Huang specifikace akcelerátorů Rubin a Rubin Ultra. Od té doby Nvidia Rubin Ultra zrušila a nyní se ukazuje, že nedosahuje ani původních specifikací Rubin…

OpenAI confirmed GPT-6.1 Terra is safer overall than some of its older models, but its safety testing also found other problems. [...]

The University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center disclosed a cyberattack that caused system outages and disrupted patient care and academic activities. [...]

A credit card skimming group reportedly compromised a shared analytics script used by e-commerce platform Convertr to steal shoppers' payment data during checkout. [...]

By chilling roundworms, scientists traced a molecular pathway hinting at one way cold might extend lifespan.

From ice baths and cold showers to whole-body cryotherapy, cold exposure has long been hyped as a wellness shortcut. The supposed benefits include boosted dopamine, weight loss, stronger immunity, or even slower aging.

Scientific evidence for these claims is scant, but a telltale link between temperature and longevity has intrigued scientists for over a century. Lowering ambient temperature by just a smidge can extend lifespan in the roundworm C. elegans, fruit flies, and even mice. Plenty of mechanisms could explain the curious effect, but scientists are still largely in the dark.

A new study may shed some light on the matter. When scientists grew roundworms at moderately cold temperatures, the worms steadily ramped up production of BH2, a helper agent for many enzymes, including those that build brain chemicals. Though initially produced in our muscles, BH2 roams to other parts of the body too, including the intestines and brain. Here, in the study, it boosted tyrosine production and contributed to a longer lifespan.

Mapping a longevity pathway in worms isn’t just about satisfying scientific curiosity. When the scientists supplemented human cells with BH2 or tyrosine, the treatments fended off toxic protein clumps associated with neurodegenerative diseases.

But don’t go ordering tyrosine just yet. A biological response in cells doesn’t automatically translate into a health benefit, especially one as complex as slowing aging. While worms are a useful model in longevity studies, they’re a far cry from humans. That said, an existing drug used to treat a metabolic condition can tweak the pathway, and examining clinical data from patients taking the drug could offer a useful test to see if the mechanism holds up in people.

More broadly, the findings point to muscles as active players in the aging process. Beyond movement, their chemical output could change how other tissues age. The findings “highlight the muscle’s ‘metabolome’—its full set of metabolites—as a potential source of signals that promote longevity,” wrote Hanseul Lee and Seung-Jae Lee at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, who were not involved in the study.

Cold Case

As time ticks by, basic cell functions gradually falter. DNA’s protective end caps, called telomers, fray. Mutations accumulate in our genetic blueprint. Chronic inflammation flares across the body. Senescent “zombie” cells bathe healthy tissues in a toxic chemical brew. Cellular energy factories and waste disposal plants begin to sputter.

Dubbed the hallmarks of aging, these processes only partly depend on genetics. Environment, social factors, and lifestyle—diet, exercise, exposure to toxins—also shape our aging trajectory.

Temperature seems like an odd addition to that list. Yet nature is littered with examples. Hibernating mammals generally live longer than those who don’t. Yellow-bellied marmots, for example, spend up to seven months a year hibernating, lowering their body temperature and throttling metabolism. Scientists have found their biological aging essentially stalls during hibernation.

These observations inspired the rate-of-living theory, which suggests that the lower a creature’s metabolic rate, the longer it lives. Recent work has given the century-old idea a nuanced update by exploring how cooler temperatures directly activate mechanisms that counter some of the hallmarks of aging. But there are caveats.

Take mitochondria, our cells’ energy factories. With age, they become increasingly dysfunctional. A chill activates brown fat, which is packed with mitochondria, ramping up energy use and potentially overall metabolic health. In a small study of a dozen people exposed to mild cold for up to eight hours, most showed signs of better blood sugar regulation. But these were short-term effects, not evidence for lasting protection. Cold can also boost mitochondrial numbers, though whether they protect against aging in humans remains to be seen.

The immune system may also respond to a chill. A study in healthy people and those with inflammatory disease, found cold exposure slashed immune molecules called cytokines, which often fuel inflammation. A different study found lower temperatures slowed the accumulation of reactive oxygen species (little “bullets” that damage cellular components, including DNA).

A cellular waste removal plant, the proteasome, also seems to benefit from air conditioning. In 2023, David Vilchez at the University of Cologne and colleagues found that moderately cold temperatures boosted proteasome activity in both C. elegans and human cells. The newly invigorated cleanup crew chomped proteins known to aggregate into clumps involved in neurodegenerative diseases.

“Lowering body temperature is one of the most effective mechanisms to extend longevity,” the team wrote at the time. But translating those ideas into a practical strategy isn’t straightforward—continuously maintaining a low body temperature is a hard sell. Mimicking those effects in a pill, however, might be easier to swallow.

A Cool Way to Live Long

In the new study, Vilchez’s team compared metabolites in C. elegans grown at a comfortable 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) with those in worms kept at temperatures five degrees lower. On average, the chilled worms lived roughly 15 percent longer.

The levels of one metabolite, BH2, skyrocketed in the cold. The molecule helps a host of enzymes do their jobs, and genetically blocking its production wiped out the extra longevity.

The team found BH2 was mostly produced in muscles and transported to other organs. In the intestines and brain, it shifted into another form that pushed cells to make more tyrosine, an amino acid often found in meats, fish, diary, and soy. Even without a cold snap, feeding tyrosine to worms unable to make BH2 helped them live longer.

“We were genuinely surprised to find the supplementation significantly extended lifespan, even at standard and warmer temperature,” said Vilchez in a press release.

The team then tested BH2 in human neurons. Mutant proteins related to Huntington’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and dementia often trigger cell death, but cells treated with BH2 largely escaped this fate. Meanwhile, they better maintained protein homeostasis, the delicate balance between making, folding, and clearing proteins that goes awry with age.

These findings suggest a way to mimic the benefits of cold without having to tolerate the shivers or dangerous health effects.  But a designer pill is a long way off. Safety is one concern. In mammals, a balance between BH2 and its active version regulates reactive oxygen species. Supplementation may tip that balance, causing cells to pump out more “bullets” and ironically accelerate aging. And because the pathway controls other enzymes, unexpected side effects could do more harm than good.

For now, the takeaway isn’t to stock up on BH2 or tyrosine as a fountain of youth. Rather, the results are a good starting point for the development of metabolite-based treatments for neurodegenerative disorders. And instead of going after therapies that target the aging body as a whole, the results suggest focusing on one tissue could be enough.

“These findings suggest that specifically targeting a single tissue, such as muscle, could provide organism-wide protection. This opens up new avenues for therapeutic approaches,” said Vilchez.

The post Study Could Help Explain Why Colder Body Temperature Extends Lifespan in Many Species appeared first on SingularityHub.

Tyto filmy a seriály jsou na českém Amazon Prime nejoblíbenější. Nerozlišujeme žánr, stáří ani hodnocení na filmových webech. Jde o souhrnnou oblíbenost, kterou zjišťuje web FlixPatrol.

Defenders across the world face the burden of responding to yet another botched code-execution vulnerability, this time in boot-time firmware used by most of the world’s server vendors and data centers.

The vulnerability, with a severity rating of 9.5 out of 10, resides in the TianoCore EDK II, an open source codebase that hardware makers and cloud providers use to create the UEFI firmware that runs during the boot-up sequence. Last year, a representative of the UEFI Forum called EDK2 the "preeminent solution / implementation of the UEFI specifications." Virtually all UEFI suppliers (sometimes still called IBVs or independent BIOS vendors), including AMI, Insyde, and Phoenix, use the reference code extensively. Project Mu, Microsoft's hardened EDK2 fork, used the code containing the vulnerable component as well.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-97631, is a memory-corruption flaw in an ICMP component that attackers can exploit to execute malicious code that runs before the operating system and firmware can implement defenses like Secure Boot, which establishes a chain of trust for all code, including the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), loaded during boot. While final payloads delivered by CVE-2026-97631 have no persistence—meaning they run only once—they can give attackers a wide opening to install other payloads that also run each time early in the boot process.

Read full article

Comments

Claude Code se speciálním skillem dokáže samostatně sestavit rodokmen. • Agent se zeptá na úvodní informace a potom sám hledá v matrikách a jiných archiváliích. • Rodokmen vytvoří v podobě přehledného webu.

An autonomous AI agent discovered four vulnerabilities in the decades-old, widely used EPICS (Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System) open source software toolkit, including a critical flaw that could allow remote attackers to execute code on systems used to control particle accelerators and fusion experiments. The bugs include a critical, 9.8-rated under CVSS v3.1 integer overflow vulnerability (CVE-2026-114595), leading to an attacker-controlled out-of-bounds heap write and potentially remote code execution; an 8.2-rated, high-severity, improper message-length validation flaw (CVE-2026-114596), causing an out-of-bounds memory write and controller-process crash; a 7.5-rated, high-severity insufficient bounds checking bug (CVE-2026-114597) that allows out-of-bounds memory reads and process crashes; and a 7.5-rated, high-severity type confusion flaw (CVE-2026-114598) that can lead to denial of service and could expose adjacent memory contents. All four affect EPICS Base, which is used to operate some of the world's largest scientific research projects and facilities, and organizations should update to version 7.0.11, which includes the fixes. “Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to cause a denial-of-service condition, corrupt memory, disclose sensitive information, or potentially execute arbitrary code,” the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned in a Tuesday advisory. An AI agent called Cipher independently found all four previously unknown security holes - investigating and testing the unfamiliar EPICS system, and validating the four exploits - in three hours and 49 minutes, Causal Security co-founder Shubham Raj told The Register. “The initial investigation required no human intervention, followed by one instruction authorizing deeper exploitability testing in a secure environment,” Raj said. Earlier this year, Causal Security’s Cipher, which Raj described as “a fully autonomous super hacker that can reason across the technology stack,” found multiple critical attack paths in power-grid systems used across North America and Europe, prompting an October 8 security advisory from CISA. EPICS, originally developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, is used to build and remotely control distributed Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, connecting operators to physical devices. It’s used in around 90 major scientific, university, and industrial projects and facilities globally including Argonne National Laboratory's Advanced Photon Source and ITER's fusion reactor control system. All four of these flaws illustrate how AI agents are really good at finding vulnerabilities in industrial and operational technologies - systems and equipment that used to be able to rely on obscurity to protect them from hackers - and add to defenders' concerns that it's only a matter of time until an autonomous cyberattack shuts down critical services, like power grids or water systems. These are the types of digital intrusions that can cause physical harm. Raj points to CVE-2026-114595, the critical integer-overflow vulnerability, as an example. “It allows attacker-controlled network data to cause an out-of-bounds heap memory write, with potential for remote code execution,” he told us. “EPICS controllers sit between operators and physical equipment, handling measurements, commands, and control functions,” he continued. “Operationally: Imagine a particle accelerator in the middle of an expensive experiment. An attacker could potentially crash a controller, interrupt critical measurements or control functions, and force operators to halt the experiment. That could mean lost experimental work, significant downtime, and expensive recovery.” Plus, if an attacker was able to develop an RCE exploit, this could allow them to “take control of the affected process, manipulate readings, interfere with control functions, or disrupt the equipment connected to it,” Raj said. The prerequisite for exploiting these vulns in a real scientific facility is being able to reach the vulnerable EPICS services on a facility's control network. But this could occur if the networks weren’t sufficiently segmented, or another system had access to the vulnerable EPICS network. “Once an attacker is able to find a network, which is either misconfigured or they are able to reach, it’s pretty easy to carry out the attacks,” Raj said, adding that exploitation wouldn’t require deep OT knowledge, or understanding of how particle accelerators or fusion reactors work. “Someone with conventional exploitation skills could investigate them, and increasingly capable AI systems could help develop exploits without requiring specialized OT expertise.” Manipulating specific physical processes does require additional knowledge, he added. “But an attacker doesn't need to understand the physics of a particle accelerator to disrupt the software controlling it. Crashing critical processes or interrupting monitoring and control can already have serious operational consequences. What's changing is that attackers may no longer need years of specialized expertise just to discover these weaknesses.” ®

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of three cyber attacks targeting organizations in Japan in which artificial intelligence (AI) was a key element, either in the driving seat or to assist a human operator. TrendAI, which analyzed three exposed server environments used by threat actors to conduct the malicious cyber operations, described them as distinct from previously published

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of three cyber attacks targeting organizations in Japan in which artificial intelligence (AI) was a key element, either in the driving seat or to assist a human operator. TrendAI, which analyzed three exposed server environments used by threat actors to conduct the malicious cyber operations, described them as distinct from previously publishedRavie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Výrobci smartphonů pilně připravují aktualizace na další verzi Androidu • Někteří to zvládnou velmi rychle, jiní nechají své uživatele čekat velmi dlouho • V tomto článku sledujeme, jak na tom jsou jednotlivé značky.

Microsoft has released out-of-band (OOB) Windows updates to remove trust in certificates tied to compromised eMudhra certificate authority keys, protecting systems that do not receive automatic certificate trust updates. [...]

Alza testuje doručování léků na předpis kurýrem. • Lékárníci i ministr zdravotnictví považují službu za nezákonnou. • Ministerstvo chystá novelu, která by doručování umožnila.

Byl vydán Mozilla Firefox 159.0. Přehled novinek v poznámkách k vydání a poznámkách k vydání pro vývojáře. Řešeny jsou rovněž bezpečnostní chyby. Nový Firefox 159 bude brzy k dispozici také na Flathubu a Snapcraftu.

Vezmete tři krabičky, dvě vrátíte a zaplatíte jen jednu. Samoobslužná lednice Eat Smart propojuje rádiovou identifikaci jídel, mobilní aplikaci a cloud. Při vývoji bylo potřeba vyřešit i to, jak elektronické značky spolehlivě přečíst uvnitř kovové skříně.

Agent decision logs and telemetry data belonging to Warp agentic development environment users were exposed in an attack on a third-party vendor in the project's infrastructure. [...]