“We have added this vulnerability to our catalog of known exploited vulnerabilities, which compels federal civilian agencies — and signals to non-federal partners — to urgently patch or remediate this vulnerability,” CISA director Jen Easterly wrote in the statement. The bug pertains to something called log4j, and one way that software engineers can protect websites from it is to upgrade to the latest version of log4j (2.15.0). “We are proactively reaching out to entities whose networks may be vulnerable and are leveraging our scanning and intrusion detection tools to help government and industry partners identify exposure to or exploitation of the vulnerability....

The Loma Linda University biology professor sweeps his blacklight a few feet ahead of him and spots one scurrying out from under a rock, its body glowing fluorescent green under the UV rays. Now, it’s simply a matter of identifying the species, noting behavioral data, and perhaps taking a few live specimens scooped into portable containers back to the lab where he will collect and study their venom. He’s been stung many times in the process, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not, so it’s safe to say he has an intimate knowledge of these creatures he finds so fascinating....

On June 8, New Zealand announced that its last person known to be infected with COVID-19 has recovered. This means that, at least for now, the island nation has eliminated the disease. The country has tallied 1,504 confirmed and probable infections and 22 deaths. Several other countries with smaller populations have reportedly also quashed transmission of COVID-19, including Fiji and Montenegro. A handful of other nations, including Iceland and Taiwan, have recently brought the number of active cases of COVID-19 to nearly zero....

Why would you want to put another hard drive in your PS5? Out of the box, PS5 comes with an 875GB solid-state drive. After factoring the space needed for the system software, you actually have 667.2 GB to store games, apps like Netflix and YouTube, saved game data, screenshots, and video clips. Many of the best PS5 games require between 40-60 GB of storage. Even if you mix in some PS4 games and smaller indies, you can realistically store 10-15 games on the drive at a time....

An analysis of 236 Indigenous languages in three of the world’s most biodiverse regions found that over 75 percent of 12,495 plant medicinal attributes documented in these areas are exclusive to a specific language. “If these languages disappear, we’ll lose this index to the forest library,” says study co-author Rodrigo Cámara-Leret, a researcher studying biological and cultural diversity at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. “We can read the landscape thanks to the information compiled by native peoples,” he says....

Under the guise of streamlining data, the Trump administration has moved previously available COVID data on hospitalizations out of the public eye. Starting on Wednesday, all hospitals are under orders to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and instead report directly to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which will be compiling the data into a single database. But that database won’t be available to the public....

“Most of America’s critical infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector and critical infrastructure owners and operators must accelerate efforts to lock their digital doors,” President Biden said in the statement. This new messaging adds urgency to earlier warnings the White House has given since the US began imposing sanctions on Russia in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine. Anne Neuberger, deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology, said in a press briefing Monday that there is no evidence of a specific planned attack....

The size of each icon illustrates the amount of money it took to build. The color illustrates where the money came from: red for private funds, blue for public, and hues of purple in between for a mix of both. The ghostly, faded-out icons are for stadiums that lost their team. You might’ve figured, the public has been chipping in more dough than private investors. How much more? About $32....

The company’s latest device, the Whoop 4.0 fitness tracker, is more compact than previous generations while introducing more functions. It might not look like much at a glance but, within just a few weeks, it quickly becomes a powerful ally in your fitness life, providing greater insight into performance and recovery, allowing you to maximize the efficiency of your workout routine. Between the lack of lifestyle features and specificity of the data, the Whoop 4....

Nearly a century ago, one of the first fad diets, known as the Hollywood or grapefruit diet, suggested that eating the tart fruit with every meal was the secret to staying thin. It wasn’t. But that didn’t stop diets from ballooning into a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States. You wouldn’t know it from reading the promotional materials of all the apps, guidebooks, and influencers promising to help you shed pounds, but there’s a lot that researchers and physicians still don’t understand about weight loss....

When a Shahed-136 hits, sometimes people die, but a pilot on the weapon never does, because it’s uncrewed. “‘Kamikaze’ is a Japanese word that translates to ‘divine wind,’ and is commonly used to refer to the Empire of Japan’s military pilots who were ordered to go on suicide missions during World War II, purposely crashing aircraft loaded with explosives onto targets, such as U.S. Navy ships,” reads the guidance. With modern loitering munitions—in this case, loitering means the ability to fly around before it impacts a target, if it does—a guidance system, or sometimes a remote operator, makes the decision to aim the uncrewed explosive into a building, vehicle, or people, selected as a target....

This past August, a video about titanium dioxide in tampons went viral on TikTok. A blonde woman holding a large box of tampons suggested that the mineral’s presence in the products could cause period cramps, ovarian cysts, irreversible uterine damage, and even cancer. Research conducted on rats has found that titanium dioxide is harmful if inhaled in large quantities, and the European Union has banned the mineral as a food additive over possible health concerns....

What’s happening in Chicago is happening around the world, and not just with coyotes. Gehrt and other researchers in his field are convinced that urban areas should prepare to make room for large carnivores. Coyotes, which live in every state but Hawaii, have appeared in cities from Los Angeles to New York. This spring, biologists in Los Angeles radio-collared the first mountain lion ever found in Griffith Park, the home of the Hollywood sign....

As your shiny new gadget ages, so does its software. To keep devices running smoothly, manufacturers issue regular updates. But those patches can’t do anything if you refuse to install them. Gadget updates take care of a lot of problems, but their most important application might be security. When disasters strike, they usually hit hardware that’s running outdated software. To prevent this, manufacturers will regularly roll out crucial patches that protect your laptop, phone, and other gadgets from the latest threats....

A study published yesterday in the journal People and Nature found that even in the more remote and rarely visited national parks, the presence of even just a few humans impacts the activity and behavior of wildlife that live there. “There’s been increasing recognition of how much just the presence of humans in these places, and our recreating there, can impact wildlife,” senior author Laura Prugh, associate professor in the University of Washington School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, said in a statement....

This hypothetical planet has a name: Planet B. As in, Plan B. The proverbial Planet B functions as a sort of escape hatch, real or philosophical, for when things get hairy here on Planet A. This terrestrial cousin has long shown up in science fiction, shaping how Earthlings conceive of such a place, sometimes subconsciously. “We don’t even think about the fact that something like Star Wars takes place on exoplanets,” says Lisa Messeri, a Yale anthropologist and author of the book Placing Outer Space....

It’s not perfect though. Due to the proprietary tech Apple has built into the buds, you’ll lose some functionality along the way, including the possibility of checking the battery life of your AirPods on the device you’re listening to, or having your music automatically pause when you take one of the buds out. Still, the rest of the features such as tapping your AirPods or squeezing the stems of the AirPods Pro to pause playback, will work just the same....

“This is one of the things we don’t know at the moment,” says Garth Illingworth, a Professor Emeritus at the University of California Santa Cruz, who was not involved with the research. The first makeover happened hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang, when the cosmos’s protons and electrons paired off into hydrogen atoms as things cooled down. At this point most colors of light in the Big Bang’s afterglow could move freely without banging into interfering particles that would obscure them from view, and the universe became largely transparent....

“In the last nine years there has been a revolutionary change in the way culture and society use technology,” executive director of the Center for Body Computing Leslie Saxon said in a press release. “It’s about to happen in medicine.” Earlier this year we sat down with Saxon at SXSW to talk about how implantable sensors could help doctors gather more data. And during the Body Computing Conference this October, she introduced another intriguing technology, the hologram house call....