Ozempic, MRI machines and flat screen televisions all emerged out of fundamental research decades earlier — the very types of study being slashed by the US government.
Category: government
Abandoned coal mine drainage identified as a significant source of carbon emissions
For the past 250 years, people have mined coal industrially in Pennsylvania, U.S… By 1830, the city of Pittsburgh was using more than 400 tons of the fossil fuel every day. Burning all that coal has contributed to climate change. Additionally, unremediated mines—especially those that operated before Congress passed regulations in 1977 —have leaked environmentally harmful mine drainage. But that might not be the end of their legacy.
In research presented last week at GSA Connects 2025 in San Antonio, Texas, U.S., Dr. Dorothy Vesper, a geochemist at West Virginia University, found that those abandoned mines pose another risk: continuous CO2 emissions from water that leaks out even decades or centuries after mining stops.
China-Linked Hackers Exploit Windows Shortcut Flaw to Target European Diplomats
The activity targeted diplomatic organizations in Hungary, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands, as well as government agencies in Serbia, Arctic Wolf said in a technical report published Thursday.
“The attack chain begins with spear-phishing emails containing an embedded URL that is the first of several stages that lead to the delivery of malicious LNK files themed around European Commission meetings, NATO-related workshops, and multilateral diplomatic coordination events,” the cybersecurity company said.
The files are designed to exploit ZDI-CAN-25373 to trigger a multi-stage attack chain that culminates in the deployment of the PlugX malware using DLL side-loading. PlugX is a remote access trojan that’s also referred to as Destroy RAT, Kaba, Korplug, SOGU, and TIGERPLUG.
A quest to find probiotics with immune benefits
Kirin has now worked LC-Plasma into a range of non-beer products including yoghurt beverages, green tea and other drinks. In 2020, these became the first ‘functional’ food or beverages in Japan to be allowed to be marketed as containing potentially immune-boosting ingredients.
“A food or beverage that might help improve immune function had been highly sought after in Japan for almost 30 years. But none succeeded in spite of much effort and expense,” Fujiwara says. “We conducted lots of studies and finally succeeded in meeting government requirements in 2020.”
Researchers at Kirin and NIID/JIHS have also been exploring in laboratory and animal studies the effects of LC-Plasma against various infectious diseases, including influenza, dengue fever, SARS-CoV-2 and common colds.
Digital ID cards could be a disaster in the UK and beyond
The British government isn’t the only one looking to introduce digital ID cards. There is so much to worry about here, not least the threat of hacks, says Annalee Newitz
APT36 Targets Indian Government with Golang-Based DeskRAT Malware Campaign
A Pakistan-nexus threat actor has been observed targeting Indian government entities as part of spear-phishing attacks designed to deliver a Golang-based malware known as DeskRAT.
The activity, observed in August and September 2025 by Sekoia, has been attributed to Transparent Tribe (aka APT36), a state-sponsored hacking group known to be active since at least 2013. It also builds upon a prior campaign disclosed by CYFIRMA in August 2025.
The attack chains involve sending phishing emails containing a ZIP file attachment, or in some cases, a link pointing to an archive hosted on legitimate cloud services like Google Drive. Present within the ZIP file is a malicious Desktop file embedding commands to display a decoy PDF (“CDS_Directive_Armed_Forces.pdf”) using Mozilla Firefox while simultaneously executing the main payload.
World’s first full-cell dual-cation battery developed in Ireland
Researchers at University of Limerick (UL) have developed a battery that could reshape the future of electric vehicles and portable electronics. Their breakthrough in energy storage technology has seen the development of the world’s first full-cell dual-cation battery.
This innovative system combines lithium and sodium ions to significantly enhance both battery capacity and stability, marking a new frontier in sustainable energy research.
The work, published in Nano Energy, was led by Hugh Geaney, Associate Professor of Chemistry at UL’s Department of Chemical Sciences and Principal Investigator at UL’s Bernal Institute, and Government of Ireland postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Syed Abdul Ahad, his colleague at the Department and the Bernal Institute.
Ukraine Aid Groups Targeted Through Fake Zoom Meetings and Weaponized PDF Files
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a coordinated spear-phishing campaign dubbed PhantomCaptcha targeting organizations associated with Ukraine’s war relief efforts to deliver a remote access trojan that uses a WebSocket for command-and-control (C2).
The activity, which took place on October 8, 2025, targeted individual members of the International Red Cross, Norwegian Refugee Council, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Ukraine office, Norwegian Refugee Council, Council of Europe’s Register of Damage for Ukraine, and Ukrainian regional government administrations in the Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, and Mikolaevsk regions, SentinelOne said in a new report published today.
The phishing emails have been found to impersonate the Ukrainian President’s Office, carrying a booby-trapped PDF document that contains an embedded link, which, when clicked, redirects victims to a fake Zoom site (“zoomconference[.]app”) and tricks them into running a malicious PowerShell command via a ClickFix-style fake Cloudflare CAPTCHA page under the guise of a browser check.
Chinese Threat Actors Exploit ToolShell SharePoint Flaw Weeks After Microsoft’s July Patch
CVE-2025–53770, assessed to be a patch bypass for CVE-2025–49704 and CVE-2025–49706, has been weaponized as a zero-day by three Chinese threat groups, including Linen Typhoon (aka Budworm), Violet Typhoon (aka Sheathminer), and Storm-2603, the latter of which is linked to the deployment of Warlock, LockBit, and Babuk ransomware families in recent months.
However, the latest findings from Symantec indicate that a much wider range of Chinese threat actors have abused the vulnerability. This includes the Salt Typhoon (aka Glowworm) hacking group, which is said to have leveraged the ToolShell flaw to deploy tools like Zingdoor, ShadowPad, and KrustyLoader against the telecom entity and the two government bodies in Africa.
KrustyLoader, first detailed by Synacktiv in January 2024, is a Rust-based loader previously put to use by a China-nexus espionage group dubbed UNC5221 in attacks exploiting flaws in Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) and SAP NetWeaver.