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Sensor lights up to reveal scopolamine, a common substance used for sexual assault

A team from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) has led the development of a new sensor capable of quickly and easily detecting scopolamine, one of the substances most commonly used in crimes of chemical submission, especially in sexual assaults. The sensor detects the presence of this drug in less than five minutes with high sensitivity. The research is published in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

“Scopolamine is a substance that is difficult to detect using conventional methods, especially when found in drinks. For this reason, our group from the IDM Institute at the UPV set out to develop new, simple tools that can immediately alert us to its presence,” says Vicente Martí Centelles, a researcher at the Interuniversity Research Institute for Molecular Recognition and Technological Development (IDM) at the UPV.

Simultaneous packing structures in superionic water may explain ice giant magnetic fields

Superionic water—the hot, black and strangely conductive form of ice that exists in the center of distant planets—was predicted in the 1980s and first recreated in a laboratory in 2018. With each closer look, it continues to surprise researchers.

In a recent study published in Nature Communications, a team including researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has made a surprising discovery: Multiple atomic packing structures can coexist under identical conditions in superionic water.

Quantum phenomenon enables a nanoscale mirror that can be switched on and off

Controlling light is an important technological challenge—not just at the large scale of optics in microscopes and telescopes, but also at the nanometer scale. Recently, physicists at the University of Amsterdam published a clever quantum trick that allows them to make a nanoscale mirror that can be turned on and off at will.

The work is published in the journal Light: Science & Applications.

Scientists Made a Flash of Light Disappear Inside a Liquid

Liquids and solutions may look simple, but on the molecular scale they are constantly shifting and reorganizing. When sugar dissolves in water, each sugar molecule quickly becomes surrounded by fast moving water molecules. Inside living cells, the situation is even more intricate. Tiny liquid drople

China-Linked UAT-7290 Targets Telecoms with Linux Malware and ORB Nodes

A China-nexus threat actor known as UAT-7290 has been attributed to espionage-focused intrusions against entities in South Asia and Southeastern Europe.

The activity cluster, which has been active since at least 2022, primarily focuses on extensive technical reconnaissance of target organizations before initiating attacks, ultimately leading to the deployment of malware families such as RushDrop, DriveSwitch, and SilentRaid, according to a Cisco Talos report published today.

“In addition to conducting espionage-focused attacks where UAT-7290 burrows deep inside a victim enterprise’s network infrastructure, their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and tooling suggest that this actor also establishes Operational Relay Box (ORBs) nodes,” researchers Asheer Malhotra, Vitor Ventura, and Brandon White said.

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