Comb jellies – very simple, gelatinous creatures best-known for their hypnotic underwater light shows – first appeared in Earth’s oceans around 550 million years ago.
For a long time, biologists have kind of considered them the living embodiment of ‘no thoughts, head empty’
But a new study suggests their central sensory organ is far more complex and brain-like than we realized.
It would be tempting to assume there’s nothing much of note happening on Mars, but that dusty rusty planet has a lot of interesting stuff going on.
Most of it has to do with rocks. Mars has a lot of rocks. In fact, Mars has so many rocks that have undergone all sorts of weathering over the eons that, occasionally, it manages to produce something that looks a bit like an artificial or biological structure, if you squint.
It’s a bit like monkeys and typewriters. We may not get Shakespeare, but every once in a while, we might see some rocks that look enough like bugs to fool an entomologist.
New Cornell research – co-authored by an undergraduate and two recent alumni – will help exoplanet scientists pinpoint the most likely places to look for life in the universe out of more than 6,000 exoplanets.
The paper, “ Probing the Limits of Habitability: a Catalogue of Rocky Exoplanets in the Habitable Zone,” published March 19 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Authors are Abigail Bohl ’26, Lucas Lawrence ’23, Gillis Lowry ’25 and Lisa Kaltenegger, professor of astronomy and director of the Carl Sagan Institute in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The project utilizes new data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission and the NASA Exoplanet Archive to identify planets in the habitable zone.
Microsoft Azure Monitor alerts are being abused to send callback phishing emails that impersonate warnings from the Microsoft Security Team about unauthorized charges on your account.
Azure Monitor is Microsoft’s cloud-based monitoring service that collects and analyzes data from Azure resources, applications, and infrastructure. It enables users to track performance, notify about billing changes, detect issues, and trigger alerts based on various conditions.
Over the past month, numerous people have reported receiving Azure Monitor alerts warning of suspicious charges or invoice activity on their accounts, urging them to call an enclosed phone number.
The Tycoon2FA phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform that Europol and partners disrupted on March 4 has already returned to previously observed activity levels.
Microsoft led the technical disruption, which involved seizing 330 domains part of Tycoon2FA’s backbone infrastructure that included control panels and phishing pages used in attacks.
However, the disruption caused by the law enforcement was short-lived, as CrowdStrike noticed the cybercrime service return to normal operational volumes within days.