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Man admits to locking thousands of Windows devices in extortion plot

A former core infrastructure engineer has pleaded guilty to locking Windows admins out of 254 servers as part of a failed extortion plot targeting his employer, an industrial company headquartered in Somerset County, New Jersey.

According to court documents, 57-year-old Daniel Rhyne from Kansas City, Missouri, remotely accessed the company’s network without authorization using an administrator account between November 9 and November 25.

Throughout this time, he allegedly scheduled tasks on the company’s Windows domain controller to delete network admin accounts and to change the passwords for 13 domain admin accounts and 301 domain user accounts to “TheFr0zenCrew!”

Study suggests people are losing 338 spoken words every year and have been for at least 15 years

In a society increasingly shaped by self-checkouts, GPS navigation and touchscreen ordering kiosks, new research shows face-to-face conversation may be quietly fading. A new study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science suggests that people are losing 338 spoken words every year and have been for at least a decade and a half.

Matthias Mehl, a psychology professor at the University of Arizona, has spent his career studying how people communicate in everyday life. When he set out to replicate his landmark 2007 Science paper on gender differences in talkativeness, the results pointed to something he hadn’t gone looking for: a steady, years-long decline in how much people speak each day.

For this study, Mehl collaborated with Valeria Pfeifer, an assistant professor of psychology and counseling at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and the study’s first author. Mehl spoke with the University of Arizona News about the accidental discovery, what it means for social connection, and why losing a few hundred words per day each year matters more than it seems.

Body-wide multi-omic counteraction of aging with GLP-1R agonism

Online now: Body-wide multi-omic counteraction of aging with GLP-1R agonism: (Cell Metabolism 37, 2362–2380.e1–e8; December 2, 2025)

Online now: (Cell Metabolism 37, 2362–2380.e1–e8; December 2, 2025)

Following publication, Steve Horvath and colleagues at the Clock Foundation alerted us to a platemap error in the DNA methylation (DNAm) data. Our investigation pinpointed the potential source of this error. We provided samples on 96-well plates in a row-wise orientation instead of the column-wise orientation specified in the Clock Foundation’s protocol. Subsequently, incorrect assignment of metadata for 36 samples (out of 459) that contributed data to the paper likely occurred during the transposition and rearrangement of a subset of samples on two incompletely filled plates prior to the assay. Working with Clock Foundation colleagues, we have corrected the metadata for 33 samples and discarded 3 samples for which we could not retrieve the metadata with total certainty.

This error impacted DNAm data for the following tissues:

High-throughput platform helps engineer fast-acting covalent protein drugs

A team led by principal investigators Bobo Dang and Ting Zhou at Westlake University/Westlake Laboratory have developed a high-throughput platform for engineering fast-acting covalent protein therapeutics. Their study, titled “A high-throughput selection system for fast-acting covalent protein drugs” published in Science, opens new avenues for next-generation biologics.

Covalent small-molecule drugs have shown great success in cancer therapy by forming irreversible bonds with their targets. This has inspired efforts to extend covalent strategies to protein therapeutics, especially engineered miniproteins. However, their development is limited by a kinetic mismatch: Miniproteins are rapidly cleared in vivo, whereas covalent bond formation is typically slow. In addition, high-throughput platforms for systematically optimizing covalent protein reactivity have been lacking.

To address this challenge, the researchers proposed that precise spatial positioning of chemical warheads within protein scaffolds could enable molecular preorganization, thereby accelerating covalent bond formation without increasing intrinsic reactivity.

Abstract: Genetic analysis of neurodegenerative diseases:

As part of the JCI’s Review Series on Neurodegeneration, Sonja W. Scholz and colleagues highlight key genomic technologies advancing diagnosis and research in neurodegeneration.

1Neurodegenerative Diseases Research Section, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke;

2Neurogenetics Branch, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; and.

3Neuromuscular Diseases Research Section, National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, Maryland, USA.

Exposing secret night operations between hawkmoths and Japan’s black-nectar flowers

Researchers Soma Chiyoda, Ko Mochizuki, and Atsushi Kawakita from the University of Tokyo have discovered that nocturnal hawkmoths are the main pollinators of Jasminanthes mucronata, a plant species native to Japan that produces black nectar. This is the first time that a colored nectar flower has been confirmed to be mainly pollinated by nocturnal insects. The discovery thus promotes further research into this so far unexplored ecology. The findings were published in the journal Ecology.

In ancient Greek mythology, nectar was the drink of the gods, the key to their immortality. Real-life nectar might not confer immortality to its consumers, but it certainly helps many a creature stay alive by providing them with rich nutrition. The creatures feeding on these plants then unwittingly carry their pollen across the landscape. To draw a map of this complex web of co-existence, we must discern whether species interact with one another.

As nectar is generally transparent, flowers that produce colored nectar have garnered particular attention in the research community. However, due to the visual nature of colored nectar, researchers have focused mostly on daytime animals as potential pollinators.

Jack Dorsey: Every Company Can Now Be a Mini-AGI

Jack Dorsey (Block CEO) and Roelof Botha (Sequoia partner and Block board member) on Rewriting the CEO playbook for the AI era.

• Manager mode = Pyramid (command & control)

• Founder mode = Flat (founders decide fast)

• Dorsey mode = Circle w/ AI at the center, humans at the edge, and decisions flow from customer inputs → AI → humans steering it.

00:00 Existential Dread & Hope.

02:56 AI Replaces Hierarchy.

Continue reading “Jack Dorsey: Every Company Can Now Be a Mini-AGI” | >

No battery needed: Single organic device can act as both indoor solar cell and photodetector

Next-generation optoelectronic systems (devices that convert light to electrical energy) leverage organic semiconductor-based indoor energy-autonomous architectures for cutting-edge applications. Notably, organic semiconductors possess mechanical flexibility, solution processability, and bandgap-tunable optoelectronic properties, making them highly lucrative for indoor power generation via organic photovoltaics (OPVs), as well as for spectrally selective photodetection through organic photodetectors (OPDs). Unfortunately, technological progress made in the fields of OPVs and OPDs has largely been separate, necessitating further research for the development of bifunctional OPV-OPD systems for concurrent energy harvesting and photodetection.

Additionally, the potential self-powered operation of such systems is restricted by conflicting charge transport kinetics, especially in the electron and hole transport layers (ETLs and HTLs, respectively). This limitation impacts device durability and stability and increases fabrication costs, making it indispensable to find new HTL materials such as poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene), 2-(9H-carbazol-9-yl)ethyl]phosphonic acid self-assembled monolayer, MoOx, NiOx, and V2O5, beyond conventional options.

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