All posts tagged: detect

Molecular add-on helps chiral perovskite semiconductors detect visible light

Molecular add-on helps chiral perovskite semiconductors detect visible light

Published by Jenni Sidey

A material built to tell left-handed light from right-handed light has long had a frustrating weakness. It mostly ignored visible light. That limitation may now be easing. A University at Buffalo-led team reports that it paired a chiral semiconductor with a non-chiral molecule that absorbs visible light more readily, producing a hybrid system that not only responds to visible wavelengths but also keeps the optical handedness that makes chiral materials unusual in the first place. The work, published in Nature Communications, centers on chiral perovskites, a class of semiconductors whose structures come in left- and right-handed forms. Those materials can respond differently to left- and right-circularly polarized light, making them attractive for polarized-light detection, optical communication systems and other optoelectronic uses. The problem is that many chiral semiconductors work best under higher-energy ultraviolet light, not the visible wavelengths used in many practical devices. “We were able to transfer the properties of chirality to a non-chiral molecule,” said Wanyi Nie, associate professor in the University at Buffalo Department of Physics and the study’s corresponding author. “The …

Vercel breach exposes the OAuth gap most security teams cannot detect, scope or contain

Vercel breach exposes the OAuth gap most security teams cannot detect, scope or contain

Published by skeptic

One employee at Vercel adopted an AI tool. One employee at that AI vendor got hit with an infostealer. That combination created a walk-in path to Vercel’s production environments through an OAuth grant that nobody had reviewed. Vercel, the cloud platform behind Next.js and its millions of weekly npm downloads, confirmed on Sunday that attackers gained unauthorized access to internal systems. Mandiant was brought in. Law enforcement was notified. Investigations remain active. An update on Monday confirmed that Vercel collaborated with GitHub, Microsoft, npm, and Socket to verify that no Vercel npm packages were compromised. Vercel also announced it is now defaulting environment variable creation to “sensitive.” Next.js, Turbopack, AI SDK, and all Vercel-published npm packages remain uncompromised after a coordinated audit with GitHub, Microsoft, npm, and Socket. Context.ai was the entry point. OX Security’s analysis found that a Vercel employee installed the Context.ai browser extension and signed into it using a corporate Google Workspace account, granting broad OAuth permissions. When Context.ai was breached, the attacker inherited that employee’s Workspace access, pivoted into Vercel environments, …

Researchers propose a broader new way to detect life beyond Earth

Researchers propose a broader new way to detect life beyond Earth

Published by Jenni Sidey

A single alien world can be misleading. A strange gas in an atmosphere might look promising, then turn out to come from ordinary chemistry. A seemingly unusual planet might only be unusual because astronomers do not yet understand it well enough. That uncertainty has long haunted the search for life beyond Earth, where one planet at a time is often treated like a possible smoking gun. Now, a research team led by Harrison B. Smith of the Earth-Life Science Institute at the Institute of Science Tokyo and Lana Sinapayen of the National Institute for Basic Biology is arguing for a different way to look. Instead of asking whether one distant planet carries a clear sign of life, they suggest scientists may eventually spot life through broader patterns spread across many planets. Their idea is built around what they call an agnostic biosignature. In plain terms, that means a way to search for life without needing a precise definition of what life is, or what chemistry it must use. In this example, life from a planet …

AI agents that automatically prevent, detect and fix software issues are here as NeuBird launches Falcon, FalconClaw

AI agents that automatically prevent, detect and fix software issues are here as NeuBird launches Falcon, FalconClaw

Published by skeptic

The mantra of the modern tech industry was arguably coined by Facebook (before it became Meta): “move fast and break things.” But as enterprise infrastructure has shifted into a dizzying maze of hybrid clouds, microservices, and ephemeral compute clusters, the “breaking” part has become a structural tax that many organizations can no longer afford to pay. Today, three-year-old startup NeuBird AI is launching a full-scale offensive against this “chaos tax,” announcing a $19.3 million funding round alongside the release of its Falcon autonomous production operations agent. The launch isn’t just a product update; it is a philosophical pivot. For years, the industry has focused on “Incident Response”—making the fire trucks faster and the hoses bigger. NeuBird is arguing that the only sustainable path forward is “Incident Avoidance”. As Venkat Ramakrishnan, President and COO of NeuBird AI, put it in a recent interview: “Incident management is so old school. Incident resolution is so old school. Incident avoidance is what is going to be enabled by AI”. By grounding AI in real-time enterprise context rather than just …

New AI blood test can help detect several brain diseases at once

New AI blood test can help detect several brain diseases at once

Published by Jenni Sidey

Memory loss can point in more than one direction. A patient may seem to fit Alzheimer’s disease, only to have signs that also resemble Parkinson’s disease or a past stroke. In many older adults, those conditions can overlap inside the brain, which helps explain why diagnosis is often messy, slow, and sometimes wrong. A new study from Lund University in Sweden suggests that a single blood sample, paired with artificial intelligence, may one day help sort out that confusion. Writing in Nature Medicine, researchers described an AI system called ProtAIDe-Dx that used blood-based protein patterns to detect several neurodegenerative conditions at the same time. The model was built from plasma proteomics data from 17,187 participants gathered across 19 sites through the Global Neurodegenerative Proteomics Consortium, or GNPC. “Our hope is to be able to accurately diagnose several diseases at once with a single blood test in the future,” said Jacob Vogel of Lund University, who led the study. The researchers have developed an AI model capable of detecting multiple neurodegenerative diseases at once. (CREDIT: iStock) …

Scientists find a new way to detect scientific breakthroughs

Scientists find a new way to detect scientific breakthroughs

Published by Jenni Sidey

Some scientific breakthroughs arrive with a bang. Others arrive twice. That odd pattern sits at the center of a new study from researchers at Binghamton University and the University of Virginia, who built a way to track when research truly changes the direction of science. Their method does more than flag famous papers. It also picks up something that often confuses older citation-based measures: major discoveries made at nearly the same time by different people. The study, published in Science Advances, comes from Sadamori Kojaku of Binghamton University, Munjung Kim, and Yong-Yeol Ahn. Together, they set out to measure what scholars often call “disruptiveness,” the degree to which a paper pulls a field away from its earlier path and pushes it somewhere new. “Science doesn’t evolve incrementally, but sometimes we see abrupt changes. Scholars are interested in when and why exactly the disruption happens,” Kojaku said. “And to do that, we need to create a metric to kind of tell scholars, ‘OK, this is the disruption happening in a given year.’” Their answer was a …

Scientists can now detect early signs of Alzheimer’s through the nose

Scientists can now detect early signs of Alzheimer’s through the nose

Published by Jenni Sidey

A thin brush reaches deep into the upper nose, where smell begins. The motion takes only minutes. What it collects may carry early signs of a disease that usually hides for years. At Duke Health, researchers have tested a nasal swab that captures living nerve and immune cells, then reads their genetic activity for clues tied to Alzheimer’s disease. The approach points to a different kind of diagnostic window, one that opens before memory loss becomes obvious. “We want to be able to confirm Alzheimer’s very early, before damage has a chance to build up in the brain,” said Bradley J. Goldstein, the study’s corresponding author. That timing matters. Brush biopsies as a practical strategy for sampling olfactory epithelium in Alzheimer’s Disease. (CREDIT: Nature) Where Early Clues Have Been Hard to Find Alzheimer’s affects millions worldwide, yet its earliest phase often slips by unnoticed. By the time symptoms appear, changes in the brain have already taken hold. Current blood tests detect markers that emerge later in the disease process, which limits their usefulness for catching …

Scientists Detect Something Bizarre in Subterranean Structures Under the Great Salt Lake

Scientists Detect Something Bizarre in Subterranean Structures Under the Great Salt Lake

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech The Great Salt Lake is harboring an unexpected secret: a huge stash of water that’s decidedly not salty. A team of researchers who x-rayed its subterranean structures discovered that lurking below its briny surface is a vast and miles-deep reservoir of freshwater. The findings, detailed in a new study in the journal Scientific Reports, upend expectations that any freshwater presence would be small and relegated to the lake’s outskirts, dumped there by nearby mountains. In reality, it appears that possibly the entire saltwater lake is undergirded by freshwater. “We were able to answer the question of how deep this potential reservoir is, and what its spatial extent is beneath the eastern lake margin.  If you know how deep, you know how wide, you know the porous space, you can calculate the potential freshwater volume,” said lead author Michael Zhdanov, a geophysicist at the University of Utah, in a statement about the work. Scientists had a sneaking suspicion that there …

New AI model can detect advanced heart failure before it’s too late

New AI model can detect advanced heart failure before it’s too late

Published by Jenni Sidey

A person with advanced heart failure can look stable at a routine clinic visit. Their vitals may not alarm anyone. Their ultrasound might appear unremarkable to a quick review. The most revealing information only surfaces during a demanding exercise test that pushes the heart close to its limits, and that test, at most hospitals, is never ordered. That diagnostic gap kills people. Advanced heart failure affects roughly 200,000 Americans and carries a one-year survival rate below 50 percent, worse than many cancers. Yet fewer than 6,000 patients per year receive advanced treatments such as heart transplants or mechanical pumps. Part of the problem is access to treatment. But the failure often begins earlier, in the clinic, when the severity of a patient’s condition simply goes unrecognized. Representative echocardiographic image used to train a machine learning model to identify patients with heart failure. (CREDIT: Dr. Zhe Huang) The Test That Most Patients Never Get The standard for assessing advanced heart failure severity is cardiopulmonary exercise testing, a procedure that measures how much oxygen the body can …

Researchers detect dry ice in a planetary nebula for the first time

Researchers detect dry ice in a planetary nebula for the first time

Published by skeptic

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers observed dry ice inside a complex planetary nebula known as NGC 6302. This is the first time dry ice has ever been observed inside a planetary nebula. Planetary nebulae (PNe) are expanding shells of gas and dust that have been ejected from a star during the process of its evolution from a main-sequence star into a red giant or white dwarf. They are relatively rare but are important for astronomers investigating the composition of the interstellar medium (ISM). Complex chemistry of a rare planetary nebula NGC 6302, dubbed the Butterfly Nebula or the Bug Nebula, is a bipolar type PN located some 3,400 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. The nebula has a radius of at least 1.5 light-years and exhibits bright east-west-oriented bipolar lobes bisected by a massive dusty torus. Previous observations of NGC 6302 have detected methyl cation (CH3+) in this nebula, a key driver of organic chemistry. Moreover, some studies have found widespread polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) emission in NGC 6302. These two findings …