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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/malicious-packages-using-invisible-unicode-found-in-151-github-repos-and-vs-code

Aikido suggests that the 151 repos identified are likely a fraction of the total, since many had already been deleted before the research was published. Among the notable targets are repositories from Wasmer, Reworm, and anomalyco, the organization behind OpenCode and SST. The same decoder pattern also appeared in at least two npm packages and one VS Code extension uploaded on March 12.

Unfortunately, this most recent Glassworm campaign is harder to counter than previous iterations due to the sophistication of the malicious injections. Instead of showing up as obviously suspicious commits, they’re taking the form of version bumps and small refactors that are “stylistically consistent with each target project.” Aikido says it suspects the attackers are using large language models to generate this cover, since manually creating 151 bespoke code changes across different codebases wouldn’t be feasible otherwise.

Glassworm has been active since at least March 2025, when Aikido first found the invisible Unicode technique in malicious npm packages. By October, the same actor had moved into the Open VSX extension registry and GitHub repositories. An earlier investigation by Koi Security found the group used stolen npm, GitHub, and Git credentials to propagate the worm further, with decoded payloads deploying hidden VNC servers and SOCKS proxies for remote access. The Solana-based infrastructure makes takedown difficult, since blockchain transactions cannot be modified or deleted.

Aikido recommends scrutinizing package names and dependencies before incorporating them into projects, and using automated tooling that scans specifically for invisible Unicode characters, since visual code review doesn’t protect this class of injection.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Researchers played music to cells – aggressiveness of laryngeal cancer decreased:

The continuous movement of the vocal cords weakens and eventually stops as laryngeal cancer progresses. Researchers have, for the first time, discovered that restoring cellular vibration reduces the aggressiveness of advanced vocal cord cancer. When cancer cells were exposed to sound-wave vibration, a protein that promotes cancer growth and severity decreased.

"What music should we play to our cells?" This question sparked a groundbreaking study on laryngeal cancer that revealed a previously unknown sensitivity of this cancer type to a targeted drug currently under development.

Laryngeal cancer is one of the most common malignant tumours of the head and neck region. The most common early symptom is hoarseness, as the cancer typically appears in the vocal cords, and their movement gradually becomes impaired as the disease develops. Movement decreases because the vocal cord tissue stiffens and the cancer invades surrounding tissue.

[...] Researchers have long known that increased tissue stiffness promotes cancer malignancy in non-moving tissues such as breast, liver, and pancreatic cancers, because cells sense and respond to the physical properties of their environment. The sensitivity of cells to external forces led researchers to take an interest in laryngeal cancer, which develops in constantly moving tissue.

"We wondered whether 'movement could be medicine' and whether tissue stiffening and immobilisation contribute to cancer development," says Academy Professor Johanna Ivaska, Director of the BarrierForce Centre of Excellence funded by the Research Council of Finland.

"We developed this idea together with BarrierForce Vice Director Professor Sara Wickström and her research group. With their help, we used a bioreactor in which cells were grown on a vibrating membrane placed on top of a loudspeaker," explains Ivaska.

[...] The researchers' predictions proved correct: exposing cancer cells to vibration-mimicking vocal cord movement reduced their malignancy. One of the observed changes was a decrease in a protein called YAP in the cells.

Jasmin Kaivola notes that the study is entirely groundbreaking because the biomechanics of developing cancers have not previously been studied in moving tissues. She says it would be interesting to investigate whether the mechanism they identified has prognostic value in other cancers of moving tissues, such as lung cancer.

"We are excited about the results and believe that our findings may encourage developers of these drugs to explore their suitability for this difficult-to-treat cancer with a poor prognosis," says Kaivola.

Journal Reference: Kaivola, J., Punovuori, K., Chastney, M.R. et al. Restoring the tumour mechanophenotype of vocal fold cancer reverts its malignant properties. Nat. Mater. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-025-02473-7

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

On Saturday, March 21? What about a cheeseburger?

Elon Musk spent quite some time last fall complaining that existing foundries cannot meet his company's demand for high-performance AI processors and proposed an idea to build his own chipmaking venture. Apparently, this was not just a brag but rather an announcement of a long-term project. Now the project has gotten its launch date: March 21, 2026.

"Terafab Project launches in 7 days," Elon Musk wrote in an X post.

Speaking in an interview with Moonshots, Elon Musk argued that the semiconductor industry may be approaching cleanroom design incorrectly. Instead of keeping entire buildings ultra-clean, Musk suggested that fabs should focus on isolating silicon wafers themselves throughout the manufacturing flow, keeping them sealed from the surrounding environment at all times. He surmised that would allow him to eat cheesburgers in the cleanroom while chips were being made.

Rebuilding the whole supply chain for such fabs would take the industry a couple of decades, to say the least. For this, Musk argued that his planning horizon is closer to one to two years, and he rarely looks beyond three years, which makes the traditional semiconductor buildout cycle incompatible with his projected demand.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Almost 100 people were arrested, and thousands of servers taken down in a multi-month, international law enforcement operation, Interpol announced.

In a press release shared late last week, the international police force said that it coordinated Operation Synergia III, which started in mid-July last year, and concluded in late January this year. During that time, police forces from 72 countries raided key locations, seized electronic devices, and arrested people.

In total, 94 people were arrested, with another 110 individuals “under investigation”. More than 45,000 malicious IP addresses and servers were taken down, and 212 electronic devices were seized.

“Cybercrime in 2026 is more sophisticated and destructive than ever before, but Operation Synergia III stands as a powerful testament to what global cooperation can achieve. INTERPOL remains at the forefront of this fight, uniting law enforcement agencies and private sector experts to dismantle criminal networks, disrupt emerging threats and protect victims around the world,” commented Neal Jetton, INTERPOL’s Director of the Cybercrime Directorate.

[...] It’s been a tough couple of weeks for cybercriminals, as Tycoon 2FA, one of the largest phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platforms in the world, was also taken down after a global coordinated law enforcement operation. This operation was led by Europol, and included police forces from Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

It successfully dismantled a phishing operation that was active since at least August 2023, and enabled thousands of cybercriminals to access email and cloud-based service accounts.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

If you can't make the chips and you can't run the turbines, you can't run an industry:

With the Strait of Hormuz effectively blockaded as part of the ongoing U.S.-Iran war, a number of shortages beyond gasoline are brewing: Helium, aluminum, and liquid natural gas (LNG) are all in increasingly short supply. This bottleneck could hit a wide range of industries, including chip manufacturing and data centers, as they are key components of day-to-day operation.

And with Iran now confirmed to have released sea mines into the Strait, its closure looks set to continue for a few more weeks, posing a grave threat to many global industries and the global economy in turn.

But the Strait isn't just a transit route for oil tankers; some 11% of global seaborne trade by volume passes through it each year. Ships that transit the waterway are responsible for 20% of the global LNG market - the same gas that powers much of the world's energy infrastructure.

The Middle East is one of the world's largest exporters of refined aluminum, importing the unwrought material before processing and shipping it out. The Middle East is responsible for around 9% of global aluminum smelting capacity, states Reuters. And some regional suppliers have announced incoming shortages. Others have simply shut down refineries while the conflict is ongoing, but they will be hard to start back up again.

canopic jug writes:

Over 15 years ago software engineer, Vincent Driessen, had published a mighty fine, illustrated explanation of Git branching only to find that recently Microsoft used its AI to not just plagiarize it but misrepresent it.

In 2010, I wrote A successful Git branching model and created a diagram to go with it. I designed that diagram in Apple Keynote, at the time obsessing over the colors, the curves, and the layout until it clearly communicated how branches relate to each other over time. I also published the source file so others could build on it. That diagram has since spread everywhere: in books, talks, blog posts, team wikis, and YouTube videos. I never minded. That was the whole point: sharing knowledge and letting the internet take it by storm!

What I did not expect was for Microsoft, a trillion-dollar company, some 15+ years later, to apparently run it through an AI image generator and publish the result on their official Learn portal, without any credit or link back to the original.

The AI rip-off was not just ugly. It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy. The carefully crafted visual language and layout of the original, the branch colors, the lane design, the dot and bubble alignment that made the original so readable—all of it had been muddled into a laughable form. Proper AI slop.

Previously:
(2025) The Drunken Plagiarists: Working with Co-pilots
(2024) Blocking AI Bots From Microsoft, Others Has Been "Pain in the a**": Reddit CEO

Original Submission

jelizondo writes:

Futura reports the first observation of a phenomenon predicted by Einstein over a 100 years ago:

The event, catalogued as AT2020afhd, is what astronomers call a tidal disruption event. As the star approached the supermassive black hole, gravitational forces stretched and tore it apart. Its debris spiraled inward, forming a rapidly spinning disk of superheated gas. From that disk, jets of matter launched outward at nearly the speed of light.

As researchers tracked the event in X-ray and radio, they noticed something unexpected. The disk and the jet were wobbling in unison, completing a full cycle every 19.6 days. That synchronized motion pointed to a single cause: the black hole itself was dragging spacetime around with it as it spun, pulling the entire disk-and-jet system into a slow, rhythmic precession.

The phenomenon has a name: Lense-Thirring precession, or frame dragging. Einstein laid the theoretical groundwork in 1913. Physicists Josef Lense and Hans Thirring put it into mathematical form in 1918. Until now, no one had observed it so directly around a black hole.

The study, published December 10, 2025 in Science Advances, was led by Yanan Wang and colleagues at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with support from a multinational team including Cardiff University. To detect the precession, researchers combined data from NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, cross-referencing X-ray and radio observations over several months.

Dr. Cosimo Inserra, Reader in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University and one of the paper's co-authors, described the detection plainly. A spinning black hole drags spacetime along with it the way a spinning top stirs water in a whirlpool. When incoming gas orbits at a tilt, the inner disk wobbles. Any jet anchored to that disk wobbles with it.

[...] Prior tidal disruption events showed steady radio signals. AT2020afhd did not. Its short term radio variability couldn't be attributed to the energy output of the black hole or its surrounding components, which, Inserra noted, further confirms the dragging effect and offers a new observational tool for studying similar events in the future.

Black holes have been studied through their effects on light, gas, and nearby stars for decades. AT2020afhd doesn't just add another data point to that record, it makes the mechanics of spacetime distortion directly measurable for the first time.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/03/100-years-later-where-is-robert-goddards-first-liquid-fuel-rocket/

It flew for only two seconds, but its impact is still felt a century later.

Robert Goddard's first liquid-fueled rocket, which lifted off from a snowy field on March 16, 1926, has been written about extensively. Earlier solid-fueled rockets existed, but liquid-fueled rockets promised the sustainability and control needed to send spacecraft and humans into Earth orbit and beyond.

"The rocket's reach was short, but it marked the moment that humanity entered a new era," said Kevin Schindler, author of "Robert Goddard's Massachusetts,"
[...]
Photos from that day exist through the efforts of Goddard's wife, as does a monument stand from where the rocket, nicknamed "Nell," left the ground (today, located on a golf course). Over the decades, replicas of Nell have been built, even ones capable of flight. But a century later, a question about the rocket remains.

Where is it now?
[...]
Goddard wrote in his notebook that the rocket "rose 41 feet & went 184 feet, in 2.5 secs." The next day, he added, "Even though the release was pulled, the rocket did not rise at first, but the flame came out, and there was a steady roar. After a number of seconds it rose, slowly until it cleared the frame, and then at express train speed, curving over to the left, and striking the ice and snow, still going at a rapid rate."

"It looked almost magical as it rose, without any appreciably greater noise or flame, as if it said, 'I've been here long enough; I think I'll be going somewhere else, if you don't mind,'" he wrote.
[...]
Esther took a photograph of her husband standing with the recovered parts. She also posed for a similar photo, together with Sachs and Roope. In his notebook, Goddard wrote that they brought the rocket's remains back to his laboratory.

By all accounts, Goddard did not try to reassemble Nell, nor did he treat the pieces as historic artifacts.

"He didn't preserve it as a sacred object," wrote Michael Neufeld, who retired as a senior curator for the space history division of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, in an email. "He didn't have a lot of money at that point and reused everything."
[...]
The National Air and Space Museum's collection catalog describes the Goddard May 1926 rocket as "likely includ[ing] the nozzle" recovered from Nell.

"I gather the nozzle assertion is based on his notes. I haven't seen them myself," said Neufeld. "More may be on the May 1926 rocket, which we can't prove."

Goddard's notebook is held at the Robert H. Goddard Library at Clark University today. In his March 16, 1926, entry, Goddard recorded that "the lower half of the nozzle burned off." Photos taken prior to Nell's launch show a longer nozzle than what is installed on the May rocket, perhaps supporting its suggested reuse.
[...]
As referenced by both Winter and Brooks, W.S. Crane researched and published a catalog for the museum's Goddard holdings in 1994. The chamber is attributed to coming from Clark University and the nozzle fragments are described as a gift from Esther Goddard. The source of the nose cone is unknown.

The museum also has the rod, rollers, and wire that were used to ignite Nell. "Pulling the wire opened a hole in the bottom of the liquid oxygen tank, where the oxygen dripped onto a heated surface," Crane wrote, adding that the assembly was also a gift from Mrs. Goddard.

"We are a few years out from a full recovery," wrote Brooks in an email, "The Goddard collection will return in a contemporary and updated presentation (compared to the original exhibit, which dated back to 1959) when the museum reopens."
[...]
"Apart from its historic significance, this rocket became a minor source of embarrassment for Dr. Goddard, since the illogical position of the combustion chamber at the top is evidence that he had failed to consider some very basic physics in his design," wrote Crane. "This is a great example of the role of common sense and intuition in pioneering engineering, and one of the very few times that Dr. Goddard's failed him."

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/the-science-of-how-fireflies-stay-in-sync/

Scientists have discovered that male fireflies in a South Carolina swamp follow local interaction rules to synchronize their flashing mating displays. The research is being presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver. (A preprint is also available on the biorxiv.)
[...]
As previously reported, research into swarming and flocking was largely relegated to observational biologists for decades. But in the 1980s, a computer graphics specialist named Craig Reynolds developed the so-called "boids" program, an agent-based computational model that has dominated collective behavior studies ever since.
[...]
As for fireflies, we already know quite a bit about how they emit light. We know the enzyme they use to make light (called luciferase), as well as the chemicals they use in the light-generating reaction.
[...]
Orit Peleg of the University of Colorado at Boulder has been fascinated for several years by how fireflies synchronize their flashes. Prior research involved field work in Great Smoky Mountains National Park to monitor thousands of male fireflies known for their fleeting flashes of mating displays (Photinus carolinus).
[...]
Peleg's lab has since built on that earlier research. The latest findings are the result of field work conducted each May for four years (2021–2025) at Congaree National Park in South Carolina. Once again, they pitched a pop-up tent isolated from external light sources. Then they exposed captured fireflies to a dim LED light that mimicked a firefly flash, blinking between once every second to once every 300 milliseconds.

The results: The fireflies were most likely to change their own flashing rhythm in response when the LED blinked almost, but not quite, at the same time as the fireflies.
[...]
"For a whole season, I spent pretty much every night in the dark watching lights blink at a fixed frequency," former graduate student (and co-author on the preprint) Owen Martin said of the field observations. "Then, occasionally, I'd get this magical experience where I'd see the firefly just start syncing with the light. I would wonder if I was just seeing things." But the ensuing mathematical analysis confirmed the patterns

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Software engineer, Blain Smith, was written an essay discussing the role of a well-rounded education has had in creating the ICT ecosystem we have today. In it he describes quite a few luminaries, although he did miss Perl's creator, linguist Larry Wall. He is highly relevant because, for a couple of decades, Perl was the glue that held the Internet together which enabled the explosive growth from the mid-90s through the mid-00s.

The founders of your field read philosophy and wrote essays and studied classical languages and asked questions about consciousness and beauty and the nature of human thought. They did not do these things because they had spare time or because someone made them. They did them because they understood, implicitly or explicitly, that building machines worthy of human trust requires understanding what it means to be human.

That understanding is not going to come from another tutorial, another side project, or another Hacker News thread. It is going to come from the long, slow, sometimes difficult work of engaging with the humanities. Read philosophy. Read literature. Read history. Study how humans have thought about ethics, about power, about communication, about what it means to build something that lasts. Sit with those ideas long enough to let them reshape how you approach your own work.

The tradition that produced Lovelace's poetical science and Hoare's classical mind and Dijkstra's handwritten essays and Hopper's insistence that computers must speak to people is not dead. But it is diminishing, generation by generation, as the field grows further from its roots. You have the opportunity to reverse that. Not by going back to school, necessarily, but by taking the humanities seriously enough to let them into your professional life, your design decisions, your code reviews, your conversations with the people who will use what you build.

The machines we build reflect the minds that build them. If those minds are nourished only by technical knowledge, the machines will be technically competent and humanistically hollow. If those minds are broad, curious, and grounded in the long tradition of human thought, the machines will be something better. They will be worthy of the people who depend on them.

The choice, as it has always been, is yours.

That raises the question if a well-rounded education is even possible on either side of the pond these days given the radical changes in recent decades to tertiary education and the institutions formerly tasked with delivering advanced studies.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Chimps' love for crystals could help us understand our own ancestors' fascination with these stones:

For hundreds of thousands of years, our hominin ancestors collected crystals. Something about these stones made them desirable, even when they weren't used for anything. But then why collect them at all? To learn more about the roots of this fascination, scientists in Spain ran experiments with individuals from the species most closely related genetically to hominins and humans: chimpanzees. Chimps were drawn to crystals' transparency and shape and could quickly distinguish them from normal rocks. These findings could show why objects with crystal-like properties have intrigued our ancestors for almost 800,000 years – and continue to pique our interest today.

Crystals have repeatedly been found at archaeological sites alongside Homo remains. Evidence shows hominins have been collecting these stones for as long as 780,000 years. Yet, we know that our ancestors did not use them as weapons, tools, or even jewelry. So why did they collect them at all?

Now, in a new Frontiers in Psychology study, scientists in Spain investigated which characteristics of crystals may have made them so fascinating to our ancestors. They designed experiments with chimpanzees – one of the two great ape species most closely related to modern humans – to identify the physical properties of crystals that may have attracted early hominins.

"We show that enculturated chimpanzees can distinguish crystals from other stones," said lead author Prof Juan Manuel García-Ruiz, an Ikerbasque Research Professor on crystallography at the Donostia International Physics Center in San Sebastián. "We were pleasantly surprised by how strong and seemingly natural the chimpanzees' attraction to crystals was. This suggests that sensitivity to such objects may have deep evolutionary roots."

[...] In the first experiment, a large crystal – the monolith – was placed on a platform, along with a normal rock of similar size. While initially both objects caught the chimps' attention, soon the crystal was preferred and the rock disregarded. Once they had removed it from the platform, all chimps inspected the crystal, rotating and tilting it so they could view it from specific angles. Yvan then picked up the crystal and decisively carried it to the dormitories.

Interest was strongest early after exposure and declined very gradually over time, the team observed. The same pattern is found in humans as the novelty of an objects fades. When caretakers tried to retrieve the crystal from the chimps' enclosure, they had to exchange it for favored snacks: bananas and yogurt.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is back on the broadcast media’s throat. This time, he is unhappy with the way broadcasters have been covering the war with Iran.

In an X post on Saturday, Carr quote-tweeted a Truth Social post by President Trump in which the president claimed that news coverage of the Iran war was “terrible” and “intentionally misleading” and accused traditional media organizations of actually wanting the U.S. to lose the war. In his own post, Carr threatened to revoke licenses if coverage doesn’t change in a way the Trump administration would approve of.

“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions – also known as the fake news – have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr wrote. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”

Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey called for the FCC Chairman to resign over the missive.

“Your Saturday post is not an aberration. It is the latest and most dangerous step in a sustained campaign to use the FCC’s licensing authority as a weapon against broadcasters and journalists whose coverage displeases the Trump administration,” Sen. Markey wrote in a letter on Sunday. “The FCC’s credibility depends on its willingness to exercise its authority on the merits, not at the direction of the President, and not as an instrument of retribution against journalism. You have once again shown that you are unwilling to maintain that independence and uphold your sworn oath to defend the U.S. Constitution, and I once again call on you to resign.”

Under Carr’s leadership, the FCC’s tight grip on broadcast media has been the source of controversy. Back in September, ABC briefly suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night TV show after his comments about the late MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk angered Trump’s fan base. Following Kimmel’s segment, Carr appeared on a podcast episode to vow revenge, saying he would ask TV stations to remove Kimmel from the air.

Trump praised Carr’s actions at the time, saying that the shows that often criticize him should “maybe” have their license taken away, but ultimately the decision was up to Brendan Carr, whom he deemed “outstanding,” “a tough guy,” and “a patriot.”

More recently, Stephen Colbert said that his network, CBS, forced him to cancel an appearance by Democratic Texas Rep. James Talarico, who is up for a Senate election later this year, in anticipation of FCC pushback.

Carr is not the sole high-ranking U.S. official to pledge attacks on the media. On Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth complained about CNN’s coverage of the Iran war and said he was looking forward to Paramount Skydance owner and Trump ally David Ellison taking over the network.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/03/woman-sneezes-out-maggots-after-fly-larvae-get-trapped-in-her-deviated-septum/

A 58-year-old woman in Greece appears to hold the record for growing a parasitic sheep bot fly in her nose the longest, almost creating a snot rocket that could literally fly.

Usually, when the sheep bot fly accidentally nosedives into a human's schnoz, the first-stage larvae they deliver don't actually develop.
[...]
For a long time, experts thought that the flies couldn't complete their development in humans beyond the first larval stage. But a few human cases have been reported in recent decades involving the second- and third-stage larvae. The woman's case, reported in the Journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases by a medical entomologist and colleagues, goes the furthest yet, finding pupa and a puparium—the hard casing of a pupa—in the woman's nose.
[...]
On a hot and dry September day, she recalled a swarm of flies bombarding her face. About a week later, she had facial pain and then developed a cough over the next two to three weeks. Those were her only symptoms until October 15, when she sneezed and reported that "worms" came out of her nose. They were, in fact, late-stage sheep bot fly larvae.

She had surgery to remove the mucus munchers, which recovered 10 larvae at various stages and a pupa.
[...]
"From a purely anatomic perspective, we hypothesize that the combination of high larval numbers and septum deviation impeded normal egress from the nasal passages, permitting progression to the [third larval stage] and, in 1 instance, pupation," they wrote. In other words, there were so many maggots in her crooked nasal passage that they created a bottleneck on their way out, allowing some to stay longer than usual.
[...]
The experts note that, in a way, the woman was lucky. In animals, the third-stage larvae can't pupate when they become trapped in the sinuses. Instead, they either dry out, liquify, or calcify, which can all lead to secondary bacterial infections.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Researchers have used brain imaging to show how memories can be reactivated in the brain without them reaching conscious awareness, showing that these memories persist even when we think they have been forgotten:

Scientists from the University of Nottingham's School of Psychology used Magnetoencephalography (MEG) to show how our brains reactivate memories even when we can't recall them, suggesting that the brain remembers even if we don't. The results have been published in Journal of Neuroscience.

Neural oscillations are rhythmic electrical activity in the brain often referred to as brain waves. These are essential for encoding, storing, and retrieving memories by synchronizing neural populations. Oscillations specifically facilitate memory formation, spatial navigation, and episodic memory binding in the hippocampus, while alpha and beta bands are often linked to cortical processing during long-term memory tasks.

[...] The results showed that while the brain reactivated memories regardless of whether they were consciously recalled, the reactivated memory signal fluctuated more rhythmically in the alpha band when the memory was successfully recalled, as though this rhythmic pattern helped the memory signal to be heard over all the background neural noise that otherwise might mask it.

Dr Benjamin Griffiths from the School of Psychology led this study and explains: "What we showed is that even when the brain can reactivate the right memory, it doesn't guarantee you'll become aware of it. Instead, what seems to matter is that the memory rhythmically pulses so that it can be detected above and beyond other neural activity. If you think about a football ground, if everyone is chatting you can't hear what is being said but if everyone starts singing the same song you can hear it clearly, we speculate that a similar idea is involved in the brain's recall of memories."

The researchers also found a decrease in total sensory neocortical alpha power accompanies this memory rhythm, Ben explains: "This finding can be likened to the general background noise in the stadium dropping. When the overall chatter dies down, even a modest chant from the fans becomes easier to hear."

These findings may have real implications for conditions like dementia. Current treatments often assume that when someone can't remember, the memory itself is gone. But if memories are being reactivated in the brain and simply failing to reach consciousness, it suggests we might need a different approach — one focused not on rebuilding lost memories, but on helping existing ones break through into awareness.
Dr Benjamin Griffiths, School of Psychology

Journal Reference: Benjamin J. Griffiths, Journal of Neuroscience 4 March 2026, e1487252026; https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1487-25.2026

Original Submission

hubie writes:

New UBC research shows apocalyptic thinking is widespread and shapes how people respond to global threats:

In an era of climate anxiety, geopolitical tensions and rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, apocalyptic thinking is no longer confined to the fringes of society, according to new research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

"Belief in the end of the world is surprisingly common across North America, and it's significantly influencing how people interpret and respond to the most pressing threats facing humanity," said Dr. Matthew I. Billet, the study's lead author who conducted the research as a PhD candidate in UBC's psychology department. He is now a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Irvine.

[...] "Different narratives people believe about the end of the world can lead to very different responses to societal issues," said Dr. Billet. "Someone who believes humans are causing the apocalypse through climate change will respond very differently to environmental policy than someone who believes the end times are controlled by divine prophecy."

The research revealed differences across religious denominations.

"Everyone agrees on one thing: We humans play an important role in the fate of our species," said Dr. Billet. "This was as true for the religious as it was for the non-religious. However, there were also differences between religious denominations that were quite stark. These differences point to how religion—and culture more broadly—can shape how we fundamentally view the world and our collective future."

The study's most significant finding may be how such beliefs translate into action, or inaction.

[...] Those who believed the end is near and that humans are causing it perceived greater risk and supported more extreme action to address threats. However, those who believed divine forces control the apocalypse were less likely to support preventive measures.