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Powering off your phone regularly, disabling Bluetooth when it's not needed, and using only trusted accessories are just some of the NSA's security recommendations.

That pricey and precious smartphone you carry with you can be hit by a host of security threats, from phishing to malware to spyware. All it takes is one successful attack to clobber your phone and compromise your data and even steal your identity. So, how do you protect yourself?

In a Mobile Device Best Practices report, the NSA serves up a variety of tips designed to thwart hackers and attackers from assaulting your mobile device. One method is as simple as turning your phone off and on.

Spearphishing attacks can target your phone to install malware, while zero-click exploits are able to infect your device without any interaction on your part. The NSA's advice? Power your phone off and then back on again at least once a week. This simple action can make it more difficult for hackers to steal information from your phone, though the agency cautions that this will not always prevent an attack.

In its report, the NSA cited several other threats that can impact your mobile device.

China’s Chang’e-6 lunar lander successfully touched down on the far side of the moon Sunday morning Beijing time, in a significant step for the ambitious mission that could advance the country’s aspirations of putting astronauts on the moon.

The Chang’e-6 probe landed in the South Pole-Aitken Basin, where it will begin to collect samples from the lunar surface, the China National Space Administration announced.

China’s most complex robotic lunar endeavor to date, the uncrewed mission aims to return samples to Earth from the moon’s far side for the first time.

The landing marks the second time a mission has successfully reached the far side of the moon. China first completed that historic feat in 2019 with its Chang’e-4 probe.

Minecraft is 15 years old, so it’s only natural that Lego should honor the anniversary with a set just for the game’s many adult fans. The company has started taking preorders for The Crafting Table, a 1,195-piece 18-and-up build, as Jay’s Brick Blog writes. The set will cost $89.99 in the US when it’s released on August 1st.

Lego says the set will include “familiar biomes, favorite mobs and hidden Easter eggs.” As the name suggests, the kit looks like an in-game crafting table. But inside of it is a Minecraft diorama featuring 12 biomes including Plains (with a village), Taiga (with a dripstone cave), and Cherry Grove (with an abandoned mineshaft).

It also has eight microfigures; among them are Steve, Alex, a skeleton, a Creeper, and a pig. And it incorporates five mini-builds and stickers that feature phrases from the game. The whole kit, once built, will measure 5.5 inches x 6 inches x 6 inches.

GARDI SUGDUB, Panama (AP) — On a tiny island off Panama’s Caribbean coast, about 300 families are packing their belongings in preparation for a dramatic change. Generations of Gunas who have grown up on Gardi Sugdub in a life dedicated to the sea and tourism will trade that next week for the mainland’s solid ground.

They go voluntarily — sort of.

The Gunas of Gardi Sugdub are the first of 63 communities along Panama’s Caribbean and Pacific coasts that government officials and scientists expect to be forced to relocate by rising sea levels in the coming decades.

On a recent day, the island’s Indigenous residents rowed or sputtered off with outboard motors to fish. Children, some in uniforms and others in the colorful local textiles called “molas,” chattered as they hustled through the warren of narrow dirt streets on their way to school.

A fifth grade teacher in Massachusetts has been placed on paid leave after a series of incidents including holding a mock slave auction, using a racial slur, and calling out the student who reported the slur

A fifth-grade teacher in Massachusetts has been placed on paid leave after a series of incidents including holding a mock slave auction, using a racial slur, and calling out the student who reported the slur, a school official said.

Officials did not name the teacher at the Margaret A. Neary Elementary School in Southborough, a town about 30 miles (48 kilometers) west of Boston.

District Superintendent Gregory Martineau told parents in a statement this week that he first learned about the incidents from parents in April.

He said the first incident — a mock slave auction — took place in January during a history lesson on the economy of the Southern colonies.

A global shortage of oranges that sent prices soaring has prompted some orange juice manufacturers to consider turning to alternative fruits to make the breakfast staple.

Global prices for oranges hit $3.68 per pound in April, up about 33% from the $2.76 figure recorded one year ago, according to International Monetary Fund data. That also marks a stunning 210% increase from January 2021, shortly before the inflation crisis began.

"There are three main factors driving the soaring price of orange juice, and it's drought, disease and demand," Ted Jenkin, oXYGen Financial CEO and co-founder, told FOX Business.

The spike stems from declining output in Florida, which is the primary U.S. producer, and disease and extreme weather events in Brazil, which accounts for about 70% of global production.

Orange trees in Brazil have been suffering from a disease known as citrus greening. Once infected, citrus trees produce fruits that are partially green, small, misshapen and bitter. There is no cure, and trees typically die within a few years of infection.

The game’s latest major order introduced a mission so overwhelming it needs to be nerfed

Once upon a time, Helldivers 2 was everyone’s favorite game. Players were overjoyed to cosplay as satirized fascists, and the promise of an evolving galactic war story enthralled the masses. Nowadays though, it seems like Helldivers 2’s own community is getting increasingly sick of it and the developer behind it. Just look at the reception to the latest major order, which has proven far too hard to be enjoyable.

Helldivers 2’s current major order introduces a new mission to deploy “dark fluid” on the planet of Meridia. It’s intended to be used to destroy the intense number of Terminids that are there. During the mission, players are supposed to defend drill sites from incoming waves of bugs (which is nothing new), but people are finding it exceptionally hard to do, because the bugs have been spawning in overwhelming numbers right on top of the drill sites.

The physics of matter creation in a black hole has been mimicked in an experiment with graphene superlattices. The experiment verifies the long-standing prediction of using the electric field to generate electron-positronic waves from the quantum vacuum.


In their upcoming paper Origin of Mass and the Nature of Gravity, physicists Nassim Haramein, Olivier Alirol, and Cyprien Guermonprez describe how the substantive and energetic nature of the quantum vacuum generate mass and confinement forces that at the microscale results in stable hadrons like the proton. Here, we see directly from experiment how the coherent collective modes of zero-point energy of the vacuum result in observable matter waves, as a hot electron-hole plasma in graphene superlattices with effective electric field strength above the Schwinger limit.

The Quantum Vacuum—Ubiquitous Mass-energy of Space

There is a hypothetical state of space referred to in physics as the vacuum. The idea of the vacuum is a completely empty space devoid of any matter, energy, or forces. This state is hypothetical because it does not exist anywhere in nature. The reason for this is that the very fabric of the universe, space, is a substantive medium, a sea of energy. In fact, the preeminent physicist Paul Dirac— known for the Dirac equation, an extension of the Schrodinger equation that is consistent with special relativity— posited that the vacuum must be filled with an infinite sea of negative energy electrons (see also his fascinating work on the large number hypothesis).

Some of Google's most closely-guarded secrets have seemingly leaked

Google’s Search algorithms all but rule the internet. As the dominant search engine on the planet, Search rankings can make or break a website — which has everyone and their aunt battling to try and claim the top spots. Those algorithms are a closely guarded secret, but leaked documents claim to shed some light on how Google Search operates.

SparkToro claims to have accessed over 2,500 of API documentation it claims originates from Google’s internal “Content API Warehouse”. And in those documents are what appear to be key details of Google’s Search algorithm. Android Authority notes that these documents don’t show the way Search ranks different websites or how they treat different site characteristics. But it does seem to show what Google actually collects in its bid to offer users the most useful Search results.

Interestingly, the site also claims these documents leaked to GitHub back in March, only to be removed. However for now SparkToro is working in collaboration with iPullRank to try and figure out what all these alleged APIs are meant to do.

Cat Bohannon tells Hay festival audience it is not known why men go through life ‘smuggling two little death nuggets’

Whether it is the fountain of youth or the elixir of life, men have travelled the world looking for the key to increasing their longevity.

They should be looking a bit closer to home, according to one leading researcher – although after they do, they might end up taking the years God intended for them.

When it comes to increasing the lifespan of any male mammal, “there is one way you can intervene”: castration.

Cat Bohannon, the celebrated author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, said men went through life “smuggling two little death nuggets”, with research suggesting an orchiectomy can lend a few more precious years.

Speaking at the Hay festival on Friday, Bohannon said castration was a “way to make male mammals live longer”. This effect was observed in American men in the mid-20th century who were institutionalised, usually because of mental illness, and castrated, and in Korean eunuchs. The castrated men lived longer than their “regularly balled peers”.

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I am afraid of this person and this research. Very afraid...

Ticketmaster owner Live Nation confirmed "unauthorised activity" on its database after a group of hackers said they had stolen the personal details of 560 million customers.

ShinyHunters, the group claiming responsibility, says the stolen data includes names, addresses, phone numbers and partial credit card details from Ticketmaster users worldwide.

The hacking group is reportedly demanding a $500,000 (£400,000) ransom payment to prevent the data from being sold to other parties.

In a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Live Nation said that on 27 May "a criminal threat actor offered what it alleged to be Company user data for sale via the dark web", and that it was investigating.

The Japanese government is pushing ahead with a plan to make Japan’s publicly funded research output free to read. In June, the science ministry will assign funding to universities to build the infrastructure needed to make research papers free to read on a national scale. The move follows the ministry’s announcement in February that researchers who receive government funding will be required to make their papers freely available to read on the institutional repositories from January 2025.

The Japanese plan “is expected to enhance the long-term traceability of research information, facilitate secondary research and promote collaboration”, says Kazuki Ide, a health-sciences and public-policy scholar at Osaka University in Suita, Japan, who has written about open access in Japan.

The nation is one of the first Asian countries to make notable advances towards making more research open access (OA) and among the first countries in the world to forge a nationwide plan for OA.

The plan follows in the footsteps of the influential Plan S, introduced six years ago by a group of research funders in the United States and Europe known as cOAlition S, to accelerate the move to OA publishing. The United States also implemented an OA mandate in 2022 that requires all research funded by US taxpayers to be freely available from 2026.

The Kansas Supreme Court offered a mixed bag in a ruling Friday that combined several challenges to a 2021 election law, siding with state officials on one provision, reviving challenges to others and offering the possibility that at least one will be halted before this year’s general election.

But it was the ballot signature verification measure’s majority opinion — which stated there is no right to vote enshrined in the Kansas Constitution’s Bill of Rights — that drew fiery dissent from three of the court’s seven justices.

The measure requires election officials to match the signatures on advance mail ballots to a person’s voter registration record. The state Supreme Court reversed a lower court’s dismissal of that lawsuit, but the majority rejected arguments from voting rights groups that the measure violates state constitutional voting rights.

In fact, Justice Caleb Stegall, writing for the majority, said that the dissenting justices wrongly accused the majority of ignoring past precedent, holding that the court has not identified a “fundamental right to vote” within the state constitution.

The United States Department of Justice is quietly prosecuting a novel Espionage Act case involving a drone, a Chinese national, and classified nuclear submarines.

The case is such a rarity that it appears to be the first known prosecution under a World War II–era law that bans photographing vital military installations using aircraft, showing how new technologies are leading to fresh national security and First Amendment issues.

“This is definitely not something that the law has addressed to any significant degree,” Emily Berman, a law professor at the University of Houston who specializes in national security, tells WIRED. “There’s definitely no reported cases.”

On January 5, 2024, Fengyun Shi flew to Virginia while on leave from his graduate studies at the University of Minnesota and rented a Tesla at the airport. His research focused on using AI to detect signs of crop disease in photos. Shi’s subject that week wasn’t plants, however, but allegedly the local shipyards—the only ones manufacturing the latest generation of Navy carrier ships in the country, and nuclear submarines as well.

According to an affidavit filed by FBI special agent Sara Shalowitz in February, a shipyard security officer alerted the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to Shi’s actions. The affidavit alleges that on January 6, Shi was flying a drone in “inclement weather” before it got stuck in a neighbor’s tree. When Shi, who is a Chinese citizen, approached the neighbor for help, he was questioned about his nationality and purpose for being in the area. The unnamed resident took photos of Shi, his license plate, and his ID, and called the police. The affidavit alleges that Shi was “very nervous” when questioned by police and “did not have any real reasons” for flying a drone in bad weather. The police gave Shi the number for the fire department and said he would need to stay on the scene. Instead, he returned the rental car an hour later and left Hampton Roads, Virginia, abandoning the drone.

When the FBI seized the drone and pulled the photos off its memory card, they discovered images that special agent Shalowitz said she recognized as being taken at Newport News Shipyard and BAE Systems, which is a 45-minute drive away. The affidavit states that on the day Shi took the photos, the Newport News Shipyard was “actively manufacturing” aircraft carriers and Virginia class nuclear submarines.

Tokyo - A 40,000-yen ($255)-per-person tax cut program began on Saturday in Japan to ease the pain of inflation felt by households as Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, hit by low approval ratings, seeks to make the benefits of government support more visible to disgruntled voters.

Of the total reduced under the new temporary scheme, 30,000 yen is from income tax, and 10,000 yen is from resident tax. High-income earners who receive 20 million yen or more annually will be excluded, with cash handouts given to those earning low incomes, such as those exempt from paying both taxes.

A household of three -- an income earner, a spouse and a child -- will be entitled to a 120,000 yen cut, for instance.

The program will cover some 95 million people as a major feature of the government's efforts to help consumers at a time when wage growth has yet to outpace inflation. Workers can see their income tax payments reduced on their pay slips.

Thousands of NHS cancer patients in England are expected to get access to trials of a new type of treatment using vaccines to fight their disease.

Thirty hospitals so far have signed up to the Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad.

It is designed to match patients with forthcoming trials using mRNA technology, as found in current Covid jabs.

The vaccines are designed to prime the immune system to recognise and destroy any remaining cancer cells and reduce the risk of the disease recurring.

A new study dives deeper into the amazing adaptations of the cephalopod brain.

Octopuses can do it all, from their signature camouflage to chucking shells at other octopuses, but one major thing they can’t do is thermoregulate. Changes in water temperature can threaten their powerful brains due to this quirk of evolution, but they still manage to handle it.

A study published June 8 in the journal Cell shows that two-spot octopuses adapt to seasonal shifts in temperature by producing different neural proteins. They accomplish this by editing their RNA—the messenger molecule between proteins and DNA. The team on this study believes that this rewiring protects their brains and this strategy is likely used across other octopuses and squid.

“Ten years ago, there were some hints that something unusual was going on, but there wasn’t [any] systematic mapping and our first goal was to systematically map the editing sites of the squid,” study co-author and a statistical mathematician at Tel Aviv University Eli Eisenberg tells PopSci.

They found that squid have tens of thousands of recording sites that were primarily located in their neural tissues where these RNA edits could be happening. Eisenberg and study co-author Joshua Rosenthal extended their research into octopuses and their neural networks. They wanted to know how these cephalopods with complicated and well-evolved brains handle the wide range of temperatures they are exposed to.

Vermont has become the first state to enact a law requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a share of the damage caused by climate change after the state suffered catastrophic summer flooding and damage from other extreme weather.

Republican Gov. Phil Scott allowed the bill to become law without his signature late Thursday, saying he is concerned about the costs and outcome of the small state taking on “Big Oil” alone in what will likely be a grueling legal fight. But he acknowledged that he understands something has to be done to address the toll of climate change.

Scot, a moderate Republican in the largely blue state of Vermont, recently announced that he’s running for reelection to a fifth two-year term. He has been at odds with the Democrat-controlled Legislature, which he has called out of balance, and was expected by environmental advocates to veto the bill but then allowed it to be enacted.

“Instead of coordinating with other states like New York and California, with far more abundant resources, Vermont – one of the least populated states with the lowest GDP in the country – has decided to recover costs associated with climate change on its own,” Scott wrote in a letter to lawmakers. But he said he understands the desire to seek funding to mitigate the damages caused by climate change that has hurt Vermont “in so many ways.”

The Japanese space agency said it has lost contact with its intrepid Venus spacecraft Akatsuki.

Akatsuki is Japan's mission dedicated to studying the climate of Venus and currently the only active spacecraft in orbit around the second planet from the sun. The $300 million spacecraft launched in 2010 and had a less than stellar start to its mission, failing to enter orbit around Venus due to a failure of its main engine. However, the mission team managed to contrive a second opportunity in 2015 after five years of orbiting the sun, successfully entering orbit.

The spacecraft, also known as Venus Climate Orbiter, has been conducting science ever since, making some unexpected observations. These activities may now be at an end, however.

JAXA’s mission account for Akatsuki posted on X Wednesday (May 29) that the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) had "lost contact with Akatsuki after an operation in late April due to an extended period of low attitude stability control mode, and is currently making efforts to reestablish communication with the spacecraft."

Using a more efficient method than current approaches, researchers promise the coldest temperatures in the world at just a fraction of the cost and time.

A breakthrough cooling technology could help invigorate quantum computing and slash costly preparation time in key scientific experiments by weeks.

Scientists often need to generate temperatures close to absolute zero for quantum computing and astronomy, among other uses. Known as the "Big Chill," such temperatures keep the most sensitive electrical instruments free from interference — such as temperature changes. However, the refrigerators used to achieve these temperatures are extremely costly and inefficient.

However, scientists with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) — a U.S. government agency — have built a new prototype refrigerator that they claim can achieve the Big Chill much more quickly and efficiently.

The researchers published the details of their new machine April 23 in the journal Nature Communications. They claimed using it could save 27 million watts of power per year and reduce global energy consumption by $30 million.