So, essentially SpaceX’s new parking garage will be bigger than your local H-E-B (excluding the largest H-E-B in San Antonio of course). Construction on the garage began earlier this year in February, but it’s expected to be completed by January 7, 2027, according to the TDLR.
SpaceX’s Bastrop facility is a major manufacturing hub for its Starlink satellite internet service, producing terminals and components. It’s located across the street from Hyperloop Plaza, a Musk-owned shopping center which houses The Boring Company, and the new X (formerly Twitter) headquarters.
The Clop ransomware gang (also known as Cl0p) is targeting Internet-exposed Gladinet CentreStack file servers in a new data theft extortion campaign.
Gladinet CentreStack enables businesses to securely share files hosted on on-premises file servers through web browsers, mobile apps, and mapped drives without requiring a VPN. According to Gladinet, CentreStack “is used by thousands of businesses from over 49 countries.”
Since April, Gladinet has released security updates to address several other security flaws that were exploited in attacks, some of them as zero-days.
Cisco has alerted users to a maximum-severity zero-day flaw in Cisco AsyncOS software that has been actively exploited by a China-nexus advanced persistent threat (APT) actor codenamed UAT-9686 in attacks targeting Cisco Secure Email Gateway and Cisco Secure Email and Web Manager.
The networking equipment major said it became aware of the intrusion campaign on December 10, 2025, and that it has singled out a “limited subset of appliances” with certain ports open to the internet. It’s currently not known how many customers are affected.
“This attack allows the threat actors to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges on the underlying operating system of an affected appliance,” Cisco said in an advisory. “The ongoing investigation has revealed evidence of a persistence mechanism planted by the threat actors to maintain a degree of control over compromised appliances.”
Jim Al-Khalili explores emerging technologies powering the future of quantum, and looks at how we got here.
This Discourse was recorded at the Ri on 7 November 2025, in partnership with the Institute of Physics.
Watch the Q&A session for this talk here (exclusively for our Science Supporter members): Join this channel as a member to get access to perks: / @theroyalinstitution.
Physicist and renowned broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili takes a look back at a century of quantum mechanics, the strangest yet most successful theory in all of science, and how it has shaped our world. He also looks forward to the exciting new world of Quantum 2.0 and how a deeper understanding of such counterintuitive concepts as quantum superposition and quantum entanglement is leading to the development of entirely new technologies, from quantum computers and quantum sensors to quantum cryptography and the quantum internet.
The United Nations has proclaimed 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, to celebrate the centenary of quantum mechanics and the revolutionary work of the likes of Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. Together with the Institute of Physics, join us to celebrate the culmination of the International Year of Quantum at the penultimate Discourse of our Discover200 year.
A “House of Cards” is a wonderful English phrase that it seems is now primarily associated with a Netflix political drama. However, its original meaning is of a system that is fundamentally unstable. It’s also the term Sarah Thiele, originally a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia, and now at Princeton, and her co-authors used to describe our current satellite mega-constellation system in a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv.
They have plenty of justification for using that term. Calculations show that, across all low-Earth orbit mega-constellations, a “close approach,” defined as two satellites passing by each at less than 1km separation, occurs every 22 seconds. For Starlink alone, that number is once every 11 minutes. Another known metric of Starlink is that, on average, each of the thousands of satellites have to perform 41 maneuvers per year to avoid running into other objects in their orbit.
That might sound like an efficiently engineered system operating the way it should, but as any engineer will tell you, “edge cases”—the things that don’t happen in a typical environment, are the cause of most system failures. According to the paper, solar storms are one potential edge case for satellite mega-constellations. Typically, solar storms affect satellite operation in two ways.
Neal Agarwal published another gift to the internet with Size of Life. It shows the scale of living things, starting with DNA, to hemoglobin, and keeps going up.
The scientific illustrations are hand-drawn (without AI) by Julius Csotonyi. Sound & FX by Aleix Ramon and cello music by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga calm the mind and encourage a slow observation of things, but also grow in complexity and weight with the scale. It kind of feels like a meditation exercise.
Huntress is warning of a new actively exploited vulnerability in Gladinet’s CentreStack and Triofox products stemming from the use of hard-coded cryptographic keys that have affected nine organizations so far.
“Threat actors can potentially abuse this as a way to access the web.config file, opening the door for deserialization and remote code execution,” security researcher Bryan Masters said.
The use of hard-coded cryptographic keys could allow threat actors to decrypt or forge access tickets, enabling them to access sensitive files like web.config that can be exploited to achieve ViewState deserialization and remote code execution, the cybersecurity company added.
Google is introducing in the Chrome browser a new defense layer called ‘User Alignment Critic’ to protect upcoming agentic AI browsing features powered by Gemini.
Agentic browsing is an emerging mode in which an AI agent is configured to autonomously perform for the user multi-step tasks on the web, including navigating sites, reading their content, clicking buttons, filling forms, and carrying out a sequence of actions.
User Alignment Critic is a separate LLM model isolated from untrusted content that acts as a “high-trust system component.”
A team from the Faculty of Physics and the Center for Quantum Optica l Technologies at the Center of New Technologies, University of Warsaw has developed a new method for measuring elusive terahertz signals using a “quantum antenna.”
The authors of the work utilized a novel setup for radio wave detection with Rydberg atoms to not only detect but also precisely calibrate a so-called frequency comb in the terahertz band. This band was until recently a white spot in the electromagnetic spectrum, and the solution described in the journal Optica paves the way for ultrasensitive spectroscopy and a new generation of quantum sensors operating at room temperature.
Terahertz (THz) radiation, being part of the electromagnetic spectrum, lies at the boundary of electronics and optics, positioned between microwaves (used, for example, in Wi-Fi) and infrared.
