Most products made for pets are designed entirely by humans. But what if animals could help design the things they use? A new project suggests they can. Researchers worked with a pet parakeet named Shiso to create a wearable perch based on the bird’s own preferences, turning the design process into a true collaboration between […]
The post This clever parakeet helped design its own perch appeared first on Knowridge Science Report.
Imagine wearing a small patch that can instantly warn you if you are exposed to dangerous gases or contaminated water. Instead of sending an alert to your phone that you might not notice right away, the patch vibrates against your skin, giving you an immediate warning to move away from danger. Researchers at North Carolina […]
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Traditional phishing techniques are in decline as a result of the disruption of the Tycoon2FA phishing-as-a-service (PHaaS) platform, Microsoft said in a new report, “Email threat landscape: Q2 2026 trends and insights”.
“Phishing volume linked to the platform fell 92% from pre-disruption averages, including QR code phishing and CAPTCHA-gated phishing both declining from their March highs,” the company wrote in the report.
The takedown reduced activity across multiple phishing categories, forcing attackers to shift to newer delivery methods.
Riding this shift in were a few notable phishing campaigns, including an automated business email compromise (BEC) campaign that reached 42,000 organizations in under three hours, and a multi-stage phishing campaign that used nested email (EML) files, calendar invitations, and a Microsoft authentication redirect to deliver malware.
To counter phishing attacks, Microsoft recommends blocking emails containing known bad URLs/ subject fields, enabling password-less authentication methods, or moving to MFA for accounts that still require passwords.
The take-down of Tycoon2FA forced its operators to abandon portions of their infrastructure and rework hosting, domain registrations, and delivery mechanisms.
“After falling 15% in March and another 22% in April, Tycoon2FA-linked phishing volume dropped 74% in May to just 1.5 million messages, then fell another 20% in June to 1.2 million, by far the lowest monthly volumes observed in at least a year,” Microsoft said.
The decline extended to QR Code lures and fake CAPTCHA pages, two phishing techniques in which Tycoon2FA accounted for 12% and 14% of industry activity in June, respectively. This indicated that the platform’s customer base had not been able to migrate to a replacement infrastructure.
But cutting off one head of the hacker hydra only gave rise to new tactics elsewhere.
The adaptation came in the form of using Microsoft Teams as a social engineering channel. Attackers established conversations to build trust before attempting credential theft or delivering malicious payloads. “Teams-based phishing volume climbed steadily throughout Q2, with the average number of detected attacks rising 19% from March to April, holding roughly flat into May (+1%), then increasing another 10% into June,” Microsoft said.
Microsoft also observed a highly automated BEC campaign that reached over 67,000 users using scripted emails, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), and engagement tracking, alongside a separate phishing campaign targeting 107,000 users that abused Microsoft’s authentication flow and trusted cloud services, including Teams archive recording and ICS calendar invite, to disguise malware delivery behind legitimate infrastructure.
While QR Code and Captcha-based phishing attacks dropped significantly in the second quarter, business email compromise (BEC) charted jumped 121% between March and April, before dropping down again in May.
QR Code phishing represented 8.3 million attacks in June 2026, down from a peak of 18.7 million in March. Similarly, Captcha-gated phishing fell from 12 million attacks in March to 2.2 million in June.
BEC attacks hit 9 million in March, falling to 3.9 million in June.
But even as these phishing classics lost momentum and newer techniques emerged, Microsoft’s defensive advice remained rooted in the basics. It noted organizations should complement email filtering with phishing-resistant authentication such as passkeys and phishing-resistant MFA to reduce the effectiveness of credential theft campaigns.
The company also recommended strengthening Exchange Online Protection and Microsoft Defender for Office 365 with capabilities such as Safe links and Zero-hour Auto Purge (ZAP), in which malicious emails already delivered to mailboxes are removed before they are read, alongside enforcing password-less authentication methods like Windows Hello, FIDO keys, and Microsoft Authenticator.
Microsoft concluded its report with a list of indicators of compromise (IoCs) from the threats observed in the quarter to support detection efforts.
This article first appeared on CSO.
The problem of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, a group of potentially cancer-causing “forever chemicals,” may finally have a solution, thanks to German scientists.
The PFAS group contains more than 10,000 synthetic substances that refuse to break down, leading to the term “forever chemicals,” and which instead build up in the body to cause developmental issues, immune problems, and even cancer.
Now, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) researchers have reported not one, but two new solutions to the forever chemical problem in recent papers published in the journals Chemical Engineering Journal Advances and Scientific Reports.
One of these new processes for addressing this long-standing environmental problem employs hydrodynamic cavitation, while the other employs cold atmospheric plasma combined with gas dispersion.
PFAS have exceptionally stable carbon-fluorine bonds, which make them difficult to break down. Through industrial wastewater, these forever chemicals are released into oceans and rivers, where they can accumulate in plants, animals, and humans. While some of them are tied to specific health risks, many are still question marks, with their health consequences unclear.
The work at HZDR is part of Germany’s “National Water Strategy,” aimed at protecting the country’s water supplies. In a 2022 preliminary study that the new work built on, researchers degraded PFAS chemicals through a hydrodynamic cavitation process.
Work on these new processes was conducted at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research (UFZ), confirming that both processes degrade PFAS and produce fluoride, which the researchers hope will soon be adopted in industry.
“In hydrodynamic cavitation, we pass PFAS-enriched water through a constriction, generating small vapor bubbles,” explained co-author Dr. Sebastian Reinecke, head of the Department of Water and Environmental Technologies at HZDR. “When the bubbles burst under the rising ambient pressure in the water downstream of the constriction, the PFAS that are attached to the bubbles are exposed to local temperature spikes of several thousand degrees Celsius.”
While this occurs, highly reactive hydroxyl radicals form during cavitation, which the team believes then attack intermediate products, hastening the breakdown of PFAS.
The researchers demonstrated that PFAS chemicals in tap water were broken down, with higher concentrations of fluoride produced as treatment duration increased. A persistent and well-studied PFAS, perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), was used in the research, with 37% of the dissolved chemical eventually breaking down.
“We are now conducting follow-up experiments to increase the degradation rate,” Reinecke added. “Our goal is to improve the process to a degradation rate of more than 80 percent of the PFAS in the solution and mineralizing more than 50 percent of the fluorine that is bound in the chemicals – that means, breaking down the carbon-fluorine bonds that are typical of PFAS.”
Dr. Amit Kumar, an environmental engineer at HZDR, led another series of experiments on cold atmospheric plasma and gas dispersion, which offered the advantage of not requiring catalysts or additional chemicals. Kumar applied some of his previous research on breaking down micropollutants to the problem of forever chemicals.
“We generated plasma at the water surface while simultaneously introducing gas into the PFAS-contaminated water,” Reinecke explained. “The PFAS attach to the surface of the gas bubbles. As they rise, the water is constantly circulated. This brings the PFAS to the surface, where they are broken down in the plasma.”
Roughly 35% of the fluorine atoms in these forever chemicals were released as fluoride salts in the process, almost completely degrading long- and short-chain PFAS.
“While this method has significantly faster reaction kinetics than cavitation, it also consumes far more energy per volume unit,” Reinecke notes. “In addition, the process generates numerous transformation products that we have not yet been able to investigate in detail – for instance, gaseous compounds that form during the reaction.”
With their central ideas proven, the researchers are now focused on scaling up these processes for industrial-scale wastewater applications. Part of this involves increasing the reaction volume from 50 milliliters to 5 liters and combining the two separate processes.
“I believe we’ll achieve high degradation rates by combining the highly reactive species from the plasma with the effects of cavitation,” says Reinecke.
Additionally, follow-up work is currently investigating whether any byproducts of the plasma process are harmful and how to mitigate those effects.
Merging the techniques could lead to a highly efficient new PFAS removal technology, providing a powerful tool for dealing with one of the most significant threats to clean water supplies.
The paper, “Enhanced Degradation and Defluorination of Perfluorooctane Sulfonate (PFOS) in Tap Water Using Gas-Dispersed Cold Atmospheric Plasma,” appeared in Scientific Reports on June 13, 2026, and the second study, “Degradation and Defluorination of Perfluorooctane Sulfonate (PFOS) Forever Chemical in Water Using Hydrodynamic Cavitation Treatment,” appeared in Chemical Engineering Journal Advances on March 26, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
If you’ve ever swum in the ocean and been touched by seaweed, there’s a good chance it was Sargassum! This free-floating seaweed can have population explosions in coastal waters, degrading water quality, ecosystems, fisheries, and tourism. However, despite its drawbacks, scientists think that Sargassum could be useful for extracting valuable metals, known as rare earth elements (REEs).
REEs are classified by their average masses and atomic weights. Light REEs include cerium, praseodymium, and neodymium, middle REEs include gadolinium, terbium, and dysprosium, and heavy REEs include erbium, thulium, and ytterbium. These metals are used in magnets, electronic motors, wind turbines, spacecraft, and more. Our current methods of extracting REEs, open-pit mining and chemical processing, are invasive, causing habitat loss and producing toxic waste. Additionally, REEs are difficult to import due to restricted access worldwide. But what if these metals could be extracted using natural methods?
Scientists from Woods Hole and UCLA recently tested whether Sargassum could accumulate REEs, creating a sustainable solution to these problems. They harvested Sargassum at Waterfront Park in Woods Hole, rinsed the wet samples, and stored them in sterilized, filtered seawater, which they aerated with 12-hour cycles of light and dark to keep the Sargassum alive. They dried another set of samples in the sun under controlled outdoor conditions, stored them in sealed containers, and later rehydrated them in seawater for 3 hours before the experiments.
For each experiment, they added 5 grams (about 0.2 ounces) of Sargassum to solutions containing a mixture of 9 REEs – cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, erbium, thulium, and ytterbium – in concentrations totalling 0.1 micromolar (μM) REEs, 11μM REEs, 100 to 110μM REEs, and 575 to 600μM REEs. They performed each experiment 4 times: twice with fresh seaweed and twice with rehydrated seaweed.
The researchers removed 1 gram (about 0.04 ounces) of seaweed from each solution after 1, 3, and 7 days, and dissolved it in acid to release the REEs it had absorbed. They analyzed the concentrations of REEs in each seaweed sample and the leftover solutions using 2 different plasma-based methods. They used these REE concentrations to calculate the ratio of REEs in the Sargassum versus in the solution, known as the bioconcentration factor, to determine how effectively the seaweed absorbed REEs.
They found that after 7 days at lower REE concentrations (0.1μM), the fresh seaweed had bioconcentration factors of over 1,000. At higher REE concentrations (11μM), their bioconcentration factors ranged from about 400 to 700. However, these levels of REEs were eventually toxic to the fresh Sargassum, so they died after 2 weeks. In addition, the higher REE concentrations of 100 to 600μM were immediately toxic to the fresh Sargassum, which died within 1 day in solution.
The researchers determined that once the seaweed died, it could no longer actively take up REEs into its tissues but could only accumulate them on its surface or adsorb them. Adsorption can be thought of as a powdered donut – when the surface is covered with powdered sugar, no more powder fits on the donut. Similarly, there was a limit to how many REEs could stick to the Sargassum. Due to this limit, the fresh seaweed samples had bioconcentration factors below 250 in the highest REE concentrations. In contrast, the rehydrated Sargassum consumed less REEs at lower concentrations, but didn’t experience toxicity and continued to accumulate REEs at higher concentrations.
Finally, the team compared Sargassum to a common industrial method of accumulating REEs, known as activated carbon. REEs bond easily to activated carbon because of its abundant surface area and high porosity. Both materials accumulated a similar amount of REEs in solutions of 0.1μM REEs. However, at 575 to 600μM REEs, Sargassum accumulated about twice as many REEs as activated carbon, especially the heavier REEs.
The researchers concluded that Sargassum is a natural hyper-accumulator, meaning it successfully concentrates REEs. However, they recommended that future researchers test whether Sargassum performs the same in the natural environment as it does in the lab. If so, Sargassum could be used to accumulate REEs from wastewater, like mine drainage, or other water sources with higher concentrations of REEs. Regardless, they suggested that using Sargassum to obtain REEs could simultaneously expand global access to these metals and mitigate toxic blooms.
The post Using seaweed to harvest valuable metals appeared first on Sciworthy.
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