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Android mental health apps with 14.7M installs filled with security flaws

Several mental health mobile apps with millions of downloads on Google Play contain security vulnerabilities that could expose users’ sensitive medical information.

In one of the apps, security researchers discovered more than 85 medium-and high-severity vulnerabilities that could be exploited to compromise users’ therapy data and privacy.

Some of the products are AI companions designed to help people suffering from clinical depression, multiple forms of anxiety, panic attacks, stress, and bipolar disorder.

Spain arrests suspected hacktivists for DDoSing govt sites

Spanish authorities have arrested four alleged members of a hacktivist group believed to have carried out cyberattacks targeting government ministries, political parties, and various public institutions.

The group, which called itself “Anonymous Fénix” and claimed they were affiliated with the Anonymous hacker collective, conducted distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against targets in Spain and several South American countries, according to the Spanish Civil Guard.

The first attacks occurred in April 2023 and peaked after the flash floods that struck Valencia in late October 2024, when the group’s members attacked multiple government websites, claiming Spanish authorities were responsible for the deaths and destruction caused by the storm.

Microsoft says bug in classic Outlook hides the mouse pointer

Microsoft is investigating a known issue that causes the mouse pointer to disappear in the classic Outlook desktop email client for some users.

This bug has been acknowledged almost two months after the first reports started surfacing online, with users saying that Outlook became unusable after the mouse pointer vanished while using the app.

“My mouse just stopped being visible while I am using Outlook, and this is very, very, frustrating because my permission wasn’t given to make these changes, and now I can’t find anything, can’t open emails, can’t copy and paste, and the list goes on and on,” one customer noted.

Connecting two opposite realities: How one heavy particle can reshape an entire Quantum world

Physicists have earlier debated about exotic electrons or atoms interacting with large numbers of surrounding particles. In terms of the Quasiparticle Model, a single particle travels through a sea of fermions, which include electrons, protons, or neutrons, and interacts persistently with its neighbours, according to a report in the SciTech daily.

When the particles travel, they attract neighbouring particles surrounded with it, forming an entity identified as a Fermi polaron. In fact, it reflects the coordinated motion of the impurity and the particles near it. A doctoral candidate at Heidelberg University’s Institute for Theoretical Physics, Eugen Dizer, explained that this idea has become vital for strongly interacting systems that range from ultracold atomic gases to solid materials and even nuclear matter.

Physicists dream up ‘spacetime quasicrystals’ that could underpin the universe

Spacetime obeys a rule known as Lorentz symmetry means that something is unchanged whether you’re sitting still or moving at close to the speed of light. For example, the laws of physics respect Lorentz symmetry: They don’t change for fast moving observers. Lorentz symmetry doesn’t hold for previously known quasicrystals, or for normal crystals either: An ant sitting still would observe a different structure than would a near light-speed ant. In relativity, observers traveling at high speeds observe an apparent shortening of objects, and that distorts the materials’ structure.

But the new spacetime quasicrystals obey Lorentz symmetry. They would appear the same to an ant sitting still as to one on a speeding rocket. The researchers mathematically formulated their quasicrystals by taking a four-dimensional slice through a grid of points in higher dimensions and projecting those points onto the slice. The slice has a slope that is an irrational number — one that can’t be written as a fraction of two whole numbers, such as pi. The irrational slope means the slice never directly intersects the points on the grid, and that helps produce the structure that never repeats.

Quasicrystals are a mathematical concept that shows up in the structure of real materials, but the concept could appear elsewhere. “The spacetime that we live in could be a quasicrystal,” says Sotiris Mygdalas of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, a coauthor of the study.

First 3D map of Uranus’s upper atmosphere created

“This is the first time we’ve been able to see Uranus’s upper atmosphere in three dimensions,” said Paola Tiranti.

What does the atmosphere of Uranus look like? This is what a recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters hopes to address as a team of researchers from the United States and United Kingdom investigated new data about the upper atmosphere of Uranus. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the atmosphere of Uranus and establish new methods for exploring gas giant atmospheres.

For the study, the researchers analyzed data obtained from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in January 2025 with its powerful infrared instruments. The motivation for the study was due to the lack of understanding of Uranus’s upper atmosphere, whose temperature and composition have remained elusive. The researchers focused on a region of the upper atmosphere known as the ionosphere, which is the region that interacts with the space environment and produces the auroras.

In the end, the researchers not only created the first 3D map of Uranus’s upper atmosphere, but found that atmospheric temperatures peak between 3,000 to 4,000 kilometers (1,864 to 2,485 miles) above the planet while the density of charged particles, where space radiation interacts with the atmosphere, peak at approximately 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) above the planet. Additionally, the researchers were surprised to discover that the charged particle density was weaker than longstanding models had predicted.

MGem: AAV, from almost a virus to an awesome vector—or is it?

An interesting paper evaluating the challenges faced by the existing generation of AAV vectors and proposing best practices for the future of AAVs in gene therapy. Useful tables of serotype, dose, and outcome are included. [ https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.02957-25](https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.02957-25)

Adeno-associated virus (AAV), discovered in 1965 (1), was considered a “biological oddity” and was dubbed as “almost a virus” (2), because it fails to undergo a productive replication in the absence of co-infection with a helper virus, such as adenovirus (3), herpesvirus (4), vaccinia virus (5), or human papillomavirus (6). Infection with the wild-type (WT) AAV infection is also not associated with any known disease in humans. However, following the availability of the complete nucleotide sequence of the WT AAV2 genome (7), molecular cloning (8, 9), and the demonstration of its remarkable ability to integrate site-specifically into human chromosome 19q13.3 (10, 11), sparked a significant interest in AAV, subsequently leading to the development of the first generation of recombinant AAV2 vectors (12, 13), followed by further refinements (14, 15).

Ever since then, interest in AAV vectors has continued to grow exponentially (16–19). The first generation of AAV vectors has been used in at least 700 programs, and there are over 200 currently active Phase I/II/III clinical trials for gene therapy of a wide variety of human diseases. Thus far, seven AAV “drugs”—Luxturna for Leber congenital amaurosis (20–22); Zolgensma for spinal muscular atrophy (23); Hemgenix for hemophilia B (24–27); Elevidys for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (28); Roctavian for hemophilia A (29–32); Beqvez for hemophilia B (33) (Beqvez has now been discontinued); and Kebilidi for aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase deficiency (34, 35)—have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.

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People with synesthesia experience distinct thematic patterns in their dreams

From the article:

The thematic analysis revealed that synesthete dreams systematically differed from control dreams in four distinct categories. People with synesthesia were more likely to describe dreams involving digital life. This theme included references to scrolling, screens, computer accounts, and routine technology use.

Synesthetes also reported more dreams centered on interpersonal regret. This theme featured scenarios involving guilt, moral conflict, missed opportunities, and urgent apologies. The scientists note that this aligns with the heightened emotional reactivity and memory retention frequently observed in people with synesthesia.

The third prevalent theme in synesthete dreams was diverse worlds. This category included shifting environments, cultural settings, and complex or dystopian landscapes. Because synesthetes tend to score high in openness to experience, they may possess a more flexible cognitive style that supports the construction of richly detailed and varied dream settings.

Finally, the violent conflict theme appeared more often in the dreams of synesthetes. This theme involved fictional threats, horror imagery, and words associated with intense physical clashes. The researchers suggest that individuals with enhanced memory abilities, a common trait in synesthesia, might be more likely to incorporate intense waking experiences into their dreams.

Do waking perceptual traits influence our sleep? New research indicates that people with synesthesia have unique dream patterns, providing evidence that our individual brain structures actively shape our imagination long after we fall asleep.

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