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‘Bad actor’ hijacks Apex Legends characters in live matches

Apex Legends players over the weekend experienced disruptions during live matches as threat actors hijacked their characters, disconnected them, and changed their nicknames.

Respawn, the publisher of the still popular battle royale-hero shooter, issued a public statement about the security incident, assuring players that it hadn’t been caused by an exploit or malware infection.

The title continues to have a large user base, with an estimated half a million daily concurrent players across all platforms as of mid-2025.

Hidden Telegram proxy links can reveal your IP address in one click

A single click on what may appear to be a Telegram username or harmless link is all it takes to expose your real IP address to attackers due to how proxy links are handled.

Telegram tells BleepingComputer it will now add warnings to proxy links after researchers demonstrated that specially crafted links could be used to reveal a Telegram user’s real IP address without any further confirmation.

Unexpected finding could offer new treatment targets for meth addiction

University of Florida neuroscientists have made a mechanistic discovery that paves the way to test immune-modulating medicines as a potential tool to break the cycle of methamphetamine addiction.

In a new preclinical study, a McKnight Brain Institute team led by Habibeh Khoshbouei, Ph.D., Pharm. D., examined the role of neuroinflammation in meth addiction to provide a deeper understanding of the mechanisms at work.

“Unlike alcohol or opioids, there currently is no medicinal therapeutic approach for methamphetamine addiction,” said Khoshbouei, a professor of neuroscience and psychiatry. “So this is an important societal issue.”

Two wrongs make a right: How two damaging disease variants can restore health

Scientists at Pacific Northwest Research Institute (PNRI) have overturned a long-held belief in genetics: that inheriting two harmful variants of the same gene always worsens disease. Instead, the team found that in many cases, two harmful variants can actually restore normal protein function.

Their work appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists report new immune insights and targets into LRRK2 mutations in Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a debilitating and progressive neurodegenerative disorder caused by the loss of dopamine-producing neurons in the substantia nigra, a brain region essential for motor control. Clinically, it is marked by tremor, rigidity, bradykinesia and postural instability, symptoms that progressively erode independence and quality of life.

PD affects millions of people worldwide, including nearly one million individuals in the United States, making it one of the fastest-growing neurological disorders. In the U.S. alone, the disease imposes a profound health care and socioeconomic burden, with annual costs reaching tens of billions of dollars due to medical care, lost productivity and long-term disability.

While environmental factors contribute to disease risk, genetic drivers are increasingly recognized, with mutations in the leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2) gene representing one of the most common causes of both familial and sporadic PD. Understanding how LRRK2 mutations drive disease is therefore central to developing therapies that go beyond symptoms control.

How brain waves shape our sense of self

A new study from Karolinska Institutet, published in Nature Communications, reveals how rhythmic brain waves known as alpha oscillations help us distinguish between our own body and the external world. The findings offer new insights into how the brain integrates sensory signals to create a coherent sense of bodily self.

What makes you feel that your hand is yours? It might seem obvious, but the brain’s ability to tell self from non-self is a complex process.

Using a combination of behavioral experiments, brain recordings (EEG), brain stimulation, and computational modeling with a total of 106 participants, researchers from Karolinska Institutet investigated how the brain combines visual and tactile signals to create the feeling that a body part belongs to oneself—a phenomenon known as the sense of body ownership.

Tissue repair slows in old age. These proteins speed it back up

As we age, we don’t recover from injury or illness like we did when we were young. But new research from UCSF has found gene regulators—proteins that turn genes on and off—that could restore the aging body’s ability to self-repair.

The scientists looked at fibroblasts, which build the scaffolding between cells that give shape and structure to our organs.

Fibroblasts maintain this scaffolding in the face of normal wear, disease, and injury. But over time, they slow down, and the body suffers.

Association Between Circadian Rest-Activity Rhythms and Incident Dementia in Older AdultsThe Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study

Weaker and more fragmented circadian rest-activity rhythms and later peak activity time were associated with elevated dementia risk in this study.

Nonmydriatic Ocular Fundus Imaging in Consecutive Patients With Headache in an Emergency Department

In this quality improvement project, nonmydriatic ocular fundus imaging enabled prompt and accurate rule-out of papilledema in patients with headaches presenting to the emergency department and facilitated rapid and reliable examination of the ocular fundus.

Background and Objectives.

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