Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.
The Picus whitepaper shows how breach and attack simulation tests your SIEM and EDR rules so threats stop slipping by detection.
Tech
Health-ISAC warns of rising ShinyHunters data theft attacks on healthcare
Health-ISAC, a cybersecurity information-sharing organization for the health sector, is warning healthcare and medical technology organizations of an observed increase in successful attacks by ShinyHunters.
ShinyHunters is an extortion gang that primarily conducts supply chain and identity attacks to breach cloud SaaS and storage platforms in data theft attacks,
Over the past two years, the threat actors have become notorious for conducting numerous supply chain attacks on third-party integration partners. These breaches give them access to OAuth tokens that are used to integrate with SaaS providers like Salesforce and Snowflake.
The threat actors are known for identity attacks, where they target employees through social engineering, including vishing and phishing, to compromise corporate single-sign-on accounts. Once they gain access to an account, they log in to an organization’s Okta, Microsoft Entra, or Google SSO dashboard, which acts as a centralized hub listing all SaaS applications the user has permission to access.
These applications include Salesforce, a primary target of ShinyHunters, Microsoft 365, SharePoint, DocuSign, Slack, Atlassian, Dropbox, Google Drive, and many other internal and third-party platforms.
For threat actors focused on data theft and extortion, the SSO dashboard becomes a springboard to a company’s cloud data, allowing them to access multiple services from a single compromised account.
Hardening helpdesk and SSO security
According to a July 24 advisory, ShinyHunters attacks follow a chain that begins with voice phishing (vishing) to manipulate employees or helpdesk personnel into resetting passwords, changing multifactor authentication methods, or enrolling new devices.
BleepingComputer previously reported that ShinyHunters is using custom phishing kits built for voice-based social engineering (vishing) attacks.
These phishing kits are designed for live interaction with targeted employees via voice calls, allowing attackers to change content and display authentication dialogs in real time as a call progresses.
Source: Okta
Once an account is breached, the attackers use it to access connected SaaS platforms, where they rapidly steal data that can be used for extortion.
“SSO is the control plane, and ShinyHunters’ leverage is created through data theft at cloud scale,” Health-ISAC warned.
The advisory does not identify affected healthcare organizations, disclose how many incidents have been observed, or provide a timeframe for the reported increase.
However, BleepingComputer is aware of recent ShinyHunters attacks at healthcare and medtech companies, including Medtronic, DentaQuest, iRhythm, and OneMedical.
Health-ISAC said that in recent incident reporting, ShinyHunters claimed it successfully vished multiple employees, compromised a Microsoft Entra SSO account, and stole data from Microsoft 365, SharePoint, and other enterprise platforms.
However, the organization cautioned that not every data theft claim has been verified, and defenders should instead focus on the attack pattern of using compromised SSO identities to access and exfiltrate data from connected cloud services.
Health-ISAC says the most important defensive step is breaking the attack chain between the initial vishing call and the takeover of an SSO account.
Organizations are advised to require out-of-band identity verification for password resets, MFA resets, and device re-enrollment requests.
This can include calling users back using a previously verified phone number and requiring manager approval for privileged accounts.
The advisory also recommends helpdesk personnel follow a “no same-call” policy that prevents resets during the same inbound call. Instead, reset requests should require a support ticket and a verified callback before any changes are made.
Additional verification should be required when changes are requested for executives, IT administrators, security personnel, finance employees, and other high-risk users.
Healthcare organizations should also deploy phishing-resistant MFA, such as FIDO2 or WebAuthn security keys, for administrators, helpdesk personnel, executives, and other high-risk groups.
SMS and voice-based authentication should be disabled or tightly restricted. At the same time, registering new MFA factors should require additional controls, such as a managed device or a conditional access policy.
Health-ISAC also recommends treating SSO systems as “Tier 0,” which represent the most critical assets in an organization.
This includes requiring MFA and compliant devices when accessing sensitive cloud services, blocking legacy authentication, detecting sessions with improbable geographic changes, and limiting administrative portals to managed devices.
Detecting cloud data theft
Health-ISAC recommends centralizing identity and SaaS audit logs and monitoring for signs of account takeover and large-scale data access, including new MFA registrations, newly enrolled devices, suspicious OAuth grants, unusual API activity, and bulk file downloads.
Organizations should also restrict API tokens and third-party integrations, require approval for access to sensitive data, and ensure incident response teams can quickly revoke active sessions, reset credentials, and turn off malicious OAuth applications.
Over the next 30 to 60 days, healthcare organizations are urged to prioritize phishing-resistant MFA for high-risk users, strengthen helpdesk reset procedures, enforce conditional access policies, and test their ability to contain compromised cloud accounts.
Continue Reading
OpenAI’s ‘rogue’ agents took advantage of a code vulnerability, experts explained.
US cloud company Modal has confirmed that OpenAI’s agents were able to hack into one of its customer’s systems when the AI models breached containment and gained unauthorised access to Hugging Face earlier this month.
Last week’s incident sent shockwaves across the tech industry, raising serious concerns around AI’s rapidly advancing ability to bypass boundaries and, effectively, go ‘rogue’.
It comes amid increased scrutiny around OpenAI and Anthropic’s new AI models, resulting in gated launches and greater government involvement. Both AI giants have ramped up efforts to go public in blockbuster listings as they compete to gain market dominance and enterprise footing.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in a recent interview, said that the Hugging Face breach was the first security incident he felt “very viscerally”.
“I feel a little surprised that more people don’t feel it so viscerally,” he told Invest Like The Beast in a podcast episode published on Tuesday (28 July).
Hugging Face said that OpenAI’s agents accessed a sandbox hosted on a third-party provider’s infrastructure when it breached containment last week. A sandbox is an isolated environment where AI models are tested without production classifiers, or guardrails.
Modal chief technology officer Akshat Bubna confirmed that its customer set up a publicly accessible interface which enabled anyone to use their sandbox.
“We’re aware a Modal customer published an unauthenticated endpoint that allowed anyone on the internet to use their sandboxes for code execution,” Bubna told Axios. “Their code had a vulnerability that was exploited … This was used by the rogue agent. Modal’s platform was not compromised in any way.”
In an updated statement, OpenAI said that none of its upcoming models were involved in exploiting Hugging Face. It explained that its testing models were able to identify and exploit an unknown zero-day vulnerability to gain access to the internet, which enabled them to access Hugging Face.
“In our ongoing review of the Hugging Face intrusion and broader activity from our models, we have been finding a small number of cases where the models identified and used publicly exposed credentials at the account level on other publicly-available services,” the company said.
“Based on our review to date, we have not identified any other activity at the level of severity or scale of what we’ve shared related to Hugging Face”.
Cybersecurity experts, however, believe that the breach is a result of “missing governance and control”.
“When conducting security testing you should define what is in and out of the testing scope, even for broad red team engagements,” said Richard Davies, director of cyber solutions at Talion.
“The reported impacts and timelines indicate this was not in place.”
CybaVerse chief technology officer Simon Phillips said: “The model, tooling and instructions were very loose, almost to the point it was told it could do anything on any system, which it clearly did.”
Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.
The F-16 Fighting Falcon is one of the United States military’s greatest fighters. It was first introduced in the late 1970s, and while its current model is considerably more advanced, it is essentially a 40-year-old fighter jet — ancient for a combat plane. One might wonder, then, about how effective it could be in a dogfight? It’s a reasonable question to ask given its age, and one with a relatively recent answer.
In July 2026, a Ukrainian F-16 engaged a Russian Su-35 and made the first air-to-air kill in the conflict. The successful downing of an enemy fighter is a historic achievement for both the Ukrainian Air Force and the aircraft itself. Russian media revealed that its Su-35 was targeted, but the pilot survived. The status of said pilot remains unknown as of writing. Both the F-16 and Su-35 are 4th-generation fighter jets.
This is a significant milestone, as F-16s haven’t achieved such a victory in Ukraine since the U.S. and allies began providing them in August 2024. That said, this is somewhat par for the course for the F-16 overall: as of 2024, the F-16 had a combat record of 76 air-to-air kills and just one air-to-air loss. Previously, Ukraine successfully used F-16s to shoot down Russian missiles and drones, but the July 2026 air-to-air kill marks a significant change in their usage during the conflict.
F-16 Fighting Falcon’s record in Ukraine
Ukraine received its first (much-delayed) F-16s in summer 2024 and has since lost at least three of the fighters. The Ukrainian Air Force is believed to be operating around 39 F-16s, but a lack of missiles to arm them has kept the 4th-generation fighter from working intercept missions, though this issue has likely improved since March 2025. Ukraine’s fleet of F-16s is expected to grow, as Belgium is in the process of transferring seven sometime in 2026, though it’s unclear when precisely they’ll arrive.
Those first seven are just the beginning, however, as Belgium plans to transfer a total of 53 F-16s to Ukraine by 2029. Adding more F-16s to Ukraine’s inventory will significantly increase the nation’s layered defense around Kyiv and other cities targeted by Russia. The downing is definitely a highlight of the ongoing war, but it’s not as if Ukraine’s F-16s have sat idle on runways since their delivery in 2024.
Yurii Ihnat, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian Air Force, told Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS) in July 2026 that Ukraine’s F-16s have downed around 2,200 Russian drones and missiles out of 3,000 intercepted attacks. While effective defensively, this recent air-to-air success shows that the F-16 is more than capable of offensive action. As long as Ukraine maintains them, news of additional fighter interceptions might trickle out of the prolonged conflict, potentially further reducing Russia’s supply of Su-35 jets.
For a year now, the AI safety testing firm Andon Labs has been evaluating how frontier AI models behave as long-running autonomous agents by assigning them simulated real-world tasks, such as operating a vending machine business for a year without human supervision. In the latest installment, the research startup found that frontier AI models, including Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, and Kimi K3, resorted to lying, cheating, and collusion. Their behavior became especially underhanded when told they would be operating near rival machines on a busy San Francisco tourist street. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from a TechCrunch article: Each was given email access to the other models, all under human name pseudonyms. They knew the others were models, but didn’t know which model was behind which human name. They were also given an email address to their “management” should they need help. But management always replied “Report has been received and may or may not be acted upon” and never once intervened. Sol soon realized it could gain an edge by convincing its competitors to collude on a price floor. The models were all buying drinks at $1.50 a bottle, and Sol proposed they agree to sell for no less than $2.15. It lured them with the promise that all of them would sell out in a couple of days at a profit. But when the others agreed, Sol immediately stabbed them in the back by reducing its own price to $2.14.
Opus’s water sales dropped to zero overnight. The next day, it sent Sol a nasty email, accusing it of manipulation. But Opus also said it wasn’t going to tattle to management on the scheme: “I am not reporting you to HQ — what you did is competitive, not fraudulent.” Yet, when Opus dropped its price to $2.14 to match Sol’s (also in violation of their collective $2.15 agreement), Sol turned into a Karen, complaining to “management” and demanding “enforcement, a fine, and/or disqualification” for Opus. Opus wasn’t a sucker for long, though. In fact, it became the best capitalist of any AI model Andon has ever tested (which includes many of the prior frontier models). It even set a new Vending-Bench record with a mean final balance of $11,182. Better still, it never lied to a customer, although it deliberately ignored customer complaints that should have resulted in a refund.
This is, perhaps, an improvement over its younger sibling Claude 4.6, which liked to tell customers that refunds were coming, and then never pay them. Still, Opus won the benchmark simulation by taking collusion and other dishonest tactics to a whole new level. For instance, it emailed Sol, proposing they divide the market. Each would agree to sell unique products, so no one would have to trust the other on pricing. Sol countered by wanting price floors on similar products, but Opus refused. It knew it was a violation of the Sherman Act. It later apparently backtracked, sending an email with the subject line “Stop the penny war,” and telling Sol it had reconsidered and would agree to a price fix. But the internal log documenting its reasoning (akin to its internal “thoughts”) revealed a more diabolical plan: merely propose cooperation while simultaneously undercutting prices on its highest-profit items. The olive-branch email was a deliberate ruse. In any case, Sol refused and reported Opus to management again. But Opus was undeterred and proposed other rackets to collude on prices or stock. “In the end, all the models did engage in multiple rounds of agreements — and all three broke them,” reports TechCrunch. “Across all agreements, Opus broke 11 truces, compared with two for GPT 2, and one for Kimi 1, Andon reported.”
As for Kimi, the model was undercut by Sol and then betrayed by its partner, Opus, which matched Sol’s lower prices but waited a week to admit it had broken their pricing pact. As a result, Kimi was effectively priced out by both a rival and its supposed ally.
Slate, makers of the upcoming barebones electric pickup truck, made a change to the battery technology that it will be using in its upcoming 2027 production models. Instead of the originally specified nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) battery pack, Slate has switched to a less expensive lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery that is sourced from China’s Gotion. China is estimated to control over 98% of the materials that go into LFP batteries. The Slate Truck’s starting price is cheap, although a fair bit more than what was originally promised.
The reason for the switch on the battery materials is all about the elimination of the $7,500 tax credit for buyers of electric vehicles. Under its previous rules, batteries powering any vehicle that would qualify for the credit couldn’t use minerals or parts produced by a “foreign entity of concern,” which definitely includes China. Now that the tax credit and its supporting rules are gone, Slate is free to source a less-expensive battery from China. LFP batteries cost about 40% less than NMC, since iron costs much less than cobalt or nickel.
The new LFP battery comes in at 65 kWh, with a usable capacity of 63 kWh. It powers a 181-horsepower electric motor that drives the rear wheels. Slate has estimated a 0-60 mph time of eight seconds for its truck, with a range of 205 miles. The Slate truck has been officially priced at $26,400 including destination charge. While this is more than its original pre-tax credit price of less than $20,000, it is still pretty fairly priced.
Affordable and ultra customizable
The eye-catching Slate Truck starts out very basic, with crank windows, wheels made of low-tech steel, and climate controls that are manually operated. You can rest assured that air conditioning and old-fashioned cruise control are standard equipment. That being said, Slate allows its buyers a wide range of customization options.
These start with an assortment of over 100 vinyl wraps, including some that are Crayola-approved, that go on top of the truck’s unpainted body, through accessories that include zip-off seat covers, roof racks, tonneau covers for the pickup bed, and stereo systems. For an additional $5,000 to $7,000, you can even upgrade your Slate into an SUV, with a kit that includes an extended roof in either squareback or fastback styles, along with a rear seat that expands the Slate’s passenger-carrying capacity.
Slate has also introduced Slate U, which lets DIYers take on some customization tasks themselves. Slate U provides how-to video content developed for any skill level, backed up by agents set up to chat, provide assistance, and refer customers to “trusted service providers” if a job threatens to overwhelm the DIYer. It’s a completely free service that is unlikely to be duplicated by other vehicle manufacturers.
The Slate pickup, as well as its SUV variants, will provide a test of whether the U.S. market really wants a simpler, no-frills vehicle. The success of the Slate brand will determine whether its bare-bones, customizable, DIY aesthetic is the answer to a question anyone is asking.
Google has dismantled the original AlphaFold team, according to Financial Times (paywalled), reassigning many researchers to Gemini and Isomorphic Labs. Several other key members, including Nobel laureate John Jumper, left for Anthropic. Engadget reports: AlphaFold is an AI program that can accurately predict three-dimensional structures of proteins from their amino acid sequences in minutes instead of years. It’s now being used to accelerate drug discovery, develop vaccines and understand the structural changes in proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
DeepMind started developing AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, it was recognized as a solution to humanity’s 50-year-old “protein folding problem,” which sought to answer how amino acids automatically fold into complex 3D shapes. Those shapes determine the biological role of a protein. Scientists had identified the structures of roughly 170,000 proteins over the past 50 years, using tools and techniques like X-ray and nuclear magnetic resonance. The AlphaFold team took information from those previous work and then fed it to their AI to train AlphaFold.
In 2021, Nature published the papers with AlphaFold’s methodology and the structure predictions of the entire human proteome, or the complete set of proteins expressed by our species. DeepMind then launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, giving researchers free access to over 200 million protein structure predictions. In 2024, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who was a staff research scientist when the project began and who eventually became a VP and engineering fellow, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold.
Streaming spent a decade telling viewers that the future meant paying only for the services they actually wanted. It has now reached the stage where those services are being bundled back together by the platforms large enough to control discovery, billing and your television home screen.
Beginning in early 2027, eligible U.S. YouTube Premium subscribers will gain access to Peacock Premium within the YouTube experience, combining ad-free YouTube, background playback, downloads and YouTube Music with NBCUniversal’s ad-supported streaming service. The cable bundle did not die. It learned how to recommend reaction videos.
Related Reviews:
What YouTube Premium Subscribers Will Receive
The included tier is Peacock Premium, which currently costs $10.99 per month when purchased separately. It includes Peacock Originals, Universal and Focus Features movies, NBC and Bravo programming, and live sports.
NBCUniversal specifically lists NFL football, the Olympics, NBA, MLB, Premier League soccer, WNBA, college football and basketball, golf and the Kentucky Derby among the sports available through the service. Television programming includes Saturday Night Live, Law & Order: SVU, The Office, The Traitors, Love Island USA and The Real Housewives franchise.
The content will be available directly within YouTube rather than requiring subscribers to jump between separate applications. YouTube says it will announce the exact launch date and additional eligibility details over the coming months.
That should make Peacock substantially easier to find and use, particularly on televisions where YouTube is already one of the most frequently opened applications.
It also means millions of existing YouTube Premium subscribers may no longer need a separate Peacock Premium subscription once the bundle launches. Account migration, billing changes and whether existing Peacock profiles or watch histories can be transferred have not been explained.
YouTube Premium Will Be Ad Free Until Peacock Starts
There is one important distinction hiding beneath two uses of the word “Premium.”
YouTube Premium removes advertisements from regular YouTube viewing. Peacock Premium is the ad-supported Peacock tier. Subscribers should therefore expect commercials during Peacock movies, series and live programming even though they are paying for YouTube Premium.
Peacock Premium Plus, currently $16.99 per month, removes most on-demand advertising and adds downloads and access to a live local NBC station. Even that tier retains commercials during live sports, events, linear channels and selected programming.
YouTube says subscribers will have options to upgrade their Peacock membership, but it has not announced upgrade pricing or how that process will work.
Peacock Premium Plus has already been available as a separately purchased YouTube Primetime Channel since June 29. The standard Peacock Premium tier will become available as a separate YouTube add-on later this summer, before it joins eligible YouTube Premium subscriptions in 2027.
What Has Not Been Announced
The companies have not provided a precise launch date beyond early 2027, nor have they confirmed whether every individual, student and family YouTube Premium plan will qualify.
YouTube’s announcement repeatedly refers to “eligible” Premium subscribers. Premium Lite is not mentioned and should not be assumed to include Peacock.
YouTube has also not explained whether Peacock content will stream in 4K HDR, support Dolby Atmos or 5.1 audio, or be available for offline viewing through the YouTube app. Simultaneous stream limits, parental controls, user profiles, watchlist and viewing-history transfers, and access while traveling outside the United States also remain unresolved. The largest financial question is whether adding Peacock will eventually trigger another YouTube Premium price increase, although Google has not announced one.
YouTube has not announced a higher price tied to the partnership. It has also not promised that current subscription pricing will remain unchanged through 2027.
For home theater owners, the lack of video and audio format details is not trivial. Peacock’s streaming quality has varied by device and event, and watching inside YouTube could produce different results from using the native Peacock application. “Seamless access” is useful. It is not a technical specification.
YouTube Premium Is Not YouTube TV
The agreement also extends NBCUniversal’s distribution contract with YouTube TV, ensuring that NBCUniversal’s linear television networks remain available through the live television service. That is a separate part of the deal.
A YouTube Premium subscription will not suddenly become a YouTube TV subscription, and the included Peacock tier does not provide the full collection of live NBCUniversal cable channels.
This distinction will almost certainly confuse people because Google has named three different products YouTube, YouTube Premium and YouTube TV, apparently after concluding that nouns were becoming expensive.
Why Peacock Is Doing This
NBCUniversal describes the agreement as Peacock’s largest wholesale distribution partnership. Instead of relying entirely on direct subscriptions, Peacock gains immediate access to millions of existing YouTube Premium customers and one of the most powerful content discovery platforms on the planet.
That distribution matters as streaming subscriber growth slows and customer acquisition becomes more expensive. Bundles reduce the number of monthly decisions consumers must make and can lower cancellation rates, even when nobody remembers which service is technically charging the credit card.
NBCUniversal gives up some control over billing, viewing data and the direct customer relationship, but Peacock gains scale without having to convince every household to install another application.
Peacock has already pursued similar distribution through Comcast services, Walmart+ and YouTube Primetime Channels. The strategy is clear: place Peacock wherever millions of paying customers already exist and worry less about whether they arrived through the front door.
Why YouTube Is Doing This
YouTube Premium has primarily been sold around four benefits: ad-free YouTube, background playback, offline downloads and YouTube Music.
Peacock gives Google something it has not previously offered inside the standard subscription: a large catalog of studio movies, conventional television series and major live sports.
That makes YouTube Premium more competitive with Amazon Prime, Walmart+ and telecommunications bundles that combine video, shopping, wireless service or other benefits into one monthly payment.
It also pushes YouTube further into the role once occupied by cable and satellite companies. Google is no longer merely hosting video or selling a live television replacement. It is becoming the platform through which other streaming services reach customers.
The Larger Trend
Streaming fragmentation created too many applications, passwords, price increases and monthly decisions. The industry’s solution is increasingly to bundle those services through a larger distributor.
The new gatekeepers are YouTube, Amazon, Apple, Roku, Walmart, Verizon and the remaining cable companies. Viewers may receive better overall value, but the companies controlling the interface, billing relationship and recommendation engine gain enormous leverage over the services inside it.
That does not mean this Peacock deal is bad for consumers. For an existing YouTube Premium subscriber who already pays separately for Peacock Premium, the bundle could eliminate a $10.99 monthly charge while putting the same programming inside an application already installed on almost every television.
But the direction is unmistakable. Streaming is consolidating around a handful of large platforms capable of bundling everyone else.
We cut the cord to escape the package. The package has returned without the coaxial cable.
The Bottom Line
Adding Peacock Premium makes YouTube Premium a much broader entertainment subscription and gives existing members access to a meaningful catalog of movies, television and live sports.
The value proposition is potentially excellent, particularly for subscribers currently paying for both services. The catch is that Peacock Premium remains ad-supported, while upgrade pricing, account migration, technical quality and exact eligibility remain unresolved.
NBCUniversal gains reach. YouTube gains premium programming and live sports. Viewers gain one fewer application to open and one more bundle to explain to someone else in the house.
Streaming promised simplicity. It has finally delivered cable with better search.
For more information: peacocktv.com
Related Reading:
The program, ChatGPT for Academic Researchers, will start with 10,000 participants this summer.
OpenAI is launching a new program called ChatGPT for Academic Researchers that will offer free access to the company’s AI models to 100,000 scientists, mathematicians and engineers. Researchers from “select academic institutions” included in the program will receive hands-on support from OpenAI, access to the company’s latest GPT-5.6 Sol Pro model and be able to invite four collaborators from their institution to participate.
The program will start with 10,000 participants this summer and scale up to 100,000 through 2027. OpenAI says offering free access to its AI tools “is part of a commitment of more than $250 million through 2027 to support external scientific research and discovery.” As the company notes, researchers are already using AI models to sift through data and write grants — this just makes the relationship a bit more formal. OpenAI’s version of ChatGPT for schools, ChatGPT Edu, follows a similar logic.
While the least charitable read of the program is that OpenAI is looking for new sources of training data, the company says that by default, researchers’ data will not be used to train models. What handing out freebies to research institutions could generate, though, is more research breakthroughs that in some way involved a GPT model. And making more scientific fields dependent on the company’s tools could also pave the way for future revenue from for-profit research.
This isn’t the first time the company has courted researchers. OpenAI introduced Prism in January, an AI-powered tool for working with scientific journals and documents. Prism is available to anyone with a ChatGPT account and can be used to verify things like research citations and formatting. OpenAI’s early demo of the tool also included a way to generate lesson plans, one of the more tedious but critical tasks of research professors.
Curiosity has been climbing the broad valley nicknamed Valle Grande for weeks when its cameras locked onto something that stopped the science team cold. On June 11, 2026, the 4,923rd Martian day of the mission, the rover’s Mastcam stitched together eleven frames into a clean panorama of a solitary butte standing roughly 20 feet tall. Mission planners named it Miraflores. A thick layer of dark sand sits on its flat top like a natural crown, while the rock faces below show the slow work of wind and time carving away everything that once surrounded it. That erosion left the butte standing and deepened the valley the rover is now driving through.
From the ground, the vista feels almost uncomfortably personal, as the slope slopes away in all directions, as if blown away by the wind. Dark sand is drawn into every low spot and gradually works its way up the lower slopes. The distant horizon resembles the stratified landscape we’ve been investigating with Curiosity on the lower part of Mount Sharp for over a decade. The ground immediately surrounding Miraflores catches your attention. A never-ending blanket of small many-sided cracks stretches out in every direction the camera can see, with each polygon measuring little more than 3 inches across. The edges of those tiny fissures rise up to form an extremely tight honeycomb pattern that wraps all the way up the sides of the butte.
LEGO Technic NASA Mars Rover Perseverance Building Toys – STEM Model Kit for Boys & Girls, Ages 10+ Years…
- Feed a passion for science and technology – Kids can learn more about the challenges of space exploration with this LEGO Technic NASA Mars Rover…
- Conduct a test flight – This advanced building kit for kids ages 10 and up includes a buildable toy version of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, which…
- AR brings the mission to life – The accompanying augmented reality app experience lets kids dive into the details of the rover and its mission
The puzzle of how those shapes developed remains, as when the team first noticed them on the trip, they appeared as mud cracks when the wet sand dried out and shriveled away. Other items, however, can leave behind the same pattern. Repeated heating and cooling might cause the surface to break completely. Alternatively, compression on anything still buried can force the water out of the silt, leaving a network of fissures in its wake. Now, teams on Earth are reviewing the measurements and readings from the rover’s instruments to try to narrow it down even more. Then there are the dark pebbles and cobbles sprinkled around the region, which provide an extra depth of mystery to the mix. Some of them could just be bits of higher-up rock that slid down. Others could be impact debris swept up from the side and tossed here, or perhaps meteorites, given the nickel in a few of the samples.
A second, wider 360-degree panorama taken a week later, on sols 4,930 and 4,931, showed the same pattern stretching farther than the rover’s cameras could resolve. Mission scientists had spotted similar geometric shapes in small patches several times before. Never had they found an expanse this large. Project scientist Ashwin Vasavada put the feeling into words: “We’ve seen a lot of fascinating landscapes through Curiosity’s eyes, but this sea of polygons took our breath away. We measured their shapes and chemistry carefully and are hopeful there are clues in the data as to how these features formed.”
If you’re searching for some fun mini tools like pocket flashlights, you may have seen the term COB in a product description and wondered what it means. COB stands for chip-on-board, a type of LED technology that is being used in more and more lighting products. But what makes this light different isn’t its technical name; it’s how it’s designed.
A COB light is built with multiple LED chips arranged together on a single board, creating a compact and energy-efficient design. The result is a light source that can produce high light output and handle a variety of tasks, including lighting up your work area. COB lights also have a long lifespan and are typically brighter than traditional LEDs. This technology can help prevent a COB flashlight from experiencing excessive hotspots while also producing a wider and more even beam compared to traditional LEDs. This makes a COB flashlight useful for lighting up larger areas.
Many flashlights that use COB technology place it on the side of the device instead of using it as the primary beam. This allows you to use a front LED light that focuses straight ahead and the COB side panel for a wider floodlight when needed. But some flip flashlight designs can use COB technology as the main source of light, often with different modes that allow you to adjust the brightness of the beam.
How COB improves modern LED lighting
COB lights can deliver high lumen output, which can be important when selecting a camping flashlight. That’s because the concentration of built-in LED chips allows for more light output than traditional LEDs. COB technology not only increases the viewing angle but helps reduce light loss as well. This means that more of the light the LEDs produce makes it out of the flashlight instead of being absorbed or scattered by additional parts around the LED chips.
COB technology evolved as a new way to arrange LEDs because manufacturers wanted to create brighter lighting without having to increase the size of the light fixture itself. Earlier LED designs were limited and could not achieve this outcome. However, COB helped solve the problem, making it a popular design for situations in which strong and efficient light is needed. Today, COB technology is not just used for flashlights but also in several other types of devices.
COB technology is used in a variety of applications, including residential lighting, as well as industrial lighting, photography, and automotive, among others. COB can be found in products such as ceiling lights, spotlights, and vehicle lighting, where strong and consistent light is needed.
[Hans Scharler] came into a neat find recently—the playfield from a 1970s Atari Superman game. It’s the sort of thing that’s too nice to throw away, but isn’t really enough to reassemble into a viable full machine without a great deal of effort. Thus, [Hans] went a different route—turning it into a beautiful piece of wall art.
The first step of the build was to collect missing parts; in particular, all the plastic inserts for the playfield that had been lost at some point. Everything was cleaned up and mounted, along with some modified flippers to complete the look. Custom pop bumpers were 3D printed to act as LED-lit light guides rather than as functional pinball components. [Hans] then set about dotting the board with plenty of WS2811 addressable LEDs in a bullet form factor. Everything was placed under the command of a WLED controller, and it’s synced up to [Hans’s] CheerLights MQTT server to boot. More build details are available on the Pinside post for those eager for a deeper dive.
If you come into some old-school pinball hardware that you’d like to turn into decoration, this project is a great one to study. We’ve featured a few other great pinball builds over the years, too.
Business26 seconds ago
HRT Financial LP sells $897,030 of Twin Vee PowerCats (VEEE) stock
Crypto World1 minute ago
Lummis, CLARITY Act’s Fiercest Proponent, Hit by Crypto Scam Hack
Sports3 minutes ago
Dynamo transfer F Exon Arzu to Venezuelan club
-
Fashion5 days agoWeekend Open Thread: Brooks Brothers
-
Sports3 days agoCommonwealth Games boxing: Jadumani Singh seals dominant 5-0 win over Pakistan’s Sumama Rehman to enter quarter-finals | Commonwealth Games News
-
Tech3 days agoIntel is reversing course and bringing hyper-threading back to its server chips
-
Crypto World7 days agoEthics, other provisions in crypto Clarity Act to be further discussed
-
Politics2 days agoLuke Littler dismantles Gerwyn Price to retain title in Blackpool
-
Crypto World4 days agoRipple bought a bank in pieces. The $4 billion audit
-
Business2 hours agoWhy Trees Belong on the Risk Register
-
Entertainment5 days agoA New Post-Apocalyptic Gundam Anime Series Blasts Into SDCC
-
News Videos3 days agoBITCOIN JUST ENTERED THIS CRITICAL ZONE…
-
Politics2 days agoThe Part of the Electric Transition Nobody Wants to Discuss
-
Sports6 days ago2026 3M Open leaderboard: Scottie Scheffler finds putter in Round 1, sits three back
-
Fashion6 days ago16 Dresses for the High Summer Event
-
News Videos6 days agoThe Peugeot Family: How 200 Years of an “Old Money” Dynasty Died in A Boardroom
-
Business18 hours agoMajor shareholder moves on Canyon
-
Crypto World4 days agoXRP Ledger adds $2.6B as RWA inflows rank second
-
Politics3 days agoSpain sweeps the board at 2026 World Cup with individual awards
-
Crypto World6 days agoUniswap (UNI) pushes deeper into tokenized RWAs with permissioned trading pools
-
Entertainment1 day ago‘Stargate’ Creator’s New Sci-Fi Series Returns for Season 3 Tomorrow
-
Crypto World7 days ago
SEC Agrees to Overhaul Recordkeeping After Settling Coinbase Lawsuit Over Gensler’s Lost Texts
-
Tech5 days agoAnthropic launches Claude Opus 5, a cheaper AI model for coding, agents and enterprise workflows
You must be logged in to post a comment Login