Apr 11, 2025Ravie LakshmananVulnerability / Network Security Palo Alto Networks has revealed that it's observing brute-force login attempts against PAN-OS GlobalProtect gateways, days after threat actors warned of a surge in suspicious login scanning activity targeting its appliances. "Our teams are observing evidence of activity consistent with password-related attacks, such as brute-force login attempts, which does not indicate exploitation of a vulnerability," a spokesperson for the company told The Hacker News. "We continue to actively monitor this situation and analyze the reported activity to determine its potential impact and identify if mitigations are necessary." The development comes after threat intelligence firm GreyNoise alerted of a spike in suspicious login scanning activity aimed at PAN-OS GlobalProtect portals. The company further noted that the activity commenced on March 17, 2025, hitting a peak of 23,958 unique IP addresses before dropping off towards the end of last month. The pattern indicates a coordinated effort to probe network defenses and identify exposed or vulnerable systems. The login scanning activity has primarily singled out systems in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Russia, and Singapore. It's currently not known how widespread these efforts are and if they are the work of any specific threat actor at this stage. The Hacker News has reached out to Palo Alto Networks for additional comments, and we will update the story if we hear back. In the interim, all customers are encouraged to ensure that they are running the latest versions of PAN-OS. Other mitigations include enforcing multi-factor authentication (MFA), configuring GlobalProtect to facilitate MFA notifications, setting up security policies to detect and block brute-force attacks, and limiting unnecessary exposure to the internet. Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter  and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post. SHARE    

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1. Sophie and Martin are at the 2012 Gordon Research Conference on the Biology of Aging in Ventura, California. It is a foggy February weekend. Both are disappointed about how little sun there is on the California beach. They are two graduate students—Sophie in her sixth and final year, Martin in his fourth—who have traveled from different East Coast cities to present posters on their work. Martin’s shows health data collected from supercentenarians compared with the general Medicare population, capturing the diseases that are less and more common in the populations. Sophie is presenting on her recently accepted first-author paper in Aging Cell on two specific genes that, when activated, extend lifespan in C. elegans roundworms, the model organism of her research.  2. Sophie walks by Martin’s poster after she is done presenting her own. She is not immediately impressed by his work. It is not published, for one thing. But she sees how it is attention-grabbing and relevant, even necessary. He has a little crowd listening to him. He notices her—a frowning girl—standing in the back and begins to talk louder, hoping she hears. “Supercentenarians are much less likely to have seven diseases,” he says, pointing to his poster. “Alzheimer’s, heart failure, diabetes, depression, prostate cancer, hip fracture, and chronic kidney disease. Though they have higher instances of four diseases, which are arthritis, cataracts, osteoporosis, and glaucoma. These aren’t linked to mortality, but they do affect quality of life.” What stands out to Sophie is the confidence in Martin’s voice, despite the unsurprising nature of the findings. She admires that sound, its sturdiness. She makes note of his name and plans to seek him out.  3. They find one another in the hotel bar among other graduate students. The students are talking about the logistics of their futures: Who is going for a postdoc, who will opt for industry, do any have job offers already, where will their research have the most impact, is it worth spending years working toward something so uncertain? They stay up too late, dissecting journal articles they’ve read as if they were debating politics. They enjoy the freedom away from their labs and PIs.  Martin says, again with that confidence, that he will become a professor. Sophie says she likely won’t go down that path. She has received an offer to start as a scientist at an aging research startup called Abyssinian Bio, after she defends. Martin says, “Wouldn’t your work make more sense in an academic setting, where you have more freedom and power over what you do?” She says, “But that could be years from now and I want to start my real life, so …”  4-18. Martin is enamored with Sophie. She is not only brilliant; she is helpful. She strengthens his papers with precise edits and grounds his arguments with stronger evidence. Sophie is enamored with Martin. He is not only ambitious; he is supportive and adventurous. He encourages her to try new activities and tools, both in and out of work, like learning to ride a motorcycle or using CRISPR. Martin visits Sophie in San Francisco whenever he can, which amounts to a weekend or two every other month. After two years, their long-distance relationship is taking its toll. They want more weekends, more months, more everything together. They make plans for him to get a postdoc near her, but after multiple rejections from the labs where he most wants to work, his resentment toward academia grows.  “They don’t see the value of my work,” he says. 19. “Join Abyssinian,” Sophie offers. The company is growing. They want more researchers with data science backgrounds. He takes the job, drawn more by their future together than by the science. 20-35. For a long time, they are happy. They marry. They do their research. They travel. Sophie visits Martin’s extended family in France. Martin goes with Sophie to her cousin’s wedding in Taipei. They get a dog. The dog dies. They are both devastated but increasingly motivated to better understand the mechanisms of aging. Maybe their next dog will have the opportunity to live longer. They do not get a next dog. Sophie moves up at Abyssinian. Despite being in industry, her work is published in well-respected journals. She collaborates well with her colleagues. Eventually, she is promoted to executive director of research.  Martin stalls at the rank of principal scientist, and though Sophie is technically his boss—or his boss’s boss—he genuinely doesn’t mind when others call him “Dr. Sophie Xie’s husband.” 40. At dinner on his 35th birthday, a friend jokes that Martin is now middle-aged. Sophie laughs and agrees, though she is older than Martin. Martin joins in the laughter, but this small comment unlocks a sense of urgency inside him. What once felt hypothetical—his own death, the death of his wife—now appears very close. He can feel his wrinkles forming.   First come the subtle shifts in how he talks about his research and Abyssinian’s work. He wants to “defeat” and “obliterate” aging, which he comes to describe as humankind’s “greatest adversary.”  43. He begins taking supplements touted by tech influencers. He goes on a calorie-restricted diet. He gets weekly vitamin IV sessions. He looks into blood transfusions from young donors, but Sophie tells him to stop with all the fake science. She says he’s being ridiculous, that what he’s doing could be dangerous.   Martin, for the first time, sees Sophie differently. Not without love, but love burdened by an opposing weight, what others might recognize as resentment. Sophie is dedicated to the demands of her growing department. Martin thinks she is not taking the task of living longer seriously enough. He does not want her to die. He does not want to die.  Nobody at Abyssinian is taking the task of living longer seriously enough. Of all the aging bio startups he could have ended up at, how has he ended up at one with such modest—no, lazy—goals? He begins publicly dismissing basic research as “too slow” and “too limited,” which offends many of his and Sophie’s colleagues.  Sophie defends him, says he is still doing good work, despite the evidence. She is busy, traveling often for conferences, and mistakenly misclassifies the changes in Martin’s attitude as temporary outliers. 44. One day, during a meeting, Martin says to Jerry, a well-­respected scientist at Abyssinian and in the electron microscopy imaging community at large, that EM is an outdated, old, crusty technology. Martin says it is stupid to use it when there are more advanced, cutting-edge methods, like cryo-EM and super-resolution microscopy. Martin has always been outspoken, but this instance veers into rudeness.  At home, Martin and Sophie argue. Initially, they argue about whether tools of the past can be useful to their work. Then the argument morphs. What is the true purpose of their research? Martin says it’s called anti-aging research for a reason: It’s to defy aging! Sophie says she’s never called her work anti-aging research; she calls it aging research or research into the biology of aging. And Abyssinian’s overarching mission is more simply to find druggable targets for chronic and age-related diseases. Occasionally, the company’s marketing arm will push out messaging about extending the human lifespan by 20 years, but that has nothing to do with scientists like them in R&D. Martin seethes. Only 20 years! What about hundreds? Thousands?  45-49. They continue to argue and the arguments are roundabout, typically ending with Sophie crying, absconding to her sister’s house, and the two of them not speaking for short periods of time. 50. What hurts Sophie most is Martin’s persistent dismissal of death as merely an engineering problem to be solved. Sophie thinks of the ways the C. elegans she observes regulate their lifespans in response to environmental stress. The complex dance of genes and proteins that orchestrates their aging process. In the previous month’s experiment, a seemingly simple mutation produced unexpected effects across three generations of worms. Nature’s complexity still humbles her daily. There is still so much unknown.  Martin is at the kitchen counter, methodically crushing his evening supplements into powder. “I’m trying to save humanity. And all you want to do is sit in the lab to watch worms die.” 50. Martin blames the past. He realizes he should have tried harder to become a professor. Let Sophie make the industry money—he could have had academic clout. Professor Warwick. It would have had a nice sound to it. To his dismay, everyone in his lab calls him Martin. Abyssinian has a first-name policy. Something about flat hierarchies making for better collaboration. Good ideas could come from anyone, even a lowly, unintelligent senior associate scientist in Martin’s lab who barely understands how to process a data set. A great idea could come from anyone at all—except him, apparently. Sophie has made that clear. 51-59. They live in a tenuous peace for some time, perfecting the art of careful scheduling: separate coffee times, meetings avoided, short conversations that stick to the day-to-day facts of their lives. 60. Then Martin stands up to interrupt a presentation by the VP of research to announce that studying natural aging is pointless since they will soon eliminate it entirely. While Jerry may have shrugged off Martin’s aggressiveness, the VP does not. This leads to a blowout fight between Martin and many of his colleagues, in which Martin refuses to apologize and calls them all shortsighted idiots.  Sophie watches with a mixture of fear and awe. Martin thinks: Can’t she, my wife, just side with me this once?  61. Back at home: Martin at the kitchen counter, methodically crushing his evening supplements into powder. “I’m trying to save humanity.” He taps the powder into his protein shake with the precision of a scientist measuring reagents. “And all you want to do is sit in the lab to watch worms die.” Sophie observes his familiar movements, now foreign in their desperation. The kitchen light catches the silver spreading at his temples and on his chin—the very evidence of aging he is trying so hard to erase. “That’s not true,” she says. Martin gulps down his shake. “What about us? What about children?” Martin coughs, then laughs, a sound that makes Sophie flinch. “Why would we have children now? You certainly don’t have the time. But if we solve aging, which I believe we can, we’d have all the time in the world.” “We used to talk about starting a family.” “Any children we have should be born into a world where we already know they never have to die.” “We could both make the time. I want to grow old together—” All Martin hears are promises that lead to nothing, nowhere.   “You want us to deteriorate? To watch each other decay?” “I want a real life.” “So you’re choosing death. You’re choosing limitation. Mediocrity.” 64. Martin doesn’t hear from his wife for four days, despite texting her 16 times—12 too many, by his count. He finally breaks down enough to call her in the evening, after a couple of glasses of aged whisky (a gift from a former colleague, which Martin has rarely touched and kept hidden in the far back of a desk drawer).  Voicemail. And after this morning’s text, still no glimmering ellipsis bubble to indicate Sophie’s typing.  66. Forget her, he thinks, leaning back in his Steelcase chair, adjusted specifically for his long runner’s legs and shorter­-than-average torso. At 39, Martin’s spreadsheets of vitals now show an upward trajectory; proof of his ability to reverse his biological age. Sophie does not appreciate this. He stares out his office window, down at the employees crawling around Abyssinian Bio’s main quad. How small, he thinks. How significantly unaware of the future’s true possibilities. Sophie is like them.  67. Forget her, he thinks again as he turns down a bay toward Robert, one of his struggling postdocs, who is sitting at his bench staring at his laptop. As Martin approaches, Robert minimizes several windows, leaving only his home screen behind. “Where are you at with the NAD+ data?” Martin asks. Robert shifts in his chair to face Martin. The skin of his neck grows red and splotchy. Martin stares at it in disgust. “Well?” he asks again.  “Oh, I was told not to work on that anymore?” The boy has a tendency to speak in the lilt of questions.  “By who?” Martin demands. “Uh, Sophie?”  “I see. Well, I expect new data by end of day.”  “Oh, but—” Martin narrows his eyes. The red splotches on Robert’s neck grow larger.  “Um, okay,” the boy says, returning his focus to the computer.  Martin decides a response is called for … 70. Immortality Promise I am immortal. This doesn’t make me special. In fact, most people on Earth are immortal. I am 6,000 years old. Now, 6,000 years of existence give one a certain perspective. I remember back when genetic engineering and knowledge about the processes behind aging were still in their infancy. Oh, how people argued and protested. “It’s unethical!” “We’ll kill the Earth if there’s no death!” “Immortal people won’t be motivated to do anything! We’ll become a useless civilization living under our AI overlords!”  I believed back then, and now I know. Their concerns had no ground to stand on. Eternal life isn’t even remarkable anymore, but being among its architects and early believers still garners respect from the world. The elegance of my team’s solution continues to fill me with pride. We didn’t just halt aging; we mastered it. My cellular machinery hums with an efficiency that would make evolution herself jealous. Those early protesters—bless their mortal, no-longer-­beating hearts—never grasped the biological imperative of what we were doing. Nature had already created functionally immortal organisms—the hydra, certain jellyfish species, even some plants. We simply perfected what evolution had sketched out. The supposed ethical concerns melted away once people understood that we weren’t defying nature. We were fulfilling its potential. Today, those who did not want to be immortal aren’t around. Simple as that. Those who are here do care about the planet more than ever! There are almost no diseases, and we’re all very productive people. Young adults—or should I say young-looking adults—are naturally restless and energetic. And with all this life, you have the added benefit of not wasting your time on a career you might hate! You get to try different things and find out what you’re really good at and where you’re appreciated! Life is not short! Resources are plentiful! Of course, biological immortality doesn’t equal invincibility. People still die. Just not very often. My colleagues in materials science developed our modern protective exoskeletons. They’re elegant solutions, though I prefer to rely on my enhanced reflexes and reinforced skeletal structure most days.  The population concerns proved mathematically unfounded. Stable reproduction rates emerged naturally once people realized they had unlimited time to start families. I’ve had four sets of children across 6,000 years, each born when I felt truly ready to pass on another iteration of my accumulated knowledge. With more life, people have much more patience.  Now we are on to bigger and more ambitious projects. We conquered survival of individuals. The next step: survival of our species in this universe. The sun’s eventual death poses an interesting challenge, but nothing we can’t handle. We have colonized five planets and two moons in our solar system, and we will colonize more. Humanity will adapt to whatever environment we encounter. That’s what we do. My ancient motorcycle remains my favorite indulgence. I love taking it for long cruises on the old Earth roads that remain intact. The neural interface is state-of-the-art, of course. But mostly I keep it because it reminds me of earlier times, when we thought death was inevitable and life was limited to a single planet. The future stretches out before us like an infinity I helped create—yet another masterpiece in the eternal gallery of human evolution. 71. Martin feels better after writing it out. He rereads it a couple times, feels even better. Then he has the idea to send his writing to the department administrator. He asks her to create a new tab on his lab page, titled “Immortality Promise,” and to post his piece there. That will get his message across to Sophie and everyone at Abyssinian.  72. Sophie’s boss, Ray, is the first to email her. The subject line: “martn” [sic]. No further words in the body. Ray is known to be short and blunt in all his communications, but his meaning is always clear. They’ve had enough conversations about Martin by then. She is already in the process of slowly shutting down his projects, has been ignoring his texts and calls because of this. Now she has to move even faster.  73. Sophie leaves her office and goes into the lab. As an executive, she is not expected to do experiments, but watching a thousand tiny worms crawl across their agar plates soothes her. Each of the ones she now looks at carries a fluorescent marker she designed to track mitochondrial dynamics during aging. The green glow pulses with their movements, like stars blinking in a microscopic galaxy. She spent years developing this strain of C. elegans, carefully selecting for longevity without sacrificing health. The worms that lived longest weren’t always the healthiest—a truth about aging that seemed to elude Martin. Those worms taught her more about the genuine complexity of aging. Just last week, she observed something unexpected: The mitochondrial networks in her long-lived strains showed subtle patterns of reorganization never documented before. The discovery felt intimate, like being trusted with a secret. “How are things looking?” Jerry appears beside her. “That new strain expressing the dual markers?” Sophie nods, adjusting the focus. “Look at this network pattern. It’s different from anything in the literature.” She shifts aside so Jerry can see. This is what she loves about science: the genuine puzzles, the patient observation, the slow accumulation of knowledge that, while far removed from a specific application, could someday help people age with dignity. “Beautiful,” Jerry murmurs. He straightens. “I heard about Martin’s … post.” Sophie closes her eyes for a moment, the image of the mitochondrial networks still floating in her vision. She’s read Martin’s “Immortality Promise” piece three times, each more painful than the last. Not because of its grandiose claims—those were comically disconnected from reality—but because of what it’s revealed about her husband. The writing pulsed with a frightening certainty, a complete absence of doubt or wonder. Gone was the scientist who once spent many lively evenings debating with her about the evolutionary purpose of aging, who delighted in being proved wrong because it meant learning something new.  74. She sees in his words a man who has abandoned the fundamental principles of science. His piece reads like a religious text or science fiction story, casting himself as the hero. He isn’t pursuing research anymore. He hasn’t been for a long time.  She wonders how and when he arrived there. The change in Martin didn’t take place overnight. It was gradual, almost imperceptible—not unlike watching someone age. It wasn’t easy to notice if you saw the person every day; Sophie feels guilty for not noticing. Then again, she read a new study out a few months ago from Stanford researchers that found people do not age linearly but in spurts—specifically, around 44 and 60. Shifts in the body lead to sudden accelerations of change. If she’s honest with herself, she knew this was happening to Martin, to their relationship. But she chose to ignore it, give other problems precedence. Now it is too late. Maybe if she’d addressed the conditions right before the spike—but how? wasn’t it inevitable?—he would not have gone from scientist to fanatic. 75. “You’re giving the keynote at next month’s Gordon conference,” Jerry reminds her, pulling her back to reality. “Don’t let this overshadow that.” She manages a small smile. Her work has always been methodical, built on careful observation and respect for the fundamental mysteries of biology. The keynote speech represents more than five years of research: countless hours of guiding her teams, of exciting discussions among her peers, of watching worms age and die, of documenting every detail of their cellular changes. It is one of the biggest honors of her career. There is poetry in it, she thinks—in the collisions between discoveries and failures.  76. The knock on her office door comes at 2:45. Linda from HR, right on schedule. Sophie walks with her to conference room B2, two floors below, where Martin’s group resides. Through the glass walls of each lab, they see scientists working at their benches. One adjusts a microscope’s focus. Another pipettes clear liquid into rows of tubes. Three researchers point at data on a screen. Each person is investigating some aspect of aging, one careful experiment at a time. The work will continue, with or without Martin. In the conference room, Sophie opens her laptop and pulls up the folder of evidence. She has been collecting it for months. Martin’s emails to colleagues, complaints from collaborators and direct reports, and finally, his “Immortality Promise” piece. The documentation is thorough, organized chronologically. She has labeled each file with dates and brief descriptions, as she would for any other data. 77. Martin walks in at 3:00. Linda from HR shifts in her chair. Sophie is the one to hand the papers over to Martin; this much she owes him. They contain words like “termination” and “effective immediately.” Martin’s face complicates itself when he looks them over. Sophie hands over a pen and he signs quickly.   He stands, adjusts his shirt cuffs, and walks to the door. He turns back. “I’ll prove you wrong,” he says, looking at Sophie. But what stands out to her is the crack in his voice on the last word.  Sophie watches him leave. She picks up the signed papers and hands them to Linda, and then walks out herself.  Alexandra Chang is the author of Days of Distraction and Tomb Sweeping and is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree. She lives in Camarillo, California.

Photo of the CLT roof at Vitsœ's Leamington Spa headquarters Source:&nbsp Dirk Lindner Waugh Thistleton has won a High Court case brought by a former client which sued the practice over a rotted timber roof Furniture manufacturer Vitsœ had sought £4 million in damages from Waugh Thistleton, the delivery architect for its 3,677m² factory-and-office complex in Leamington Spa, which completed in 2017. Vitsœ blamed the practice for rotted cross-laminated timber (CLT) roof panels which needed replacing.  But following a court case held over several days in January, deputy high court judge Martin Bowdery dismissed the claims, ruling that Waugh Thistleton was ‘not liable to the claimant as alleged, or at all’. The High Court heard that the rotten roof panels had become too wet during construction. Although a roof covering had been due to be installed just two weeks after completion of the timber structure, delays meant the panels were exposed for several months over the winter of 2016/17. When the roof covering was eventually installed, a vapour control layer locked in the moisture. Advertisement Vitsoe had alleged that Waugh Thistleton breached its contract by failing to provide a moisture content control plan (MCCP); failing to recommend a temporary protective roof; and failing to act when construction did not take place according to the planned timetable.  However, Bowdery found ‘there was no obligation upon [Waugh Thistleton] to undertake a MCCP or risk assessment’, adding that the architect provided ‘a suitable and robust specification’ which would have prevented problems with excess water if complied with.  He also found that ‘close sequencing [of construction works was] a suitable and appropriate method of moisture protection’ and that ‘there was nothing about this project that meant a temporary roof was required’.  He added: ‘The programming of the construction of the roof was not the defendant’s responsibility. The protection of the roof works was not the defendant’s responsibility. The supervision and management of the trade contractors was not the defendant’s responsibility.’  Bowdery also said Waugh Thistleton was not responsible for monitoring the moisture content of the CLT panels. He said it was reasonable for the architect to expect timber frame contractor Hess to do this, adding that it was ultimately the responsibility of construction manager JCA to check it was being done. Advertisement The judge also found that the architect had not failed to ‘take appropriate steps in response to the CLT being exposed to sustained rainfall around Christmas 2016’. Bowdery said: ‘The defendant’s advice before and after the Christmas 2016 break was sensible, prudent and appropriate.’  The furniture manufacturer had been seeking to recoup more than £4 million it had spent on mending its roof, including construction and consultants’ costs, as well as interest paid on two multi-million-pound loans taken out to fund the remedial work. Waugh Thistleton had always denied breaching its contract, saying that ‘the matters of which the claimant complains were the responsibility of others’. Vitsoe has been contacted for comment. Waugh Thistleton declined to comment.  2025-04-11 Will Ing comment and share

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April 10, 2025How IsResearchers are trying to understand how a common prenatal blood test called NIPT is detecting cancer in some pregnant patients. Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific AmericanSUBSCRIBE TO Science QuicklyRachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.For more than a decade noninvasive prenatal blood testing, or NIPT, has become a fairly routine aspect of pregnancy care. This testing searches a pregnant person’s blood for fragments of DNA that have been shed by the placenta. NIPT is designed to spot chromosomal disorders in the fetus, but in rare cases the blood tests can detect something else: cancer in the parent.My guest today is Laura Herscher, a genetic counselor and director of student research at the Sarah Lawrence College Joan H. Marks Graduate Program in Human Genetics. She recently wrote a piece for Scientific American about the researchers working to understand how NIPT finds cancer in some pregnant people. She’s here to tell us more about the Incidental Detection of Maternal Neoplasia through Non-invasive Cell-Free DNA Analysis study, or IDENTIFY for short.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Laura, thank you so much for coming on to chat today.So you recently wrote about something called the IDENTIFY study. How did you get interested in this story?Laura Hercher: Well, the first time I heard about IDENTIFY was when the principal investigator, Diana Bianchi from, from [the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development], talked about her initial results, which was just about a year ago—it was, like, March of 2024. And she said that she was looking at something I had heard about, that had crossed my, you know, radar, but I really wasn’t paying that much attention, which was these weird and funky prenatal testing results, which, instead of giving back information on the fetus, unexpectedly provided information on the pregnant individual themselves. And I’d heard, somewhat almost by rumor, from prenatal genetic counselors that sometimes these oddball genetic testing results actually seem to see a signal for cancer in the mom.Feltman: Mm.Hercher: But, you know, most cancer screens, even when they’re set up to be cancer screens, the return on them is usually limited. However, in this case, she reported that they had looked at the first about 100 women that were worked up after getting these unusual results on a test that they thought was on their fetus, and almost exactly half of them had cancer.Feltman: Mm.Hercher: And you have to consider that this is a group of young individuals because they’re all of childbearing age, right?Feltman: Right.Hercher: So to see such a strong cancer signal in that population, it really blew me away. So I wanted to know more, and so I investigated into it.Feltman: Yeah, absolutely. So backing up a little bit, what is the prenatal testing here that we’re talking about, and how common is it? How many pregnant people are, are getting these tests?Hercher: Millions, so it’s quite common; at least, I would say, about 50 percent of all pregnancies today use this test. It’s called noninvasive prenatal testing—let’s just call it NIPT.So NIPT is a test that came along that sort of solved a problem from the point of view of expecting couples. The problem was that before NIPT, we offered testing for Down syndrome and other unusual chromosomal presentations in the fetus to essentially every pregnant individual, right?Feltman: Mm-hmm.Hercher: But there were sort of two types of testing. And one was amniocentesis or CVS [chorionic villus sampling], where you use a needle to get a sample from either the placenta or the amniotic fluid in the uterus, and as that probably suggests to people, it’s invasive ...Feltman: Mm.Hercher: Right? And so, not everyone was comfortable with that. And most importantly, even though it was very small, there was a risk of losing the pregnancy associated with both of those tests. So there were some—and expensive, and it’s a big deal ...Feltman: Mm-hmm.Hercher: And a lot of people would rather avoid that needle if they could.And there was another type of test, which was simply a blood test from [the] pregnant person, that looked at biomarkers associated with various chromosomal issues in the fetus. And that was an easy test and cheap but had tons of false positives.Feltman: Mm.Hercher: And in fact, you know, when I was first in this field and would see prenatal patients, they’d come in with a positive biomarker screen, and you could be quite reassuring ’cause, like, the chances were usually—always greater than not ...Feltman: Mm.Hercher: That it was nothing, right?Feltman: Right.Hercher: So that’s nice, but also, it means that a lot of people get agitated, have follow-up care, and so on, and turn out that it’s nothing. It wasn’t super popular, you know?Feltman: Right.Hercher: There was a push to look for a test that would find fetal cells in the maternal bloodstream ...Feltman: Mm.Hercher: So you could directly look at the fetal DNA, but you wouldn’t have to get into the uterus in any fashion.Feltman: Right.Hercher: Really, that’s never turned out to be possible. It’s very complicated. It’s difficult. There’s been sort of tantalizing hints, but no, it’s never been successful as a test. But what a Hong Kong–based researcher realized was that, you know, as cells die—in normal course of cell death, as cells turn over, they dump little bits of DNA into the bloodstream.Feltman: Mm.Hercher: That’s not when you’re pregnant—that’s for everybody all the time.Feltman: Right.Hercher: And this gets very rapidly cleaned up, recycled. So—and that DNA isn’t nice and neatly contained in chromosomes; it’s chopped up into little pieces like a jigsaw puzzle ...Feltman: Mm.Hercher: Which—it’s good to hold on to that image, right? And you can sequence those little pieces and then trace them back to what chromosome they came from by using the knowledge we have of the human genome like it was the picture on the cover of the box ...Feltman: Right.Hercher: When you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle, right? So you can trace it right back and figure out, “Oh, this little segment came from chromosome one; this little segment came from chromosome 10,” and so on. And those pieces should show up in the bloodstream in direct proportion to the size of the chromosome. So chromosome one is the biggest chromosome, so it should have the most pieces, right?Feltman: Mm-hmm.Hercher: Like, that’s just math. Like, if you get a good sample, that’s what the sample should look like, from the biggest to the smallest chromosome.So if you’re pregnant, a portion of that cell-free DNA, those little pieces, comes from the placenta.Feltman: Mm-hmm.Hercher: So what [Hong Kong–based researcher Dennis] Lo figured out was that you didn’t need to disentangle the fetal DNA from the maternal DNA, which is super complicated, in order to get a sense of whether the numbers were off because you could just assume that the maternal snippets of DNA would represent typical chromosomes because you know that person’s chromosomes.Feltman: Mm-hmm.Hercher: And so any deviation from the expected numbers should be coming from the fetus. So it’s super hard math. Like, it’s—you really have to be very precise. But the idea of it’s pretty straightforward, right? And it mostly works. But what it means is: there’s fewer—not zero, it’s still a screen—but there’s fewer false positives.It’s really quick, the adoption of this test—goes from zero to millions very, very fast. And then right away, rarely but regularly, we start seeing this funny thing. The funny thing [is] results where you’re seeing a signal of extra missing chromosomes—not one but multiple and you look at this report, and it’s supposed to be a report on ...Feltman: Mm-hmm.Hercher: Fetal chromosomes, and you’re like, “This fetus should not be alive.”Feltman: Right.Hercher: “This is not compatible with life.” And yet you look at the ultrasound, and there you have a happily developing fetus—looks fine, looks normal. It is what the doctors call “discordant,” right?Feltman: Mm-hmm.Hercher: It doesn’t make any sense. So we didn’t know—quite know what to make of them, and the lab started off by just sort of saying, like, “We’re turning you these results; we don’t understand them.” They came to call them “nonreportable” ...Feltman: Mm.Hercher: Which is different from sort of a “test fail—let’s do it over.” These were like, “Nope, don’t do it over. This just doesn’t work. Something’s off.”Feltman: Right.Hercher: And they didn’t know, but then they started to have, you know, incidental findings where the doctors would come back and say, “Look, six months ago I had this person come in, and they had these nonreportable results, and now I hear that this person has cancer.”Feltman: Mm.Hercher: And at first it was just the occasional anecdote, which, you know, you can’t really send a report based on an occasional anecdote. So over time they started looking into this; it became clearer that what we were getting was a signal, not from the fetus but from the mother. And it was happening not often but one in every 8,000 to 10,000 cases—which, when you have millions of tests a year, is really quite a number of people.Feltman: Yeah, it sounds like, you know, it was a long process to sort of turn the anecdata into a signal that was worth pursuing. How did the researchers in charge of this study get really interested and figure out what was going on?Hercher: Well, Diana Bianchi, who’s the principal investigator, is somebody who’s been working with this test, NIPT, really from its very beginning. And I think what Dr. Bianchi found was that there were some studies showing a pretty intriguing signal of cancer, but some of them were from the labs themselves. In the United States you have multiple labs—you have, like, 12 different labs that offer NIPT. Each one is slightly different. They’re not exactly the same. And so it was hard to get, like, one simple answer. And without a simple answer you can send a report back saying, “We’re concerned about maternal malignancy,” but is the insurance company gonna pay for that?Feltman: Mm.Hercher: It’s not validated. And also, like, were the doctors gonna take it seriously? They hadn’t seen it before. Like, there was a lot of ways for this not to be used properly ...Feltman: Right.Hercher: This information to get lost.So this group at [the National Institutes of Health] said, like, “Right, okay, we’re gonna do an objective study.” Anybody that fits those criteria—discordant results—that person, they would pay all of their expenses to come to NIH, they would give them a full and total workup, and that would allow them to see how many of them actually, if any, had cancer; what was the effective way of finding it; what type of cancers were these; so on—all these questions—and provide guidance for the labs.And they thought they were gonna find something, but what Dr. Bianchi said to me—so I said, “Were you surprised by how many?” She said, “Hell yeah, we were surprised.” I mean, almost half. And if you actually looked at it closely it said in the paper that they could further refine the signal. So when the women showed up and they actually had more than two full chromosomes missing or added, I think the numbers were 49 of them had this pattern ...Feltman: Mm.Hercher: And 47 of those people had cancer.Feltman: Wow.Hercher: So that was [a] really, really strong signal, but even in the bigger group, you know, they were seeing. And there were other things: Sometimes people had fibroids. Sometimes the test was wrong, and, you know. Sometimes there were other things. Sometimes there’s people that they think, like, “Well, we don’t know. We gotta follow those people out. Maybe we just can’t find it yet,” you know?Feltman: Mm.Hercher: But really a lot of them already had cancer, and essentially they either had no symptoms or they had symptoms that were easily mistaken for pregnancy.Feltman: Right. Something that really struck me in your piece was—and I’m definitely oversimplifying this—but you got into sort of the idea that in medicine people are very uncomfortable about the idea of pregnant people with cancer and it’s a very fraught topic and how maybe that contributed somewhat to the disconnect between the many pieces here as this data was coming together. Could you talk a little bit more about that?Hercher: Sure, I think there’s different pieces to it. One is simply, as Dr. Bianchi said, there’s sort of a lot of history around the idea of, like, “Don’t touch pregnant people,” you know?Feltman: Mm.Hercher: It’s not comfortable. And, you know, medicine’s quite siloed, so the OB-GYN’s not super comfortable having patients who have cancer or might have cancer. How does he work that up? It really requires them to go out and find oncologists who they would be able to explain this to, right?Feltman: Mm-hmm.Hercher: Because this isn’t some way that some—you know, show up and they’re like, “Well, they have no symptoms.”Feltman: Right.Hercher: “There’s no particular reason except I have this funky test result, and we have no idea what cancer this might be.” I mean, it’s a very odd presentation ...Feltman: Sure.Hercher: Right? And the oncologists are obviously not used to working with pregnant people.We talked to one person who had this experience—I talked to one woman who showed up for her prenatal results session, and the geneticist she was talking to said, “Well, actually, you know, we think this signal is coming from you.” And she almost didn’t follow up on it because, she said, “I felt great.”Feltman: Right.Hercher: “I actually, you know, had never been in better shape in my life. I was like, ‘That’s crazy. I’m fine. Like, I thought you were gonna say there’s something about the fetus.’” And the person kind of said, “Look, go get the workup.” So she did. And to her shock and horror they found a fairly large and aggressive lymphoma, and she had to be treated during her pregnancy. She had her last chemotherapy treatment two weeks before she gave birth, and she said that she was really lucky because in Washington, [D.C.], she was able to find a, a center where they could do coordinated care. And for her that meant that, you know, OB would send somebody over every time she had an infusion to just check on the baby’s heartbeat, make sure it was okay. You know, there was constant communication back and forth. And obviously not everybody’s going to have that available, and it can be scary and uncomfortable.Beyond that there’s a whole other layer of this story, which is that people who discover their—have cancer during a pregnancy, there are times when appropriate care means discussing terminating the pregnancy because that may result in a better outcome. That doesn’t mean that they have to do it or they’re—that’s the option they’re gonna choose, but in the situation where best outcomes are associated with treatment that can only be undertaken if a person is not pregnant ...Feltman: Mm-hmm.Hercher: Then that’s a discussion the oncologist needs to have. But that’s one of the areas where we’ve seen, since 2022, that exceptions are really challenging in stringent antiabortion laws.Feltman: Right.Hercher: Because very often the doctor is caught in a bind where the standard of care would be to present that as one of the options, but the law may say you’re not allowed to present that as an option unless the person is literally dying, and, you know, in oncology that’s not the way that’s gonna look. What’s it gonna look like is: What are your chances of being alive in five years? What are your chances of being alive to raise this child?And so the laws weren’t written by the doctors, they don’t really have a lot of flexibility or nuance in them, and in those cases oncologists can be really in a bind. And so this test, which doesn’t identify, you know—there’s not more people getting cancer because of the test, but what it’s really doing is: the early identification is moving people that would maybe be diagnosed with cancer a month, two months, six months, two years later, that’s happening earlier on and while they’re pregnant.Feltman: Right.Hercher: So it just creates more of these sort of difficult and conflictual situations.Feltman: Yeah, well, and, you know, with the average age of pregnancy being higher and, of course, seeing these upticks in cancer in, in younger cohorts, you know, is there concern that this is an issue we need to get better at handling in, in general? The idea of people having cancers diagnosed during pregnancy?Hercher: Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, all over the world, the average age at which people have children is increasing, and, you know, cancer’s a—direct, in a linear fashion, associated with older age. So we do have more—our numbers of what percentage of women who are pregnant will present with cancer are out-of-date. So it’s definitely a rare thing, but it’s an increasing rare thing.And the other thing, which Dr. Bianchi really stressed, is: we are also getting better at being able to treat people while they’re pregnant.Feltman: Mm.Hercher: We can do more of it than we thought. She told me—I thought this was really striking—she told me that, particularly, there was a group in Belgium that’s been very active about looking at this and, like, being creative about the ways to treat, and one of the problems they have is the dye that you use when you do this test to look for tumors, the contrast dye, was toxic for people who are pregnant, and they found that by getting them to drink a whole lot of pineapple juice, that worked as well ...Feltman: Wow, yeah.Hercher: So, you know, they’re finding that things that maybe they thought they couldn’t do, they really can do, and it really, really emphasizes the need to not lose these people ...Feltman: Mm.Hercher: To make sure that they are found when they can be found. I mean, a number that really stuck with me from this: of those 47 individuals with cancer, by the time they went to press with this article, six of those—remember, relatively young—people were dead.Feltman: Wow.Hercher: Yeah, so these were not a series of trivial or meaningless findings. The most common finding was lymphoma. The second-most common finding was [colorectal] cancer, which, separately but relatedly, is on the rise in younger adults in America today.So there are a lot of trends kind of, like, weaving their way in and out of this story. It was one of the ones that I found it so interesting to write about. It’s an important finding on its own, but it’s also something you have to situate within the context of what’s happening in the United States, right? And it, it asks us to, you know, work outside of silos and be really smart and really, you know intervene, and it’s yet another thing where I’m worried about the fractures in our health care. ’Cause right now they had an answer, they have resources for people in this position ...Feltman: Mm.Hercher: They’re like, “You should go to the IDENTIFY study.” They will fly you to NIH, cover all of your costs. But when the study goes away how many of these people are gonna have to really fight with their insurance companies ...Feltman: Yeah.Hercher: To get this covered? And if not, is it just gonna be, you know, like, if you have money to pay for it out of pocket, are you going to be able to get this care but otherwise not, you know?So I really wanna shine some light on this. I hope that people see the importance of, A, responding to these findings with an appropriate workup and, B, that they should be covered.Feltman: Yeah, absolutely.Thank you so much for taking the time to come on and, and tell us a little bit about your article. I definitely encourage our, our listeners to check it out in full on SciAm.com.Hercher: Thanks, it was a pleasure to be here.Feltman: That’s all for today’s episode. We’ll be back with our usual news roundup on Monday.Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great weekend!

Black Mirror may show us a variety of near-future dystopias, but at least those unfortunate to live through one of them can play Balatro. Read more

You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you're reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games here While PS Plus April 2025 has been stellar with the excellent Essential games, the addition of the best reviewed game of 2025 so far, and even more Extra and Premium experiences set to arrive, there has been a bit of bummer news in the announcement of price increases. Sony announced subscription increases for 15 countries, and now Sony has confirmed even more countries getting hit with PS Plus increases very soon. PS Plus price increases coming to even more countries PS Plus price increases are starting on April 16th for new subscribers, meanwhile, the price changes will come into effect for current subscribers at your next billing date after June 24th. The following additional countries have been confirmed to receive price increases for each of the three tiers: Australia South Korea Southeast AsiaSingaporeMalaysiaThailand Indonesia Below are the new subscription prices for Australia per Press-Start AU: PlayStation Plus Essential: 1 month: $12.95 AUD (previously $11.95 AUD) 3 months: $35.95 AUD (previously $33.95 AUD) 12 months: $102.95 AUD (previously $95.95 AUD) PlayStation Plus Extra: 1 month: $20.95 AUD (previously $18.95 AUD) 3 months: $59.95 AUD (previously $54.95 AUD) 12 months: $187.95 AUD (previously $169.95 AUD) PlayStation Plus Deluxe: 1 month: $23.95 AUD (previously $21.95 AUD) 3 months: $70.95 AUD (previously $63.95 AUD) 12 months: $214.95 AUD (previously $196.95 AUD) As for South Korea, below is what’s listed on the Korean PlayStation blog post: Essential Plan:   1 month 10,800 won 3 months 28,400 won 12 months 86,400 won Special Plan: 1 month 16,200 won 3 months 46,000 won 12 months 145,800 won Deluxe Plan: 1 month 19,000 won 3 months 54,000 won 12 months 171,000 won Lastly, below are the new prices for Southeast Asia: PlayStation Plus Essential 1 Month Subscription: SGD 10.90 | RM 35 | THB 270 | Rp 126,000 3-Month Subscription: SGD 28.90 | RM 95 | THB 720 | Rp 331,000 12-Month Subscription: SGD 88.90 | RM 285 | THB 2,200 | Rp 1,010,000 PlayStation Plus Extra 1 Month Subscription: SGD 15.90 | RM 55 | THB 410 | Rp 189,000 3-Month Subscription: SGD 44.90 | RM 155 | THB 1,170 | Rp 536,000 12-Month Subscription: SGD 142.90 | RM 490 | THB 3,720 | Rp 1,710,000 PlayStation Plus Deluxe 1 Month Subscription: SGD 18.90 | RM 65 | THB 480 | Rp 221,000 3-Month Subscription: SGD 53.90 | RM 185 | THB 1,380 | Rp 632,000 12-Month Subscription: SGD 169.90 | RM 575 | THB 4,350 | Rp 1,990,000 Check out the other 15-countries to see if you will be impacted by PS Plus price increases, too. If you are in any of the set to be affected countries and you are not yet subscribed, we’d recommend subscribing before the price increases come into place. In other PS Plus news, Sony has confirmed a mega-day one release for summer from Max Payne developer, Remedy. Related Topics PS Plus Subscribe to our newsletters! By subscribing, you agree to our Privacy Policy and may receive occasional deal communications; you can unsubscribe anytime. Share

Here's an overview of the most recent Blender jobs on Blender Artists, ArtStation and 3djobs.xyz: Braintrust | 3D Artist Generalist - Community Labs Motion Recruitment | Technical Artist – 3D Robotics Simulation Unreal Engine Cinematic Artist (Ontario) Character design and sculpting WarmCerealGames | 3D Environmental Artist Finite Games Studio | 3D Game Character Artist Funko [...] Source

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