May 14, 2025Ravie LakshmananEndpoint Security / Vulnerability Microsoft on Tuesday shipped fixes to address a total of 78 security flaws across its software lineup, including a set of five zero-days that have come under active exploitation in the wild. Of the 78 flaws resolved by the tech giant, 11 are rated Critical, 66 are rated Important, and one is rated Low in severity. Twenty-eight of these vulnerabilities lead to remote code execution, 21 of them are privilege escalation bugs, and 16 others are classified as information disclosure flaws. The updates are in addition to eight more security defects patched by the company in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of last month's Patch Tuesday update. The five vulnerabilities that have come under active exploitation in the wild are listed below - CVE-2025-30397 (CVSS score: 7.5) - Scripting Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerability CVE-2025-30400 (CVSS score: 7.8) - Microsoft Desktop Window Manager (DWM) Core Library Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2025-32701 (CVSS score: 7.8) - Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) Driver Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2025-32706 (CVSS score: 7.8) - Windows Common Log File System Driver Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2025-32709 (CVSS score: 7.8) - Windows Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability While the first three flaws have been credited to Microsoft's own threat intelligence team, Benoit Sevens of Google Threat Intelligence Group and the CrowdStrike Advanced Research Team have been acknowledged for the discovery of CVE-2025-32706. An anonymous researcher has been credited with reporting CVE-2025-32709. "Another zero-day vulnerability has been identified in the Microsoft Scripting Engine, a key component used by Internet Explorer and Internet Explorer mode in Microsoft Edge," Alex Vovk, CEO and co-founder of Action1, said about CVE-2025-30397. "Attackers can exploit the flaw via a malicious web page or script that causes the scripting engine to misinterpret object types, resulting in memory corruption and arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user. If the user has administrative privileges, attackers could gain full system control – enabling data theft, malware installation, and lateral movement across networks." CVE-2025-30400 is the third privilege escalation flaw in DWM Core Library to be weaponized in the wild since 2023. In May 2024, Microsoft issued patches for CVE-2024-30051, which Kaspersky said was used in attacks distributing QakBot (aka Qwaking Mantis) malware. "Since 2022, Patch Tuesday has addressed 26 elevation of privilege vulnerabilities in DWM," Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "In fact, the April 2025 release included fixes for five DWM Core Library elevation of privilege vulnerabilities. Prior to CVE-2025-30400, only two DWM elevation of privilege bugs were exploited as zero days – CVE-2024-30051 in 2024 and CVE-2023-36033 in 2023." CVE-2025-32701 and CVE-2025-32706 are the seventh and eighth privilege escalation flaws to be discovered in the CLFS component and have been exploited in real-world attacks since 2022. Last month, Microsoft revealed that CVE-2025-29824 was exploited in limited attacks to target companies in the U.S., Venezuela, Spain, and Saudi Arabia. CVE-2025-29824 is also said to have been exploited as a zero-day by threat actors linked to the Play ransomware family as part of an attack targeting an unnamed organization in the U.S., Broadcom-owned Symantec revealed earlier this month. CVE-2025-32709, likewise, is the third privilege escalation flaw in the Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock component to have come under abuse within a span of a year, after CVE-2024-38193 and CVE-2025-21418. It's worth noting that the exploitation of CVE-2024-38193 has been attributed to the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group. The development has prompted the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to add all five vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, requiring federal agencies to apply the fixes by June 3, 2025. Microsoft's Patch Tuesday update also addresses a privilege escalation bug in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint for Linux (CVE-2025-26684, CVSS score: 6.7) that could permit an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally. Stratascale researcher Rich Mirch, who is one of the two researchers, acknowledged for reporting the vulnerability, said the issue is rooted in a Python helper script that includes a function ("grab_java_version()") to determine the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) version. "The function determines the location of the Java binary on disk by checking the /proc/<PID>/exe symbolic link and then executes the java -version command," Mirch explained. "The problem is the Java binary could be running from an untrusted location. A malicious local unprivileged user can create a process with the name java or javaw, which will eventually be executed with root privileges to determine the version of the JRE." Another notable flaw is a spoofing vulnerability affecting Microsoft Defender for Identity (CVE-2025-26685, CVSS score: 6.5) that allows an attacker with LAN access to perform spoofing over an adjacent network. "The lateral movement path detection feature can itself potentially be exploited by an adversary to obtain an NTLM hash," Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7, said in a statement. "The compromised credentials in this case would be those of the Directory Services account, and exploitation relies on achieving fallback from Kerberos to NTLM." The vulnerability with the maximum-severity is CVE-2025-29813 (CVSS score: 10.0), a privilege escalation flaw in Azure DevOps Server that allows an unauthorized attacker to elevate privileges over a network. Microsoft said the shortcoming has been already deployed in the cloud and there is no action required on the part of customers. Software Patches from Other Vendors In addition to Microsoft, security updates have also been released by other vendors over the past few weeks to rectify several vulnerabilities, including — Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter  and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post. SHARE     Source: https://thehackernews.com/2025/05/microsoft-fixes-78-flaws-5-zero-days.html #microsoft #fixes #flaws #zerodays #exploited #cvss #bug #impacts #azure #devops #server

Warning: contains spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale season six episode eight “Exodus”. In the early days of The Handmaid’s Tale, the pre-Gilead flashback episodes were eagerly awaited. Who was June Osborne before she was captured and enslaved? Who had Commander and Mrs Waterford been before they played a part in the coup that destroyed America? It took three seasons before we saw one of the show’s most anticipated flashbacks – that of Aunt Lydia. Before Gilead, had its cruel enforcer been a prison warden? An army captain? A police officer? Nothing so authoritarian: Lydia Clements was an elementary school teacher with a background working in family law. She’d been married, we learned, but it hadn’t worked out and now she lived alone and relied on her faith for comfort and self-esteem. In flashback, we saw Lydia befriend Noelle, the single mother of one of her pupils, and allow herself to be pushed into the dating world at her young friend’s encouragement. Humiliated by a romantic rejection from a colleague, Lydia lashed out and reported Noelle to the authorities as an unfit parent, sending her son into foster care. Foreshadowing her role in Gilead, Lydia told herself that she had acted out of love, saved the child, and put his wayward mother on the path to salvation. Love has always been Lydia’s purported motivation. Love for God and for the tainted-but-redeemable souls of her “girls” has been her justification for meting out acts of outrageous cruelty. Having Janine blinded, or Emily mutilated, or June tortured, were all done for the girls’ own good, Lydia told herself. Everything she did was for the righteous love of the lord, as hallowed by the holy republic of Gilead. Now, in season six, Lydia has made a move that was genuinely motivated by love. When she arrived unexpectedly at Serena Joy and Commander Wharton’s wedding and discovered the Handmaids mid-rebellion, June asked her not to further punish the women, but to let them escape. Deep down, said June, Lydia must know that the Handmaid system was glorified rape, and that the women and girls she had delivered to the Commanders over the years did not deserve their abuse. It wasn’t until Lydia’s “special girl” Janine entered to make her appeal that Lydia finally thawed. She apologised for sending Janine into the home of the abusive Commander Bell, held her, and let the women leave. Speaking to US Weekly, actor Ann Dowd explains that Aunt Lydia is where she is “because she loves Janine as her daughter.” Lydia clearly saw similarities between Janine – who was also a young single mother – and Noelle in their early interactions, and over six seasons, has come to a genuine, familial love for Madeline Brewer’s character. Lydia is “a softer human being,” says Dowd, “because she has come to love in a real way – Janine and the girls.” Co-showrunner Yahlin Chang agrees. “In that moment, she can’t see what to do other than let them go. She does it out of love for Janine. She just goes over to Janine and says, ‘I’m sorry I hurt you.’” As the Handmaids, led by June, Janine and Moira, leave the Red Centre, Aunt Lydia sinks to her knees. “She understands what she’s done,” Dowd tells US Weekly. “She can’t bear it. I’m sure she’s begging for forgiveness. She’s not going to deny anything. When it comes to what she’s done, she would do it again.” We leave her praying for divine help. And she’s going to need it, according to co-showrunner Eric Tuchman, who told US Weekly: “Now we know she’s made that decision to liberate the Handmaids. She’s aligned with them in the eyes of Gilead. She has betrayed her duties to Gilead, so I can’t spoil what happens with her, but she’s on very shaky ground moving forward.” Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! The Handmaid’s Tale streams on Hulu on Tuesdays in the US, and airs on Channel 4 on Saturdays in the UK. Source: https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/aunt-lydia-decision-handmaids-tale-down-to-love-ann-dowd/ #aunt #lydias #decision #the #handmaids #tale #all #down #love #says #ann #dowd

May 14, 2025Ravie LakshmananVulnerability / Network Security Fortinet has patched a critical security flaw that it said has been exploited as a zero-day in attacks targeting FortiVoice enterprise phone systems. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-32756, carries a CVSS score of 9.6 out of 10.0. "A stack-based overflow vulnerability [CWE-121] in FortiVoice, FortiMail, FortiNDR, FortiRecorder, and FortiCamera may allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code or commands via crafted HTTP requests," the company said in an advisory. The company said it observed the flaw being exploited in the wild on FortiVoice systems, but did not disclose the scale of the attacks and the identity of the threat actors behind them. It further noted that the threat actor performed device network scans, erased system crash logs, and enabled fcgi debugging to log credentials from the system or SSH login attempts. The issue affects the following products and versions - FortiCamera 1.1, 2.0 (Migrate to a fixed release) FortiCamera 2.1.x (Upgrade to 2.1.4 or above) FortiMail 7.0.x (Upgrade to 7.0.9 or above) FortiMail 7.2.x (Upgrade to 7.2.8 or above) FortiMail 7.4.x (Upgrade to 7.4.5 or above) FortiMail 7.6.x (Upgrade to 7.6.3 or above) FortiNDR 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 7.1 (Migrate to a fixed release) FortiNDR 7.0.x (Upgrade to 7.0.7 or above) FortiNDR 7.2.x (Upgrade to 7.2.5 or above) FortiNDR 7.4.x (Upgrade to 7.4.8 or above) FortiNDR 7.6.x (Upgrade to 7.6.1 or above) FortiRecorder 6.4.x (Upgrade to 6.4.6 or above) FortiRecorder 7.0.x (Upgrade to 7.0.6 or above) FortiRecorder 7.2.x (Upgrade to 7.2.4 or above) FortiVoice 6.4.x (Upgrade to 6.4.11 or above) FortiVoice 7.0.x (Upgrade to 7.0.7 or above) FortiVoice 7.2.x (Upgrade to 7.2.1 or above) Fortinet said the vulnerability was discovered by its product security team based on the threat actor activity that originated from the below IP addresses - 198.105.127.124 43.228.217.173 43.228.217.82 156.236.76.90 218.187.69.244 218.187.69.59 Users of FortiVoice, FortiMail, FortiNDR, FortiRecorder and FortiCamera are recommended to apply the necessary fixes to secure their devices from active exploitation attempts. If immediate patching is not an option, it's advised to disable the HTTP/HTTPS administrative interface as a temporary workaround. Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter  and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post. SHARE     Source: https://thehackernews.com/2025/05/fortinet-patches-cve-2025-32756-zero.html #fortinet #patches #cve202532756 #zeroday #rce #flaw #exploited #fortivoice #systems

A newly described creature from the Cambrian period is putting a bizarre twist on what we thought we knew about early animal evolution. Meet Mosura fentoni—a three-eyed, clawed, and flappy-limbed predator about the size of your finger, recently identified from Canada’s famed Burgess Shale. The alien-looking animal is part of a group called radiodonts, a now-extinct lineage of arthropods best known for Anomalocaris, a three-foot-long (one-meter-long) sea terror with spiny limbs and a circular mouth full of teeth. Like its cousins, Mosura had a similar feeding disk and paddle-like limbs for swimming. But it also had a strange surprise out back: a tail-like segment of 16 tightly packed body sections, each lined with gills. The Royal Society Open Science published the team’s description of the creature today. “As much as we learn about radiodonts, there always seems to be something new and surprising about this group around the corner,” said study lead author Joe Moysiuk, curator at the Manitoba Museum, in an email to Gizmodo. “The ‘abdomen’ in Mosura is different in that its segments are small and they have only tiny flaps that would have been basically useless for propulsion.” The researchers aren’t totally sure why Mosura needed this extra breathing real estate, but it could be related to how or where it lived—maybe hanging out in low-oxygen environments in the lively Cambrian seas, or leading an especially active lifestyle. A life reconstruction of the radiodont. Illustration: Art by Danielle Dufault, © ROM Its unique shape, with broad swimming flaps and a slender abdomen, earned it the nickname “sea-moth” from the researchers—hence the name Mosura, a nod to the Japanese kaiju Mothra. But despite its nickname, Mosura is only distantly related to moths. Mosura is part of a much more ancient lineage of arthropods—and though the radiodonts are long-gone, their remarkable preservation in the Burgess Shale is routinely yielding new species to science. Beyond its sci-fi looks, Mosura is also offering rare glimpses of internal anatomy from half a billion years ago. Some of the 61 fossils of the creature studied show preserved nerve tissue, eye structures, a digestive tract, and even reflective patches representing an open circulatory system—essentially a heart pumping blood into internal cavities called lacunae. Those same features, previously mysterious in other fossils, are evident in the team’s Mosura specimens. The fossils, mostly collected by the Royal Ontario Museum over the last 50 years, came from Yoho and Kootenay National Parks—part of the Burgess Shale region. The region was part of the ancient seafloor and is known for its exceptional preservation of the soft-bodied organisms that called the seafloor home. Moysiuk has recently unearthed a couple of other creatures from the Cambrian Explosion, including Titanokorys gainesi in 2021 and Cambroraster falcatus, named for the Millennium Falcon, in 2019. “So many science fiction creatures have been inspired by living organisms,” Moysiuk said. “It seems only natural that scientists should take some inspiration in return.” “There are loads of other possible inspirations for species names, but I do think there’s a lot of potential with the ‘Tremors’ franchise,” Moysiuk added. “The giant worms in that series are supposed to be relicts of the Precambrian, and although that makes no sense scientifically, it could make for a fun reference.” You heard it here first: As long as the creatures getting discovered keep looking as alien as Moysiuk’s recent finds, no science fiction franchise is safe from becoming scientific nomenclature. Source: https://gizmodo.com/506-million-year-old-mothra-fossil-shows-the-weirdness-of-early-life-2000601274 #506millionyearold #mothra #fossil #shows #the #weirdness #early #life

Intel has spent much of its goodwill with customers chasing down bugs: the Spectre and Meltdown bugs it dealt with years ago, as well as the instability that plagued its Raptor Lake processors last year. Now there are additional chapters in each of those stories. You don’t have to do anything — just make sure your PC is patched and up to date. But there will be a price to pay in performance in fixing the latest issue, and one you can’t really do anything about. On May 1, Intel issued yet another microcode update for the Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh processors. Those processors could degrade over time due to elevated operating voltages, Intel said last July. But the recent update was designed to prevent instability on systems “running multiple days with low-activity and lightly-threaded workloads” — or machines that weren’t working at their full capacity. Mitigating that bug, Intel said, will not only solve the problem, but performance fortunately will not be affected. Instead, any variation after applying the patch would be within normal “run-to-run variation,” Intel said. Unfortunately, researchers at ETH Zurich have discovered another bug that affects a number of Intel processors, dating back to the 2018 Skylake architecture. This time, mitigating it will have a significant effect, although the effects will be most pronounced in the much-maligned 11th-gen “Rocket Lake” chips. As noted by Bleeping Computer, the new bug hearkens all the back to 2018, when the Spectre and Meltdown bugs were discovered, affecting the kernel software at the heart of most X86 chips. Though Intel patched out both bugs, researchers at ETH Zurich have discovered that branch target injection attacks (known as a “branch privilege injection”) can again be used against Intel CPUs to leak otherwise protected information. The affected chips include everything from 2018’s Skylake to Raptor Lake. AMD’s Zen 5 and Zen 4 chips are not affected, the researchers found. More information can be found at the ETH Zurich site. Proper security practices usually call for researchers to privately disclose bugs to the manufacturers before they’re released to the public, and the researchers did just that. Intel released microcode to the research team for testing and to confirm the microcode update works. To avoid being preyed upon by either vulnerability, what you need to do remains the same: simply make sure that your PC is properly patched, either via Windows Update or via the firmware updates your PC maker or motherboard maker provides. Intel disclosed the bug in a security advisory, and also issued a public blog post about the issue. A company representative also issued a statement, below. “We appreciate the work done by ETH Zurich on this research and collaboration on coordinated public disclosure,” Intel said in a statement. “Intel is strengthening its Spectre v2 hardware mitigations and recommends customers contact their system manufacturer for the appropriate update. To date, Intel is not aware of any real-world exploits of transient execution vulnerabilities.” However, there will be a performance price to pay, too. ETH Zurich said that it won’t be too bad: just a 2.7 percent drop in performance in Alder Lake and 1.6 percent in the 2018 Skylake (Coffee Lake Refresh) chip. (For the record, Intel says that “Intel’s performance tests conclude that standard benchmarks are within normal run-to-run variation.”) If you still own an 11th-gen “Rocket Lake” chips, however, you’re going to pay a price: an estimated 8.3 percent drop in performance, according to ETH Zurich. Knocking almost 10 percent off the performance of what was an already subpar chip may mean that it’s time for an upgrade. This story was updated at 11:56 AM with additional details from Intel. Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2780652/spectre-cpu-bug-returns-to-haunt-intel-processors.html #devastating #spectre #cpu #bug #returns #haunt #intel #processors

A hardcore retro Roguelite Bullet-Hell Shooter RPG in a pixel art graphics! Posted by VortexMaster on May 3rd, 2025 The world of Undead Heirloom Nandariel, an ambitious necromancer, was convinced she could use the power of relics to amplify her necromancy abilities and create an army of the undead. Through clues, she discovered that one of the relics might be hidden in a Forgotten Cemetery. Deep within that crypt, she found the Lich's Wand and finally realized her desire to raise skeletons from their graves, something once considered a myth among necromancers. Darkness quickly spread throughout the region, and everyone began to notice that the dead had come back to life. Fearing that a greater evil was approaching, the Kingdom turned to the Hunters' Guild to solve this "little problem." Characters You will choose one of four hunters toto explore the Forgotten Cemetery in search of who awakened the dead in that area. Each hunter has her own status points and 5 different unlockable skills which can be improved with dropped items or purchased in the shop. Leveling system If you want to grow, you have to eat. Each food has its owns bonuses and some healing effects that will give you a permanent status up to level 10. Gear Progress Each item category has its rank and the deeper you go into the crypts, the better the rank. Stronger creatures will drop more crystals and gold. Items fall into several categories, such as weapons, helmets, relics, jewelry, boots, trinkets, and consumables that, when equipped, combined, or consumed, grant some effect or bonus. You can equip up to 4 weapons and carry 8 items in your backpack! In order to make the gameplay experience more diverse and fun, all dungeons, items and respawns are random. Every hunt is unique! Build Possibilities The demo has over 180 items and each character has their own unique skills, so there are endless possibilities to develop the character the way you want! Inspirations & Influences The game was based on the 16-bit generation of video games. The PC, SNES and Mega Drive consoles are its main inspirations, such as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES), The Chaos Engine (Commodore Amiga/AMIGA) and the Mega Man X series and many others. What’s in the demo? The full first level Over 180 unique items Fanservice Exploration Easter Eggs & more! Have you made it this far? Why not join the hunters guild and start your own journey? Play our demo and let us know what you think! Source: https://www.indiedb.com/games/undead-heirloom/features/undead-heirloom-demo-out-now #undead #heirloom #retro #roguelite #fun

Mosura fentoni belongs to an extinct group of early arthropods. CREDIT: Art by Danielle Dufault, © ROM Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Despite centuries of digging, paleontologists are still unearthing new flora and fauna preserved for millennia in rocks. Case in point, the newly discovered Mosura fentoni. This 506-million-year-old predator was found in Canada’s Burgess Shale and packed a punch for something only about the size of a human index finger. The findings are detailed in a study published May 13 in the journal Royal Society Open Science. Meet Mosura From the fossils, paleontologists believe that Mosura fentoni had three eyes, spiny jointed claws, a circular mouth lined with teeth, and a body equipped with swimming flaps along its sides. It was likely part of an extinct group of small early arthropods called radiodonts. The three-feet-long predator Anomalocaris canadensis was also a radiodont that shared the water with Mosura. However, Mosura has something that has not been seen in other radiodont. It has an abdomen-like body region made up of several segments at its back–similar to living insects and other arthropods.  Life reconstruction of Mosura fentoni. CREDIT: Art by Danielle Dufault, © ROM. “Mosura has 16 tightly packed segments lined with gills at the rear end of its body,” Joe Moysiuk, a study co-author and Curator of Palaeontology and Geology at the Manitoba Museum, said in a statement. “This is a neat example of evolutionary convergence with modern groups, like horseshoe crabs, woodlice, and insects, which share a batch of segments bearing respiratory organs at the rear of the body.” The team is not sure why Mosura has this intriguing adaptation, but it could be related to particular habitat preference or behavioral characteristics that required more efficient respiration. The sea moth Field collectors nicknamed Mosura the “sea-moth” due to the board swimming flaps located near its midsection and narrow abdomen. The moth-like feature inspired its scientific name, which references the fictional Japanese kaiju also known as Mothra. However, it is only distantly related to real moths. Mosura sits on a much deeper branch in the arthropod evolutionary tree. “Radiodonts were the first group of arthropods to branch out in the evolutionary tree, so they provide key insight into ancestral traits for the entire group,” Jean-Bernard Caron, a study coauthor and Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum, said in a statement. “The new species emphasizes that these early arthropods were already surprisingly diverse and were adapting in a comparable way to their distant modern relatives.” Fossil specimen of Mosura fentoni, ROMIP 67520 from the Marble Canyon area. The head is at the left and the dark, three-dimensional bulges represent minerals replacing the gills and circulatory lacunae. CREDIT: Photo by Jean-Bernard Caron © ROM Additionally, several Mosura fossils show details of internal anatomy seen in later arthropods, including some elements of the nervous system, circulatory system, and digestive tract. “Very few fossil sites in the world offer this level of insight into soft internal anatomy. We can see traces representing bundles of nerves in the eyes that would have been involved in image processing, just like in living arthropods. The details are astounding,” said Caron.  Open blood Instead of having internal arteries and veins to transfer blood the way that most living mammals do, Mosura had an open circulatory system. Its heart pumped blood into large internal body cavities called lacunae. In some of the fossils, the lacunae are preserved as reflective patches that fill the body and extend into the swimming flaps. “The well-preserved lacunae of the circulatory system in Mosura help us to interpret similar, but less clear features that we’ve seen before in other fossils. Their identity has been controversial,” said Moysiuk. “It turns out that preservation of these structures is widespread, confirming the ancient origin of this type of circulatory system.” Anatomical diagram of Mosura fentoni, showing preserved details of the nervous system in purple, the digestive system in green, and the circulatory system in orange. CREDIT: Art by Danielle Dufault © ROM All but one of the 61 Mosura fossils in this study were collected by the Royal Ontario Museum between 1975 and 2022, highlighting the importance of these types of animal archives.  “Museum collections, old and new, are a bottomless treasure trove of information about the past. If you think you’ve seen it all before, you just need to open up a museum drawer,” said Moysiuk. Source: https://www.popsci.com/environment/mothra-fossil/ #ancient #threeeyed #sea #moth #used #its #butt #breathe

Could aeronutrients explain the benefits of being in nature?Daniel Ernst/Stills Around 10 years ago, British tabloid newspaper The Sun ran a memorable article about a couple who claimed to be “breatharians”, able to survive on a little water and even less food. Instead, they said, they derived sustenance from air, sunlight and the energy of the universe. The story was picked up by media outlets across the world and propelled the couple and their unusual lifestyle to fame – and no small amount of ridicule. Needless to say, humans – even self-described breatharians – can’t live primarily on air and sunlight, as some practitioners tragically discovered when they died trying. But weirdly, the concept turns out to be more substantial than it first seems. According to a duo of Australian scientists, we can and do derive nutrients from the air – nowhere near enough to live on, but perhaps enough to benefit our health. Is it possible that a source of nutrition has been under our noses all along? “The evidence shows very clearly that we can absorb nutrients from the air we breathe,” says Flávia Fayet-Moore, a nutrition scientist at the University of Newcastle in Australia. Whether or not these “aeronutrients”, as the pair have dubbed them, make a significant contribution to our health isn’t yet clear, she says – but they could in the future. Every day, we breathe around 7000 to 8000 litres of air, a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, water vapour and whiffs of other gases. Our lungs extract oxygen and replace it with… Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26635433-000-the-wild-idea-that-we-all-get-nutrients-from-the-air-that-we-breathe/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home #the #wild #idea #that #all #get #nutrients #from #air #breathe

Theoretically, Suits LA had a lot of things going for it. It was released on the heels of Suits’ Netflix renaissance, it came from the same creator as the original series, Aaron Korsh, and even promised the return of fan-favorite original characters like Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht) and Louis Litt (Rick Hoffman). But unfortunately, none of those were quite enough to make Suits LA worth the watch. And viewers concurred, with NBC canceling the show after one season. To start, Suits LA just doesn’t have as compelling of a hook as its predecessor. The inciting incident in Suits involves Mike Ross (Patrick J. Adams) being hired by Harvey Specter to the prestigious Pearson Hardman law firm, despite the fact that he doesn’t have a law degree. We spend the entire first season wondering if Mike and Harvey’s ruse will be discovered all the while watching Mike outperform his peers who actually went to Harvard law. Now the first season of Suits is by no means perfect, but it has enough of a draw to keep us watching. Aside from the gripping premise, the characters have phenomenal chemistry – it’s not hard to believe that many of them have worked together for years. In Suits LA, on the other hand, the series begins with an unexpected betrayal between law partners Ted Black (Stephen Amell) and Stuart Lane (Josh McDermitt). Lane shuts Black out of a merger with another law firm, and essentially leaves him to fend for himself. It’s an interesting idea, and certainly a shocking way to begin the series, but with very little context of who these people are and why we should care about them, the betrayal ultimately falls flat. Suits has done this kind of thing multiple times. Pearson Hardman goes through a number of mergers and restructurings throughout the series’ nine seasons. But the series does so once we’re familiar enough with these characters to recognize the stakes. The underhanded deals and betrayals hit harder because we know what they have to gain and lose. The characters of Suits LA also fail to match the level of chemistry the original cast had. Even though there were plenty of characters in Suits who didn’t get along, they still had a compelling rapport with each other. In Suits LA, it just feels like everybody hates each other, but not in any way that’s remotely interesting. Erica (Lex Scott Davis) essentially gets mad at Leah (Alice Lee) for having work boundaries just because she doesn’t know how to say no herself. Guest stars Patton Oswalt and Brian Baumgartner have beef not once, but twice in a season for some reason. Ted and Stuart have a somewhat similar relationship to Harvey and Louis – Stuart feels like Ted constantly belittles his skills but also considers Ted to be his best friend and like a brother to him. But despite the fact that the series brings in both Harvey and Louis to try and get that idea through to us, Ted and Stuart still can’t escape their shadow. Bringing Harvey and Louis into Suits LA reminds us how good we had it with the original series, and that no matter how hard this show tries it just can’t capture that same magic. “There can be many, many reasons why [Suits LA isn’t resonating], people are speculating why it hasn’t resonated, but it’s just not really showing the potential to grow for us in the future, unfortunately,” Jeff Bader, the president of program planning strategy at NBCUniversal Entertainment told reporters after the show’s cancellation. “We had to look at the performance of the shows, both on linear and on digital. We had to see the ones that looked like they had growth potential in the future.” It is a shame that TV shows don’t have as much room to grow as they once did. Who’s to say that Suits LA wouldn’t have found its stride in a second season as so many other network shows have before? But at the same time, the show should have been able to stand on its own. Its ties to Suits should be enough to bring fans in, but it’s up to the show itself and its new characters to keep them tuning in.  It seems pretty clear now that not even bringing back fan favorite characters was enough to give Suits LA the viewership numbers it needed to keep up with its predecessor nor was it enough to make the series worth tuning into. Watching Harvey and Louis interact with these characters just reminds how good we had it, and how badly Suits LA missed the mark. Source: https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/suits-la-canceled-original-cast-members/ #bringing #back #original #cast #members #wasnt #enough #save #suits