Hunter-gatherers in Siberia died of a plague outbreak 5,500 years ago

Hunter-gatherers in Siberia died of a plague outbreak 5,500 years ago

fivenewscrypto    juin 20, 2026   

Plague swept through groups of hunter-gatherers in southeastern Siberia 5,500 years ago, leaving dozens dead in its wake—with DNA from Yersinia pestis bacteria still trapped inside their teeth.

University of Oxford ancient DNA researcher Ruairidh Macleod and his colleagues recently sequenced the telltale bacterial DNA in teeth from plague victims at four ancient cemeteries in the area around Russia’s Lake Baikal. The tragedy that befell these communities is now the earliest known plague outbreak, courtesy of the oldest strain of Y. pestis ever sequenced.

Unearthing a new backstory for the plague

Until recently, scientists who study the evolution of diseases have held two fairly solid ideas about the origins of plague, the disease caused by Yersinia pestis bacteria. It's a scourge so awful that it has gone down in history as not just a plague but the plague. The first idea is that the earliest strains didn't have the right genetic traits to be really lethal. And the second is that the plague first began menacing humans when the first farmers settled in densely packed towns alongside rats and domestic animals.

Read full article

Comments

The first long-duration resident of the ISS, a cosmonaut, has died

The first long-duration resident of the ISS, a cosmonaut, has died

fivenewscrypto    juin 20, 2026   

Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev, who served twice as a crew member aboard the International Space Station (ISS), including during the final US space shuttle mission in 2011, has died at the age of 56.

With Samokutyaev's death on Wednesday, he becomes the first former ISS long-duration resident to die in the 26 years that the space station has been a home to 155 other cosmonauts and astronauts as expedition crew members. The cause of his death is unknown.

Portrait of cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev. Credit: Roscosmos

"The leadership and staff of the Roscosmos State Corporation extend their sincere condolences to the family and loved ones of Aleksandr Mikhailovich," officials with Russia's space agency said in a statement.

Read full article

Comments

Hulk, Punisher join Peter Parker in Spider-Man: Brand New Day trailer

Hulk, Punisher join Peter Parker in Spider-Man: Brand New Day trailer

fivenewscrypto    juin 20, 2026   

We're about six weeks out from the debut of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the follow-up to 2021’s No Way Home. It's been five years since Spidey graced the big screen, so naturally, Sony Pictures has released a new trailer to build audience anticipation.

(Spoilers for No Way Home below.)

No Way Home ended on a pretty bleak note, with Peter Parker (Tom Holland) asking Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to erase him from everyone’s memory to protect the multiverse, including MJ (Zendaya).

Read full article

Comments

Second carcass-eating fly species cleared by FDA for maggot wound therapy

Second carcass-eating fly species cleared by FDA for maggot wound therapy

fivenewscrypto    juin 19, 2026   

The Food and Drug Administration this week cleared a second carcass-feasting fly species for use in maggot wound therapy, according to an announcement from Cuprina Holdings, a Singapore-based company that has dubbed its new therapeutic larvae MediFly Maggots.

With the clearance, Cuprina appears to be the only company to have FDA clearance to sell two species of fly larvae—and it's abuzz with the potential to dominate the global maggot market.

The new species is Lucilia cuprina, or Australian sheep blowfly. It's a close relative of Lucilia sericata, or the common green bottle fly, which is the fly species most often used for wound therapy, often called biosurgery or maggot debridement therapy (MDT). L. sericata is the only other fly with FDA clearance, which the agency first granted in 2004 to Ronald Sherman, who is now Cuprina’s Medical and Scientific Director.

Read full article

Comments

Sooner than expected? Useful quantum error correction promised for 2028.

Sooner than expected? Useful quantum error correction promised for 2028.

fivenewscrypto    juin 19, 2026   

Quantum computing news usually picks up near the end of the year, as companies try to provide evidence that they are hitting benchmarks on time. However, there have been interesting announcements as the summer starts this year, from incremental progress to attention-grabbing promises. As we did earlier this month, Ars has a rundown of some of the most significant announcements.

These include a promise of useful, error-corrected quantum computing as soon as 2028, details on an updated trapped ion processor, and a case in which claims of quantum supremacy have been cut back a bit thanks to advances in more traditional algorithms.

2028 is remarkably soon

Many people in the field expect that useful quantum computers are still about five to 10 years away. While there may be a few useful algorithms that can be run on existing error-prone hardware, almost all of the interesting problems that quantum computing can be applied to will require some form of error correction enabled by linking a small collection of hardware qubits together into what's called a logical qubit. Logical qubits include the redundant storage of information along with neighboring qubits that can be measured to determine when errors occur and how to fix them.

Read full article

Comments

California says AT&T lied to FCC in attempt to shut off old phone network

California says AT&T lied to FCC in attempt to shut off old phone network

fivenewscrypto    juin 19, 2026   

California state regulators say AT&T lied to the Federal Communications Commission in an attempt to shut off its old copper phone network without providing an adequate replacement.

"AT&T asserts that California seeks to prohibit or hinder wireline carriers from discontinuing copper facilities and investing in fiber," said a June 15 filing by the state of California and the California Public Utilities Commission. "Indeed, AT&T has been making this argument for years. It is not and has never been true."

As we reported last month, AT&T sued California over the state’s refusal to let it stop providing phone service to all potential customers in its wireline network territory. AT&T also petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to declare that California cannot enforce its rules and to let AT&T stop providing service to about 199,000 phone customers.

Read full article

Comments

Massive breach spills credentials for thousands of sensitive networks

Massive breach spills credentials for thousands of sensitive networks

fivenewscrypto    juin 19, 2026   

Researchers have uncovered a massive breach of Fortinet firewalls that has given Russian-speaking attackers near-unrestricted access to some of the world’s largest and most powerful organizations, including Oracle, Chevron, Lenovo, Federal Express, a NATO defense contractor, and Fortinet itself.

Nearly 74,000 Fortinet devices from more than 21,000 IP addresses in 194 countries have been compromised and their plaintext credentials exposed online, Bob Diachenko, a security researcher and head of SecurityDiscovery.com, said online and in an interview. He said he found the data after gaining access to the attackers’ command-and-control server and other infrastructure. The exposed data also included the industry, revenue, and employee count for each compromised organization.

Exceptional scale, poor opsec

Independent researcher Kevin Beaumont reported that “almost all” of the compromised devices remained online as of Wednesday morning. He went on to say that he has confirmed with multiple organizations found in the attackers’ logs that the credentials are real and current. In many cases, once the threat actors compromised the devices, they went on to access affected organizations’ centralized authentication systems, such as Radius servers and Microsoft Active Directory. The number of compromised devices comprises roughly half of all Internet-facing Fortinet firewalls, based on polling from Shodan.

Read full article

Comments