A 9.5-severity memory-corruption flaw, CVE-2026-97631, in TianoCore EDK II's PXE network-boot driver lets attackers on a local network run code before Secure Boot and TPM defenses load. A premature public patch ended the planned disclosure embargo, and vendors have yet to detail which products are affected.

— via Hacker News (top 30), DamnInteresting

A Kellogg School of Management study of NFL seasons from 2012 to 2022 finds injuries cost teams fewer wins than commonly assumed. Quarterbacks are the exception, and the work suggests spending on depth may beat paying for durability.

— via Phys.org

An opinion piece argues that coverage of the long legal fight over seven Auschwitz watercolors, painted by Dina Gottliebova Babbitt under Mengele's orders, overlooks the Roma people depicted and killed. It asks how their dignity and identity can best be honored.

— via Hyperallergic, Cristiana Grigore

San José's City Council voted unanimously to rename the downtown plaza formerly named for Cesar Chavez as Plaza de San José. The choice followed a ranked-choice survey with more than 10,500 responses and came after allegations that Chavez sexually abused women and girls.

— via KQED, Steph Rodriguez

AWS launched Route 53 Resolved IP Validation for Network Firewall, free of charge. Route 53 Resolver shares the IP addresses it returns per domain with the firewall, enabling domain-based filtering of non-web traffic like SFTP and blocking SNI manipulation without TLS inspection.

— via AWS Security Blog, Lawton Pittenger

As Anthropic nears its IPO, a layered governance setup will leave public shareholders with little say. A Long-Term Benefit Trust elects and removes a majority of directors, while the seven founders jointly hold 50.1% of voting power, and employees can overrule the trust on board seats.

— via TechCrunch, Tim Fernholz

Researchers led by Rice University's Mampi Sarkar built WISO-SAT, an open database that standardizes 24 years of water vapor isotope data from eight satellite missions. A public pipeline lets others add data, easing comparisons for studies of clouds, moisture transport and El Niño.

— via Phys.org

Bank of America emailed customers telling them never to hand their banking username and password to an AI tool or agent. The bank noted that customers remain responsible for any activity resulting from shared access, and the article describes risks like lockouts and credential leaks.

— via TechCrunch, Zack Whittaker

Insurance software firm Guidewire is buying AI underwriting startup Hyperexponential for $1.7 billion in cash, with up to $400 million more tied to revenue targets, bringing the total to about $2 billion. The deal, expected to close next year, aims to put AI agents alongside human underwriters.

— via TechCrunch, Dominic-Madori Davis

Device tree files in Raspberry Pi's Linux kernel tree reveal a Raspberry Pi Zero 3 W and a Pi 4 Model A, both built around the BCM2711 SoC. There is no official announcement, and pricing, RAM, clock speeds and release date remain unknown.

— via Hacker News (top 30), sthlmb

Bill C-41, tabled in the House of Commons, would let Canadians make advance requests for medically assisted death, with provinces deciding whether to honour them. It would also halt the planned expansion of MAID to people whose sole condition is mental illness, ahead of a March 17 deadline.

— via iPolitics, The Canadian Press

The paper presents a Gaussian process framework that accounts for finite exposure times by integrating the usual instantaneous stellar-variability kernels. It also models relative instrumental drift, enabling Sun-as-a-star radial velocity datasets from overlapping instruments to be combined.

— via arXiv — Astro-ph, Jacob K. Luhn, Ryan A. Rubenzahl, Samuel Halverson, Lily L. Zhao

The study models charged-particle motion in a magnetized Simpson-Visser black bounce spacetime and fits it to HFQPO data from three microquasars. Information criteria favor the ER8 resonance model, and the fits permit a regularization parameter 0 ≤ a/M < 0.736, consistent with a regular black hole.

— via arXiv — Astro-ph, Shining Yang, Jianbo Lu, Mou Xu, Yu Liu

FEADME is a GPU-accelerated Python framework using JAX and NumPyro to model broad Balmer-line emission with elliptical accretion disks. Applied to 237 double-peaked AGN and five TDEs, it shows disk parameters depend strongly on how profile asymmetry is treated.

— via arXiv — Astro-ph, Nicholas Earl, K. Decker French, Jason T. Hinkle, Yashasvi Moon, Margaret Shepherd, Margaret E. Verrico, Samaresh Mondal, Ferdinand

Researchers present a Flow Matching and simulation-based inference framework that jointly infers properties of the GD-1 stream progenitor and the Milky Way potential. Trained on mock streams from the Odisseo N-body code, it recovers fiducial GD-1 parameters with well-calibrated posteriors.

— via arXiv — Astro-ph, Giuseppe Viterbo, Tobias Buck

Researchers present CPISM, a simulation program for the Cool Planet Imaging Coronagraph on the China Space Station Telescope. It models targets, instrument effects and detector response to plan high-contrast exoplanet observations, and a bright-star test matched theoretical expectations.

— via arXiv — Astro-ph, Yi-Ming Zhu, Gang Zhao, Jiang-Pei Dou, Zhong-Hua Lv, Yi-Li Chen, Bo Ma, Zhao-Jun Yan, Jing Tang, Ran Li

Researchers present emulators for the one- and two-loop cold dark matter power spectrum in the Effective Field Theory of Large Scale Structures, built with symbolic regression. They achieve errors below 0.5% within the EFT validity range, evaluate in under about 5×10^-4 seconds on one core, and leave counterterm time-dependence unspecified for flexible fitting.

— via arXiv — Astro-ph, Despoina Farakou, Constantinos Skordis

ALMA observations of Saturn's limb from 20°S to 69°N show stratospheric carbon monoxide confined to a thin layer between 0.1 and 1 mbar. Its even spread and lack of an equatorial enhancement point to a cometary impact within about 200 years, not steady ring infall.

— via arXiv — Physics, Deborah Bardet, Thierry Fouchet, Thibault Cavali'e, Rapha"el Moreno, Emmanuel Lellouch, Camille Lefour, Bilal Benmahi, Sandrine Guerlet

A theoretical study asks whether treating axion dark matter as a classical field is reliable. Using a fully quantum detector model, it finds the field could be in a non-classical state, but mode averaging, small noise and weak axion coupling wash out any quantum signatures.

— via arXiv — Astro-ph, Yunjia Bao, Dhong Yeon Cheong, Nicholas L. Rodd, Joey Takach, Lian-Tao Wang, Kevin Zhou

Direct Simulation Monte Carlo simulations of Mach 6 flow over a flat plate show second-mode (Mack) instabilities arising spontaneously from gas kinetic fluctuations. An acoustic vibrating surface amplifies waves at an unstable 250 kHz and damps disturbances at a stable 400 kHz, without altering other frequencies or the mean flow.

— via arXiv — Physics, Mert Senkardesler, Irmak T. Karpuzcu, Deborah A. Levin

Researchers built a Transformer-based deep learning model that infers the mass and orbit of an unseen outer planet from transit timing and duration variations. Tested on Kepler-88 with a million simulations, it recovered semi-major axis and eccentricity to within about 10 percent and planet mass to roughly 10-30 percent.

— via arXiv — Astro-ph, Chen Chen, Jiapeng Gao, Gongjie Li, Lingkai Kong, Molei Tao

A paper applies a least action principle to estimate the generative directionality of LLMs inside agents. Measured transition probabilities between generated states are consistent with a tendency toward detailed balance, suggesting LLMs implicitly learn underlying potential functions that may transcend architectures and prompt templates.

— via arXiv — Physics, Zhuo-Yang Song, Qing-Hong Cao, Ming-xing Luo, Hua Xing Zhu

The paper presents a three-LLM agent (Consultant, Reviewer, Programmer) that rewrites problems, writes code, and iteratively debugs it for scientific computing tasks like PDEs and flow past a cylinder. The review loop raised execution success of DeepSeek R1 from 59% to 82%, ChatGPT 4.1-mini from 66% to 87%, and Gemini-2.5 from 60% to 84%.

— via arXiv — Physics, Ao Cheng, Lei Zhang, Guowei He

Researchers present a way to extend an existing age-based social contact matrix with an extra socio-demographic factor, using population structure and assumptions about mixing rates. Applied to hypothetical populations and a New Zealand age-ethnic projection, it changed the reproduction number and final epidemic size, with minority groups most sensitive.

— via arXiv — q-bio, Vincent X. Lomas, Tim Chambers, Leighton Watson, Michael Plank

A coalescent framework links identity-by-descent tracts to observable runs of homozygosity, accounting for mutation, gene conversion and marker density. It adds selection effects and time-varying population size to detect selection signatures and infer past effective population size.

— via arXiv — q-bio, Enrique Santiago