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Forget about EVs. Stationary batteries have recently become a hot topic in the United States and are attracting investment. Startup Lunar Energy is the latest example. The six-year-old company, which makes battery packs for homeowners in California, Georgia and Washington, announced Wednesday that it has closed two large funding rounds. The startup shared that it has raised $130 million in unannounced Series C and $102 million in Series D. The Series C was led by Activate Capital and the Series D was led by B Capital and Prelude Ventures. The startup plans to use the funding to expand production to…

A notorious hacker group has claimed responsibility for last year’s data breaches at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), releasing data it claims was stolen from both schools. The group known as ShinyHunters on Wednesday published more than 1 million records from universities on the group’s private leak site, which the gang used to blackmail victims. In November, UPenn confirmed a data breach of “a select group of information systems related to Penn development and alumni activities.” At the time, the hackers also sent emails from the university’s official address to alumni informing them of the hack. The…

Jupiter’s icy moon Europa appears to have life-friendly molecules on its surface.Al Emran, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, discovered ammonia on Europa’s surface while examining old data from the Galileo mission, which studied Jupiter and its moons from 1995 to 2003.Data collected from Galileo’s near-infrared mapping spectrometer in 1997 showed “faint signals of ammonia” near cracks in the frozen moon’s surface, NASA officials said in a statement explaining the discovery published late last year in the Journal of Planetary Science. you may like According to the statement, this is “the first such discovery on Europa” and therefore has…

Rabi LakshmananFebruary 4, 2026Artificial intelligence/software security Microsoft announced Wednesday that it has developed a lightweight scanner that can detect backdoors in open weight large-scale language models (LLMs) and improve overall reliability for artificial intelligence (AI) systems. According to the tech giant’s AI security team, the scanner leverages three observable signals that can be used to reliably alert you to the presence of a backdoor while maintaining a low false positive rate. “These signatures are based on how the trigger input has a measurable impact on the internal behavior of the model, providing a technically robust and operationally meaningful detection foundation,”…

Rabi LakshmananFebruary 4, 2026Malware/Endpoint Security Threat hunters have revealed details of a new stealth malware campaign called DEAD#VAX. The campaign combines “disciplined techniques and sophisticated exploitation of legitimate system functionality” to bypass traditional detection mechanisms and deploy a remote access Trojan (RAT) known as AsyncRAT. “This attack leverages IPFS-hosted VHD files, extreme script obfuscation, runtime decryption, and injection of in-memory shellcode into a trusted Windows process, never dropping the decrypted binary to disk,” Securonix researchers Akshay Gaikwad, Shikha Sangwan, and Aaron Beardslee said in a report shared with The Hacker News. AsyncRAT is an open-source malware that provides attackers with…

One of the largest stars in the universe, previously predicted to be on the brink of a violent supernova explosion, may not explode anytime soon after all, a new study suggests. The surprising discovery also suggests that this star’s “behemoth” is slowly being cannibalized by a smaller, hidden partner.WOH G64, also known as the “giant star,” is a red supergiant star located approximately 163,000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way. This giant is about 1,500 times wider than the Sun, making it one of the largest stars ever discovered. It…

A new map of Australia has revealed a strange indentation in the magnetic field beneath Australia’s Northern Territory.The Australian Magnetic Anomaly Zone, named for the country’s resemblance in shape, holds valuable information about Australia’s geological history, including how different rock formations formed and acquired their unique magnetic properties.”Thanks to magnetic data, we can see through the ground and understand geological structures that would otherwise remain completely hidden,” project leader Clive Foss, senior research geoscientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), said in a statement. you may like Magnetic anomalies are local variations in the Earth’s magnetic field…

Voice AI company ElevenLabs today announced that it has raised $500 million in a new funding round led by Sequoia Capital, an investor in the startup’s final second round of bidding. Sequoia partner Andrew Reed will join the company’s board of directors. The company is now valued at $11 billion, more than triple the valuation from its previous round in January 2025. Earlier this year, the Financial Times reported that the startup was considering raising money at that valuation. The company said existing investor a16z has quadrupled its investment, while Iconiq, which led the previous round, has tripled its investment.…

Providing additional nitrogen could double the growth of tropical trees in recovering forests, significantly increasing the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) they can absorb over a 10-year period, according to a new study.The researchers found that adding nitrogen fertilizer to the soil in the youngest forests (forests less than a year old) increased tree biomass by 95% compared to a control group that did not receive fertilizer. A 10-year-old forest also recovered with nitrogen treatment and showed a 48% growth increase compared to the control group.”We all rely on tropical forests to stabilize our climate,” study co-author and lead researcher…

Uber is promoting Balaji Krishnamurthy, vice president of strategic finance and investor relations, to chief financial officer (CFO), replacing current finance chief Prashant Mahendra-Raja. Krishnamurthy has been with Uber for more than six years, spending most of her tenure in the company’s investor relations department. The appointment may signal the company’s driverless investments and expansion plans, as he frequently posts about the company’s autonomous ride-hailing efforts and also holds a seat on the board of AV company Wabi. Indeed, during the company’s fourth quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Krishnamurthy said the company will invest capital in AV software partners, work…