Hackers Exploit Websites To Give Them Excellent SEO Before Deploying Malware

schwit1 shares a report from ZDNet: Cyberattackers have turned to search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to deploy malware payloads to as many victims as possible. According to Sophos, the so-called search engine “deoptimization” method includes both SEO tricks and the abuse of human psychology to push websites that have been compromised up Google’s rankings. SEO optimization is used by webmasters to…

ATLAS finds evidence of a rare Higgs boson decay

Since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, scientists in the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have been hard at work characterizing its properties and hunting down the diverse ways in which this ephemeral particle can decay. From the copious but experimentally challenging decay to b-quarks, to the exquisitely rare but low-background decay into four…

The first evidence of top quark production in nucleus-nucleus collisions

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration, a large group of researchers from different institutes worldwide, has recently gathered the very first evidence of top quark production in nucleus-nucleus collisions. Their work, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, was based on lead-lead collision data gathered by the CMS particle detector, at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). …

CERN is Making the Large Hadron Collider’s Data More Accessible

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will open up access to more data from Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. Under an updated policy, data will be released around five years after it’s collected and CERN hopes to release the full dataset publicly “by the close of the experiment concerned.” Core LHC collaborators ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb all endorsed the…

CERN muon detector gets major upgrade for better particle hunting

Weighing in at 14,000 tonnes, the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider can now detect more of the subatomic particles created when protons are collided Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24833052-800-cern-muon-detector-gets-major-upgrade-for-better-particle-hunting/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

CERN experiments announce first indications of a rare Higgs boson process

At the 40th ICHEP conference, the ATLAS and CMS experiments announced new results which show that the Higgs boson decays into two muons. The muon is a heavier copy of the electron, one of the elementary particles that constitute the matter content of the Universe. While electrons are classified as a first-generation particle, muons belong to the second generation. The physics…

ATLAS Experiment searches for rare Higgs boson decays into a photon and a Z boson

The Higgs boson was discovered by the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 through its decays into pairs of photons, W bosons and Z bosons. Since then, physicists at these experiments have gained great insight into the properties of the Higgs boson through the study of its different production and decay processes. Decays to pairs…

WordPress Team Working on Daring Plan To Forcibly Update Old Websites

The developers behind the WordPress open-source content management system (CMS) are working on a plan to forcibly auto-update older versions of the CMS to more recent releases. From a report: The goal of this plan is to improve the security of the WordPress ecosystem, and the internet as a whole, since WordPress installations account for more than 34% of all internet…

Mud ball meteorites rain down in Costa Rica

“Mud ball” meteorites – full of clays, organics and water – are unique among space rocks. And a lot of them fell in April 2019 on a small town in Costa Rica, much to the delight of scientists. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/mudball-meteorite-fall-aguas-zarcas-costa-rica-2019…