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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 1, 2025 at 8:11am

The researchers found that the three tested LLMs failed to generate plausible passwords for each user profile, seldom guessing the correct password. Other computational tools that are currently used to guess passwords, known as rule-based and combinator-based techniques, performed significantly better. 

They  also carried out additional analyses aimed at shedding more light on why LLMs perform so poorly when asked to generate plausible passwords. The results of these analyses suggest that these models lack some of the skills necessary to complete this task, such as the ability to recall specific examples encountered during training and to apply learned password patterns in new scenarios.

"Through detailed analysis and visualization, we identify key limitations in the generative reasoning of LLMs when applied to the domain-specific task of password guessing," wrote the authors. 

The  findings suggest that, despite their linguistic prowess, current LLMs lack the domain adaptation and memorization capabilities required for effective password inference, especially in the absence of supervised fine-tuning on leaked password datasets.

Overall, this recent study suggests that LLMs are not currently suitable for the inference of passwords. 

Mohammad Abdul Rehman et al, When Intelligence Fails: An Empirical Study on Why LLMs Struggle with Password Cracking, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2510.17884

Part2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 1, 2025 at 8:10am

Why LLMs are not great at cracking passwords

Large language models (LLMs), such as the model underpinning the functioning of OpenAI's conversational platform ChatGPT, have proved to perform well on various language-related and coding tasks. Some computer scientists have recently been exploring the possibility that these models could also be used by malicious users and hackers to plan cyber-attacks or access people's personal data. 

LLMs can generate texts or code tailored for specific purposes and that meet user-specified requirements. In principle, when given information about people, they could also be able to generate passwords that they might use, which include names or dates that are meaningful to them. 

Researchers  recently carried out a study exploring this possibility. Their findings, published on the arXiv preprint server, suggest that most existing LLMs cannot reliably generate plausible passwords for specific users, while also providing an explanation for why they perform poorly on this task. 

XXXX  The remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in natural language understanding and generation have sparked interest in their potential for cyber security applications, including password guessing.XXXX

The researchers conducted an empirical investigation into the efficacy of pre-trained LLMs for password cracking using synthetic user profiles. 

To carry out their study, the researchers first created synthetic (fake) profiles for non-existing users, which included their names, birthdays and hobbies. They then asked three different LLMs to generate a list of passwords that each of these fictional users might choose when protecting their accounts. 

They evaluated the performance of state-of-the-art open-source LLMs such as TinyLLaMA, Falcon-RW-1B, and Flan-T5 by prompting them to generate plausible passwords based on structured user attributes (e.g., name, birthdate, hobbies).

To assess the performance of the models' on the task, the researchers used metrics commonly used in studies that focus on information retrieval and password-guessing. These metrics, called Hit@1, Hit@5 and Hit@10, specifically measure how good a model is guessing passwords correctly, or specifically, ranking correct passwords as the most plausible.

Their results, measured using Hit@1, Hit@5, and Hit@10 metrics under both plaintext and SHA-256 hash comparisons, reveal consistently poor performance, with all models achieving less than 1.5% accuracy at Hit@10.

In contrast, traditional rule-based and combinator-based cracking methods demonstrate significantly higher success rates.

 Part1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 1, 2025 at 8:08am

Thousands of genomes reveal the wild wolf genes in most dogs' DNA

Analysis of nearly 2,700 ancient and modern canid genomes shows that most dogs retain small but detectable segments of wild wolf DNA, indicating ongoing gene flow after domestication. About two-thirds of dog breeds and all village dogs carry traces of wolf ancestry, often in genes related to olfaction. Dog genes are also present in about half of wild wolf genomes.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2421768122

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 1, 2025 at 8:07am

Here is something to make you more lazy: A human washing machine!

A human washing machine is now on sale in Japan.  

Users lie down in the pod, close the lid and get cleaned like clothes in a washing machine—but without the spin—while music plays.

A prototype of the device, called the human washer of the future, attracted long lines at the six-month Expo that wrapped up in Osaka in October after welcoming over 27 million people.

Made by Japanese firm Science, the device is an update of a product displayed the last time Osaka hosted the event, in 1970.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB6LmIWAJLw&t=61s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfNrAIITDi0

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 1, 2025 at 8:07am

Climate friendly metals can come from deep sea ores

Deep-sea manganese nodules offer a potential alternative to land-based mining for critical metals like copper, nickel, and cobalt, with significantly less deforestation, waste, and social harm. A hydrogen-based extraction process reduces CO₂ emissions by over 90% and uses less energy compared to carbon-based methods, making deep-sea mining more sustainable if managed responsibly.

Ubaid Manzoor et al, Low-waste, single-step, sustainable extraction of critical metals from deep-sea polymetallic nodules, Science Advances (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aea1223

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 1, 2025 at 8:06am

Africa's forests have switched from absorbing to emitting carbon, new study finds

Africa's forests have shifted from absorbing to emitting carbon since 2010, primarily due to deforestation and degradation in tropical rainforests. Annual biomass losses of about 106 billion kg have not been offset by gains elsewhere. This transition threatens global climate targets, highlighting the urgent need for stronger forest protection and restoration efforts

Loss of tropical moist broadleaf forest has turned Africa's forests from a carbon sink into a source, Scientific Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-27462-3

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 1, 2025 at 8:06am

New universal law predicts how most objects shatter

When a plate drops or a glass smashes, you're annoyed by the mess. But for some physicists, the broken pieces are a source of fascination: Why does everything break into such a huge variety of sizes? Now researchers  have come up with a simple, elegant law for how objects shatter, whether they are brittle solids, liquid drops, or exploding bubbles. 

Scientists have long suspected that there was something universal about fragmentation. If you count how many fragments fall into each size range and make a graph of that distribution, it would have the same shape regardless of the object that shattered. 

Their starting point was the massive chaos of a shattering event. In the majority of cases, the most likely outcome would always be the messiest and most irregular one, a principle he called maximal randomness. This is nature choosing the path of least resistance. 

However, because it is generally known that chaos must obey physical limits, they introduced a conservation law that they had previously discovered. This law acts as an invisible rule that ensures the overall scale of the fragments (how many large pieces and how many small pieces) cannot change randomly as the object breaks. To come up with his universal fragmentation law, they combined both maximal randomness and the conservation law. 

A kinematic constraint applied to a maximal randomness principle infers both the power law shape of the fragment size distribution and the value of its dimensionality-dependent exponent," they wrote in their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters. 

By linking these two principles, they were able to mathematically predict the universal size pattern of the fragments. They showed that the law perfectly matched large amounts of fragmentation data collected over decades from a variety of objects, including brittle solids and liquids. And they tested it in an original experiment by crushing single sugar cubes and correctly predicted the specific size pattern based on the cube's three-dimensional shape.

However, this universal law doesn't explain every breakage. The rule works best when an object shatters randomly, such as when a glass tumbler suddenly hits the floor. But it doesn't work well if the material is too soft, like some plastics, or if the breakup is too orderly, such as when surface tension causes a stream of water to break into droplets of the same size.

Emmanuel Villermaux, Fragmentation: Principles versus Mechanisms, Physical Review Letters (2025). DOI: 10.1103/r7xz-5d9c

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 1, 2025 at 8:05am

Air pollution may reduce health benefits of exercise

Long-term exposure to toxic air can substantially weaken the health benefits of regular exercise, suggests a new study by an international team of researchers.

The study, published in the journal BMC Medicine, analyzed data from more than 1.5 million adults tracked for more than a decade in countries including the U.K., Taiwan, China, Denmark and the United States.

The team found that the protective effect of regular exercise on people's risk of dying over a specific period—from any cause and from cancer and heart disease specifically—appeared to be reduced, but not eliminated, for those who lived in high pollution areas.

The researchers looked at levels of fine particulate matter—tiny particles known as PM_2.5 with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometers across. These particles are so small they can get stuck in the lungs and enter the bloodstream. 

The health benefits of exercise significantly weakened, the team found, where the yearly average level of PM_2.5 was 25 micrograms per cubic meter (μg/m³) or higher. Nearly half (46%) of the world's population live in areas exceeding this threshold. 

In their section on limitations, the authors noted that the study was mostly conducted in high-income countries, so the findings might not apply to low-income countries where fine particle pollution is higher, often exceeding 50 μg/m³. Other limitations included a lack of data on indoor air quality as well as participants' diets. 

BMC Medicine (2025). DOI: 10.1186/s12916-025-04496-y

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 1, 2025 at 8:05am

The research team was also able to demonstrate that mild inflammatory processes in the gut associated with aging further reinforce this mechanism. Inflammatory signals alter iron distribution in the cell and put strain on the metabolism. At the same time, Wnt signaling also weakens—a signaling pathway that is important for keeping stem cells active and functional.

This combination of iron deficiency, inflammation, and Wnt signaling loss acts as an "accelerator" of epigenetic drift. As a result, the aging process in the intestine can begin earlier and spread faster than previously thought.

Despite the complexity of the mechanism, the study also provides encouraging results. The researchers succeeded in slowing down or partially reversing epigenetic drift in organoid cultures—miniature intestinal models grown from intestinal stem cells—by restoring iron import or specifically activating the Wnt signaling pathway. 

Anna Krepelova et al, Iron homeostasis and cell clonality drive cancer-associated intestinal DNA methylation drift in aging, Nature Aging (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s43587-025-01021-x

Part2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 1, 2025 at 8:05am

Why important genes 'go quiet' as we get older

The human gut renews itself faster than any other tissue: every few days, new cells are created from specialized stem cells. However, as we get older, epigenetic changes build up in these stem cells. These are chemical markers on the DNA that act like switches, determining which genes remain active. 

The study, recently published in Nature Aging, was conducted by an international team and it shows that changes in the gut do not occur randomly. Rather, a specific pattern develops over the course of aging, which the researchers refer to as ACCA (Aging- and Colon Cancer-Associated) drift. Researchers observed an epigenetic pattern that becomes increasingly apparent with age.

  Genes that maintain the balance in healthy tissue are particularly affected, including those that control the renewal of the intestinal epithelium via the Wnt signalling pathway.  The changes described as "drifting" can be detected not only in the aging gut, but also in almost all colon cancer samples examined. This suggests that the aging of stem cells creates an environment that promotes the development of cancer. 

The fact that the drift is not evenly distributed throughout the intestine is particularly noteworthy. Each intestinal crypt—a small, tubular section of the intestinal mucosa—originates from a single stem cell. When this stem cell undergoes epigenetic changes, the entire crypt takes on these changes.   Over time, more and more areas with an older epigenetic profile develop in the tissue. Through the natural process of crypt division, these regions continuously enlarge and can continue to grow over many years. 

This explains why the intestines of older people contain a veritable patchwork of crypts that have remained young and others that have aged significantly, and why certain regions are particularly susceptible to producing more degenerated cells, which promotes cancer growth. 

But why does this drift occur? Researchers have shown that older intestinal cells absorb less iron but release more iron at the same time. This reduces the amount of available iron (II) in the cell nucleus, which serves as a cofactor for the TET (ten-eleven translocation) enzymes. These enzymes normally protect from the excess DNA methylations, but if the cell doesn't have enough iron, they can't do their job properly. Excess DNA methylations are no longer broken down.

When there's not enough iron in the cells, faulty markings remain on the DNA. And the cells lose their ability to remove these markings. This has a kind of domino effect: as the TET activity decreases, more and more DNA methylations accumulate, and important genes are switched off; they "fall silent." This can further accelerate epigenetic drift.

Part1

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