AI-generated code is vulnerable

Vibe coding programmers are releasing batches of vulnerable code, according to researchers who have scanned over 43,000 security advisories across the web.

The programming style relies on using generative artificial intelligence (AI) to create software code using tools like Claude, Gemini, and GitHub Copilot.

According to graduate research assistant Hanqing Zhao of the Systems Software & Security Lab (SSLab) at Georgia Tech, no one had been tracking these common vulnerabilities and exposures before the launch of their Vibe Security Radar.

“The vulnerabilities we found lead to breaches,” he says. “Everyone is using these tools now. We need a feedback loop to identify which tools, which patterns, and which workflows create the most risk.”

The radar extensively scans public vulnerability databases, finds the error for each vulnerability, and then examines the code’s history to find who introduced the bug. If they discover an AI tool’s signature, the radar flags it.

Of the 74 confirmed cases uncovered so far by the tool, 14 are critical risks, and 25 are high. These vulnerabilities include command injection, authentication bypass, and server-side request forgery. Zhao explains that since AI models tend to repeat the same mistakes, an attacker would need to find these bugs just once.

“Millions of developers using the same models means the same bugs showing up across different projects,” he says. “Find one pattern in one AI codebase, you can scan for it across thousands of repositories.”

Despite its success, the team has only scratched the surface of the problem. The radar can trace metadata like co-author tags, bot emails, and other known tool signatures, but it can’t identify an issue if these markers have been removed.

The next step is behavioral detection. AI-written code has patterns in how it names variables, structures functions, and handles errors.

“We’re building models that can identify AI code from the code itself, no metadata needed,” says Zhao. “That opens up a lot of cases we currently can’t touch.”

The team is also improving its verification pipeline and expanding its sources to include more vulnerability databases. The goal is to get a more complete picture of AI-introduced vulnerabilities across open source, not just the ones that happen to leave signatures behind.

As more programmers rely on vibe coding, Zhao warns that it still needs to be reviewed as thoroughly as any other project.

“The whole point of vibe coding is not reading it afterward, I know,” he says. “But if you’re shipping AI output to production, review it the way you’d review a junior developer’s pull request. Especially anything around input handling and authentication.”

When prompting AI, SSLab also recommends providing more detailed instructions to get it closer to production-ready. There are also tools to check the code for vulnerabilities after code it has been generated. Not double-checking could lead to a catastrophe.

“The attack surface keeps growing,” says Zhao. “More people running AI agents locally means the attacker doesn’t need to break into the company infrastructure. They just need one vulnerability in a model context protocol server that someone installed and never reviewed.”

One reason the attack surfaces are expanding rapidly is AI’s evolution. In the second half of 2025, the Vibe Security Radar found about 18 cases across seven months. Then, in the first three months of 2026, it identified 56. March 2026 alone had 35, more than all of 2025 combined.

Many tools, like Claude, are now more autonomous, allowing developers to write entire features, create files, and even make architecture decisions.

“When an agent builds something without authentication, that’s not a typo,” says Zhao. “It’s a design flaw baked in from the start. Claude Code and Copilot together account for most of what we detect, but that’s partly because they leave the clearest signatures.”

Source: Georgia Tech

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‘Forever chemical’ exposure may weaken your immune system

New research finds that exposure to PFAS may weaken the immune system in adults, raising new concerns about the long-term health effects of these widely used chemicals.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are a large class of human-made chemicals used in products ranging from nonstick cookware and stain-resistant fabrics to firefighting foams.

Often called “forever chemicals,” they do not easily break down in the environment and can accumulate in the human body over time.

Some PFAS remain in the body for years. One compound highlighted in the study, perfluorohexanesulfonic acid, or PFHxS, can persist for nearly a decade, making it a particularly important marker of long-term exposure.

In a study of people previously exposed to PFAS through contaminated drinking water, researchers found that individuals with higher levels of the forever chemicals in their blood produced fewer protective antibodies when their immune systems encountered a new virus—a key measure of how effectively the body responds to infection.

“Antibodies act like tiny soldiers, helping the body recognize and fight off viruses,” says Courtney Carignan, senior author of the study and an environmental health researcher at Michigan State University.

When fewer of these “soldiers” are produced, the immune system may be less effective at fighting infection.

“These results raise important concerns about how long-term exposure to PFAS reduces the body’s ability to respond to infections, even in adulthood,” Carignan says.

The effect was strongest among older adults, men and people who were overweight—groups that often have higher PFAS levels in their bodies.

For some families, those effects are already a reality.

“When you find out your family has been exposed, it changes everything—especially how you think about your children’s health,” says Tobyn McNaughton, a Belmont, Michigan, mother whose family was affected by contaminated drinking water.

“We’re poisoned people. We learned that some of my son’s childhood vaccines weren’t fully effective due to his compromised immune system, and that’s something no parent expects to face.”

McNaughton connected with Carignan in 2018 after high levels of PFAS were found in her family’s drinking water and has since become a clean water advocate with the Great Lakes PFAS Action Network, a group cofounded by her neighbor Sandy Wynn-Stelt that is centered and driven by people affected by toxic PFAS pollution.

Carignan says McNaughton’s and others’ experiences reflect broader patterns seen in the data.

“Previous studies in adults have produced mixed results, in part because prior exposures and existing immunity can make responses difficult to isolate,” Carignan says.

“The pandemic provided a rare opportunity to observe how the immune system responds to a new virus, allowing us to more clearly detect how PFAS exposure may influence antibody production and helping resolve long-standing uncertainty about its effects in adults. Our findings make clear that PFAS exposure can affect immune response in adults in addition to the known effects in children.”

The findings come as the United States continues to debate and implement new drinking water standards for PFAS. The US Environmental Protection Agency finalized its first enforceable drinking water standards for certain PFAS chemicals in 2024, but implementation timelines and enforcement for some compounds have since shifted.

Carignan says the findings support efforts to reduce PFAS exposure—particularly through drinking water—and highlight the importance of continued monitoring and regulation.

“Exposure to PFAS is widespread, but it is also preventable,” Carignan says. “Reducing levels in drinking water is one of the most effective ways to lower exposure and protect public health.”

The research appears in Environmental Health.

Source: Michigan State University

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Are you managing your allergies the wrong way?

If you’re sneezing more than usual this spring, there’s a reason.

Allergy seasons across the US are starting earlier, lasting longer, and hitting harder, driven by warmer temperatures and rising CO2 levels that are increasing pollen production.

What’s more, people who have never had allergies before are suddenly developing them in adulthood—a trend that’s becoming increasingly common.

Lisa Olson-Gugerty, a teaching professor of public health in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and a practicing family nurse practitioner, can help explain this year’s allergy season.

Here are some of her insights:

Why this season feels different. Pollen seasons are not only starting earlier—they’re blending together across seasons, meaning the body’s immune system stays activated longer. When multiple trees pollinate at once, exposure becomes stacked and continuous, leading to more severe and persistent symptoms. Pollution compounds the problem by making pollen more irritating to airways. And a lesser-known phenomenon—”thunderstorm asthma”—can trigger severe asthma attacks when storms break pollen grains into tiny particles that travel deep into the lungs.

You are not born with allergies. First-time allergy symptoms in adulthood are very common, and the changing climate is expanding the pool of people affected. Anyone experiencing new seasonal symptoms this year shouldn’t assume it’s just a cold. Olson-Gugerty offers a simple rule of thumb: itching points to allergies; fever and body aches point to infection.

Kids are different, and parents often miss the signs. Children are more likely to develop ear infections, sleep disturbances, and asthma flare-ups during high-pollen periods, but they often can’t articulate their symptoms. Parents should watch for mouth breathing, unusual fatigue, irritability, and dark circles under the eyes—signs that are easy to overlook or misattribute.

The most common mistake allergy sufferers make. Olson-Gugerty says it’s waiting too long to treat. Allergy medications work best when started before symptoms peak, and taking them only as needed rather than consistently is one of the biggest reasons people struggle unnecessarily each spring.

Source: Syracuse University

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Watch: Team turns vapes into musical instruments

A team hacked into disposable e-cigarettes to highlight the problem of e-waste and encourage creative, sustainable use of circuits and batteries.

The squeaky, buzzy sound isn’t exactly musical, but playing or listening to a vape synth will definitely make you smile.

David Rios, Kari S. Love, and Shuang Cai, instructors and researchers in the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Interactive Telecommunications Program, are the creative hackers behind the synth, a novelty electronic instrument made from discarded vape cartridges.

Using a salvaged vape’s low-pressure sensor, lithium battery, and mouthpiece, they made a crude ocarina-like device that plays notes when the player sucks in air (sort of the opposite of a wind instrument) and presses buttons on the cartridge.

The team also created a set of open-source instructions so that DIYers can try building their own.

Disposable vapes create a lot of e-waste, and repurposing them into synthesizers or anything else extends the life of the components, keeping them out of the landfill.

In the video below, the NYU makers test their synths and explain their effort to promote sustainability and creative repurposing of discarded electronics:

Source: NYU

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After a group split, chimps killed their former friends

After the large Ngogo chimpanzee group in Kibale National Park, Uganda, split into two, individuals in one group attacked and killed more than 20 members of the other group—chimps who had been their former friends and allies.

Prior to its split, the Ngogo group was unusually large. Chimpanzee groups typically comprise about 50 members, according to John Mitani, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Michigan.

“…why did yesterday’s friend become today’s foe?”

When he first began observing the Ngogo group, there were well over 100 members. Over time, the group grew to about 200 individuals.

Mitani and Yale University professor David Watts started the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project in 1995.

From 1998 to 2014, the chimpanzees lived together in a single group. In 2015, aggression between individuals of two subgroups living in the center and west erupted, with members in each isolating themselves from each other. In 2016, the western group sent a territorial patrol to the central group, and the males fought. Then, in 2018, members of the western group killed a young adult male from the central group. After that event, individuals in the two groups separated and stopped interacting socially, spatially, and reproductively. Over the next seven years, members of the western group killed seven mature males and 17 infants.

Researchers have long known that chimpanzees will attack and kill their neighbors. But this finding, published in Science, was surprising because these chimpanzees were killing their former friends and allies, says Mitani, senior author of the study. For him, it highlights a key difference between chimpanzees and humans.

“Chimpanzees appear to consider outsiders as the enemy no matter who they are. One stark difference that exists between chimpanzees and humans is that we are an unusually prosocial and cooperative species,” Mitani says.

“We go out of our way to help and aid neighbors, some of whom may be total strangers.

“While aggression and wars break out among humans from time to time, for the most part, we live peaceably side-by-side with others now in a world of over 8 billion people. This difference between chimpanzees and humans is something that gives me hope, especially in this time of polarization.”

Why the split?

Several factors could have led to the 2018 split, Mitani says.

The group’s unusually large size is likely to have led to both increased feeding and reproductive competition. The deaths of several males in 2014 before aggressive interactions broke out in 2015 could have altered social dynamics within the group, creating hostilities that weren’t there previously. But none of these events in isolation explain the break to the researcher. In sum, a combination of factors most likely led to the split.

For Mitani, the split is difficult to come to grips with because for many years the Ngogo chimpanzees thrived due to their large group size. Previous studies found that they used their large numbers to work together collectively and cooperatively, benefiting in the process: They dominated their neighbors, took over areas previously occupied by those neighbors, gained more food, and obtained reproductive advantages.

“Given this, why did yesterday’s friend become today’s foe?” Mitani says. “It’s been hard to watch chimpanzees that I have studied for so long, know, and love turn on each other like this.”

Aaron Sandel, lead author of the study and anthropologist at the University of Texas, says that their findings may tell us something about the evolution of human warfare, challenging the hypothesis that human warfare, including civil war, is driven primarily by cultural markers of group identity such as ethnic or religious differences.

“In humans, we often attribute violent conflicts, including civil wars, to tensions that arise from ethnic, religious or political differences,” Sandel says. “We know this can’t be the case with chimps. They don’t have ethnicity or religion or political institutions. So this complex, violent conflict must be driven by more basic relational dynamics: Enduring social bonds, cliques, shifting alliances, rivalries.”

Lessons from data

Another unusual aspect of the split and its associated aggression is that the attacks and killings have been asymmetric, with members of the initially smaller group—the western group, with 76 members—attacking and killing members of the larger central group, which exited the split with 116 members. Typically, individuals in larger groups of chimpanzees use their numerical superiority to attack those in smaller groups. Members of the central group, however, failed to retaliate when the western chimpanzees started their killing spree.

“With these killings, the western group has flipped the tables on the central group,” Mitani says.

“At the outset of hostilities in 2015, the members of the smaller western group were quite afraid of the members of the larger central group, but something happened. They realized they could kill the central chimps and began doing so, to an obvious extreme.”

As of December 2025, the western group had 108 individuals while the central group’s numbers fell to 76.

“Findings like those in this paper are derived from long-term data collected over many, many years and have been supported by federal funds. I hope funds from our government will continue to be available for projects like this,” Mitani says.

“The Ngogo chimps have many more important and surprising stories to tell us.”

Additional coauthors are from the University of Michigan, the University of Utah and the Utah Natural History Museum, and Arizona State University.

Source: University of Michigan

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Primitive star could shed light on the dawn of the universe

On the fringes of the Milky Way, near a satellite galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud, researchers have discovered the most metal-poor, chemically primitive star ever found, according to new research.

Composed primarily of hydrogen and helium and containing less than 0.005% of the metals in the sun, the chemical makeup of the star SDSS J0715-7334 is the closest analog yet found to the first stars that formed in our universe.

“These pristine stars are windows into the dawn of stars and galaxies in the universe.”

Studying this low-mass, ultra-metal-poor star could help clarify astronomers’ ideas about this first generation of stars, called Population III stars, which astronomers cannot observe directly.

“No Population III stars have ever been observed, either because they were massive, lived fast and died young, or the lowest-mass Population III stars that could persist to the present day are extremely rare. Either way, the properties of this first stellar generation are some of the most important unknowns in modern astrophysics,” says coauthor Kevin Schlaufman, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University.

Schlaufman originally identified SDSS J0715-7334 as a star of interest in 2014 for follow up as part of the current fifth generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

“While this star does not have a primordial composition itself, it is the closest astronomers have ever gotten to the Population III stellar generation on this particular metric,” he says.

SDSS J0715-7334 was formed from a gas cloud that had recently interacted with the material ejected by a Population III star’s supernova. Working backwards, astronomers can use the ratios of the elements in SDSS J0715-7334 to explore the mass of that Population III star and the energy of its supernova explosion.

“These pristine stars are windows into the dawn of stars and galaxies in the universe,” says first author Alexander Ji, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of Chicago.

A team of astronomers analyzed data gathered with the Magellan Clay Telescope and its high-resolution Magellan Inamori Kyocera Echelle spectrograph to determine that SDSS J0715-7334 is almost entirely hydrogen and helium with only trace amounts of carbon and iron.

The composition of SDSS J0715-7334 indicates that the Population III star that produced its carbon and iron was both unusually massive and exploded with uncommon vigor, the researchers say.

SDSS J0715-7334 is roughly 80,000 light years away in the vicinity of the Large Magellanic Cloud, the largest of the 100-200 small satellite galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. The Magellanic Clouds have only recently joined the Milky Way, and their long history of living alone has allowed them to ingest material from the cosmic web for a longer period than the Milky Way. Those conditions may have promoted the production of low-metallicity stars like SDSS J0715-7334.

“It’s possible that we’re going to find a relatively higher proportion of ultra-metal-poor stars in galaxies like the Magellanic Clouds than in our own Milky Way Galaxy,” Schlaufman says.

As part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the researchers will continue to study the Milky Way’s formation and evolution, with Schlaufman leading an effort to study the oldest stars in the Milky Way.

“There is still lots to be done to understand what actually was going on in that era long, long ago when the Milky Way was young,” Schlaufman says. “We’ve only scratched the surface with this current phase of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.”

Findings from the survey appear in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Additional coauthors are from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the University of Chicago, the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy, Vanderbilt University, The Ohio State University, University of Florida, Monash University, Space Telescope Science Institute, Yale University, Universidad Católica del Norte, The University of Texas, Carnegie Institution for Science, Sorbonne Université, Heidelberg University, Eötvös Loránd University, Sean University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Montana State University, the University of Colorado, and The Pennsylvania State University.

Support for the research came from from the National Science Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, Max Planck Society, European Research Council, NASA, Agence Nationale de la Recherche, Gruber Science Fellowship, ANID, Joint Committee ESO-Government of Chile, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, UChicago Data Science Institute, and The University of Chicago.

Source: Johns Hopkins University

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City methane emissions are rising faster than estimated

Urban emissions of methane—a potent greenhouse gas—are rising faster than “bottom-up” accounting estimates anticipated, according to a new study.

The discrepancy was found with satellite measurements of methane over 92 major cities around the world. For 72 of the cities, there were sufficient data to track changes in methane emissions between 2019 and 2023. Overall, global urban methane emissions in 2023 were 6% higher than 2019 levels and 10% higher than 2020 levels, although they tended to decrease in European cities.

In contrast, accounting methods—which tally emission estimates of individual methane sources—suggest that urban methane emissions have only risen between 1.7% and 3.7% since 2020.

The study included over half of the C40 network, a group of 97 cities around the world aiming to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Total methane emissions across all the studied C40 cities in 2023 were also 10% higher than 2020 levels, and the cities will have to contend with an extra 2 teragrams of methane emissions per year, which is about 30% of their emission reduction targets.

The gap between official estimates and satellite measurements warn that city policies designed with accounting estimates may not reduce methane emissions as desired.

“In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and set good emissions policy, cities need to know how much they are emitting and what those sources are. But there is quite a bit of uncertainty with that for methane,” says Eric Kort, corresponding author of the study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Kort advised the study’s lead author as a University of Michigan professor of climate and space sciences and engineering, and is now director of the atmospheric chemistry department at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry.

The study continues Kort’s work identifying gaps in accounting of methane, which can enter the atmosphere from old or leaky natural gas infrastructure, landfills and wastewater treatment plants, and is 80 times more potent at warming the planet than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

With measurements from airplane surveys, Kort’s research group has shown that flaring at oil and gas production sites leaks 5 times more methane than previously estimated, and that the true climate impact of offshore oil and gas production is double the official estimates. The findings helped make flares an emissions-reduction target in the Inflation Reduction Act, leading to a $30 million Department of Energy call for new technology to reduce leaks from gas flaring.

In 2019, similar aerial measurements suggested that several large cities across the US were also emitting more methane than previously thought. The new study showed that this is a global problem.

“Cities have the motivation and power to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and therefore, present significant opportunities for impactful emissions reduction,” says Erica Whiting, a UM doctoral student in climate and space sciences and engineering and the study’s first author.

“However, there was not previously a method to quantify and monitor urban methane emissions around the globe and, therefore, no observation-based method to evaluate emission reduction strategies.”

The researchers’ global satellite measurements suggest that urban emissions accounted for 10% of all human methane emissions in 2023, and city methane emissions overall were nearly four times higher than the oil and gas “ultra emitters” that have been the focus of previous studies and emission policies.

The new findings come from the TROPOMI instrument, which was launched aboard the European Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite in 2017 to track atmospheric pollution and climate change. TROPOMI measures the amount of sunlight reflected by the atmosphere back into space. It separately measures many wavelengths of light, each of which provides information on the concentration of a particular gas or pollutant, and it has sufficient spatial resolution to pinpoint individual cities.

TROPOMI’s resolution is too coarse to identify where exactly unreported methane is coming from within the city, however. The researchers think that higher-resolution measurements could help cities update their accounts and emission policies.

“We, and others in the field, are looking into higher-resolution satellite measurements so that we can tease apart the contribution of large localized sources,” Kort says.

“Those satellites can’t necessarily tell you the whole city’s emissions, but they could tell you what individual landfills or facilities are doing.”

Funding for this study came from NASA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Source: University of Michigan

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