Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Members of Peterborough Astronomical Society will be watching from Ferry Meadows country park.Luton Astronomical Society has an event taking place at Stopsley Common in Bedfordshire and the Bedford Astronomical Society is hosting another at the Piazzi Smyth Observatory at Bedford School.West Stow Country Park in Suffolk will be hosting a pre-booked eclipse event from 17:45, while Dash Astronomical Society has moved its planned event at fire-hit Dunwich Heath to nearby Darsham Village Hall.In Essex, people can watch the partial eclipse from Southend-on-Sea pier, Munnings Museum in Dedham hosts an event and Loughton Astronomical Society is holding another at Theydon Bois…

In India’s Western Ghats, sacred groves – small, community-protected forest patches dedicated to local deities – are far more effective at regenerating native tree species than surrounding village lands, according to a recent study, reports Mongabay’s Liz Kimbrough. For the study, a research team from the Applied Environmental Research Foundation (AERF) mapped and measured 82 giant, old-growth trees across 20 species in the village of Vanzole in the northern Western Ghats, the mountain chain that runs alongside India’s west coast. The researchers defined giant trees as those that measure more than 1 meter (3.3 feet). The researchers found…

Richard Eltringham (Letters, 5 August) argues that climate change necessitates switching to a planting palette of drought-tolerant non-native species. It’s not as simple as that. Horticulturists focus on the value of non-native plants for pollinators, but other ecological interactions (for example, food plants for insect larvae) are harder to replace. Native oaks support 2,300 other species; drought-adapted non-natives can’t substitute for all these interactions.Our native species themselves aren’t tied to a preindustrial climate; there is evidence of rapid microevolutionary changes in oaks in response to recent climate change, so those crisping saplings might be part of selection for drought adaptation.…

A total solar eclipse is happening today. It’s the first that mainland Europe has seen in nearly 30 years. For a couple of minutes, the moon will line up perfectly with the sun and cast a shadow that plunges part of our planet into total darkness.I’ve seen only a partial solar eclipse — years ago in London — but even that was an eerie experience: The day suddenly drained away, like an apocalyptic dimming of the light. The world in black and white.My colleague Katrina Miller has experienced totality before, as a science writer and as a human being. Today…

Serbia still produces considerable quantities of ammunition in the Soviet-standard calibers which would be impossible to acquire from Kyiv’s Western allies, who use the NATO standard instead. Ukraine retains Soviet-era heavy howitzers and tanks that remain key to the fight in the Donbas and beyond. And despite his pro-Russian stance, Vučić is happy to provide them to Kyiv quietly. “Ukraine is in a position where it cannot care about things beyond the more immediate needs for Ukraine, and Vučić matters to him more,” explained Florian Bieber, who directs the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz. Vučić’s…

President Trump said on Tuesday evening that the Secret Service and the military decided he would take a secret flight out of Turkey last month while his staffers and the traveling press flew on a decoy Air Force One.“It’s only up to Secret Service,” Mr. Trump told reporters after landing in Washington following his trip to Ohio, in his first public comments about the evacuation from Turkey. “I just follow what they like to do. So I go by Secret Service and the military. They wanted me to go in a different flight, a different plane, equal safety but they…

Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan won the Democratic primary race for Senate in Minnesota on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, defeating a centrist congresswoman in the latest victory for the party’s left wing.Ms. Flanagan, 46, campaigned as an anti-establishment fighter, calling for universal health care and a higher federal minimum wage. She prevailed over Representative Angie Craig, a moderate Democrat from a swing district, leading by nearly 20 percentage points with more than 95 percent of votes counted. The Minnesota primary was shaped by a backlash to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the state last winter. Ms. Flanagan criticized…

Jack Wallen/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET’s key takeaways After years of requests, Opera finally adds vertical tabs.Opera’s vertical tabs are easier to use than most.You can easily switch between vertical and horizontal tabs.I’ve been using Opera, on and off, for over a decade. The browser has several features that have become absolute musts for me, such as Workspaces, split screen, and a brilliant theming engine.But the one feature that has been missing all this time is vertical tabs. For those of you who’ve never given vertical tabs a try, you don’t know what you’re…

Object removal models have improved faster than the metrics used to judge them. Diffusion erasers now reconstruct shadows, reflections and occluded structure convincingly, yet PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS, ReMOVE and CFD frequently rank their outputs the wrong way. The root cause is structural: erasure is an ill-posed, one-to-many task, so no single ground truth exists to compare against. A team from MiLM Plus, Xiaomi Inc. has released PROVE (Perceptual RemOVal cohErence), accepted at ACM MM 2026, to close that gap. PROVE pairs two perception-aligned metrics — RC-S for spatial coherence and RC-T for temporal consistency — with PROVE-Bench, a two-tier real-world…

Ravie LakshmananAug 11, 2026Botnet / Vulnerability Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new version of the Kimwolf/AISURU Android and Internet of Things (IoT) botnet that comes with significant improvements to improve its operational resilience and conduct distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The new version, tracked as Kimwolf v7, was discovered by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 in February 2026. “Kimwolf v7 adds an HTTP/2-based DDoS flood that constructs complete browser fingerprints,” researchers Asher Davila, Chris Navarrete, and Doel Santos said. “This makes attack traffic more difficult to distinguish from legitimate browsing.” The botnet also aims to make its command-and-control (C2) infrastructure more…