Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

Robot mowers are battery-powered, autonomous lawn mowers, making them a sustainable alternative to traditional gas-powered models. Much like robot vacuums, robot lawn mowers autonomously navigate around the ground, cutting grass as they go. They use sensors to navigate and stay within boundaries while mowing, as well as a companion control app. Unlike newer vacuums, robot lawn mowers can use a physical boundary, such as a buried wire along the perimeter, as with the Husqvarna 430X. The bots can also use a combination of GPS and LiDAR navigation, aided by a satellite antenna, to mow autonomously within a specified area, like the Mammotion…

Novo Nordisk is expanding its use of AWS artificial intelligence tools across drug discovery, including AI agents for target identification, therapy design, and research workflows.Under the agreement announced recently, AWS will become Novo Nordisk’s preferred cloud provider and strategic AI partner. The companies have also created a co-innovation hub at Novo Nordisk’s existing London facility, where AWS engineers and Novo Nordisk scientists will work directly with the pharmaceutical company’s data and research insights.The London hub will bring Novo Nordisk R&D staff together with AWS engineers, AI specialists, applied scientists, and professional services teams. AWS said the arrangement is intended to…

Three separate research efforts last week demonstrated ways to defeat passkey protections without breaking the cryptography they rest on. Passkeys are designed to replace reusable passwords and resist phishing. The attacks instead reused signed authentication material that Windows had exposed, abused a cloud-synced passkey system from malware already on the victim’s machine, and used a Windows Hello for Business key from a compromised user session without a fresh PIN or biometric check. None cracked the math. The impact is not the same in all three cases. SpecterOps showed a Windows and Microsoft Entra ID chain that could impersonate privileged users…

Nasdaq-listed chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA), the bellwether for everything AI, is pushing Wall Street banks to treat its AI computing power like commercial real estate, toll roads or power plants: as an investable infrastructure asset.Nvidia said Monday it has signed memorandums of understanding with six Wall Street heavyweights – Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR – to set up financing platforms that could eventually tap more than $500 billion in third‑party capital.The goal, according to the chipmaker, is to treat AI compute as a bankable infrastructure asset rather than a pure tech expense, encouraging customers…

NASA engineers have found a way to free up additional power aboard Voyager 2, helping the nearly 50-year-old spacecraft continue its scientific work for longer. The effort, known as the “Big Bang,” was carried out by engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The team simultaneously shut down certain powered components and replaced them with options that use less energy, while also making sure Voyager 2 stayed warm enough to function properly. Voyager 2’s Shrinking Power Supply Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, rely on radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which produce electricity from heat released by decaying plutonium. As that plutonium…

IMPERIAL, Texas—Many residents of this small town drive long distances to buy bottled water instead of opening up the tap. Pecos County Fresh Water, a county-operated utility, provides drinking water for 800 people in Imperial and the surrounding area. The utility routinely violates safe drinking water standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency for “combined radium” and “gross alpha,” two metrics of radioactivity in water. The culprit is naturally occurring radioactive material in the aquifer. Imperial is one of many rural communities in Texas where deposits of radioactive materials dissolve into the groundwater. But small communities often struggle to pay…

I file a lot of Freedom of Information Act requests. I’ve been requesting staff lists from both Trump administrations, and I have tracked thousands of federal political appointees in order to publish financial disclosures in searchable databases.  Much of that data was sourced from the Office of Personnel Management, which maintains a trove of information about who works in the federal government. But that agency’s FOIA department was thrown into chaos as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency fanned out across federal agencies to cut employees in early 2025. Getting records from the agency has since become an increasingly Kafkaesque…

Before most people have finished their morning coffee, an MP’s staffer might have already dealt with a suicidal caller, a victim of domestic abuse or a threat of violence. We’ve been yelled at, cried at and sometimes even physically attacked, all in the course of managing a heavy caseload of constituents’ most intractable problems. So, when I read the results of the latest survey by the wellness working group (WWG) I was not surprised to learn that half of us are experiencing clinical levels of psychological distress.Psychological distress is a range of emotional or cognitive suffering, such as anxiety or…

Claim: Albert Einstein married his cousin Elsa Einstein. Rating: For years, people online have shared an alleged fact: Albert Einstein married one of his cousins. For example, on Aug. 3, 2026, a TikTok user shared a video (archived) showing three people reacting while reading a Google artificial-intelligence summary of the famous physicist’s love life. The Google “AI Overview” displayed in the clip read in part: Albert Einstein had several love interests throughout his life, with his first wife being Mileva Maric, a Serbian physicist and his fellow student. He later married his cousin, Elsa Einstein, after divorcing Mileva, though his…

Donald Trump secretly swapped planes as he left a Nato summit in Turkey last month, as part of an elaborate ruse in response to a possible Iranian threat, US media report.The US president boarded Air Force One in view of television cameras before being transported to a military aircraft with the help of a catering truck, the Washington Post said. Journalists and some White House staff on board did not know he had been smuggled out. Officials told the BBC’s US partner CBS News that the US had detected a credible Iranian threat to fire a missile at the plane.…